When the river runs dry

When Mahinur moved into her new home, she was elated.

She had worked for months digging foundations for a local road and had saved £300 – enough to buy a plot of land.

40 years old and a fisherwoman by trade, a first home on the edge of a river was the perfect location.

What Mahinur didn’t know was that one year later, the river would run dry.

The drought came suddenly.

By March 2018, not a drop of water remained. Mahinur left her boat and simply walked across the riverbed. The fish lay rotting around her.

When I meet Mahinur, the fish have been gone for four months.

“We had heavy rainfall and the river filled again overnight,” Mahinur explains. “But there are still no fish.”

She wraps her turquoise headscarf tighter round her face and balances the heavy wooden stave of the fishing net on her shoulder as she carries it to the riverbank.

Then, fully clothed, she climbs into the river.

The next 20 minutes, she drags the net back and forth, occasionally reaching out a hand to steady herself against the current. Just her head protrudes from the water.

When she climbs out, she silently shakes out the contents of the net – one eel the size of a pencil and two fish no bigger than a penny.

“At least there’s this!” she exclaims, as she finds a larger fish among the weeds.

The fish flips around as she drops it in the metal bowl. It’s barely two mouthfuls.

Once she has changed into dry clothes, she borrows two plastic chairs from a neighbour and we sit a little way from her home.

I presume to protect her husband and son from hearing our conversation.

“It’s terrible,” she confesses.

“There should be fish in the river now - it's the right time of year - but there's nothing. I have no food and no money.”

Mahinur tells me that she frequently forgoes meals so her 12-year-old son can eat.

"I'm worried that Rabiul will ask me for fish and I have nothing to give him," she explains, wrapping her arms around herself.

"When he demands something, it has to happen at once or he will start crying or break something. He'll shout, 'Give me this!' Sometimes he hits."

It's not bad behaviour that makes her son so impatient, but a learning disability he's had since birth.

The right side of his body is also weakened by a kind of partial paralysis. No one seems exactly sure why.

His father has a physical disability too, and walks with difficulty using crutches.

It explains why Mahinur takes responsibility for the household.

Update, November 2019: We are sorry to have to share the news that since this story was published, Rabiul has died of a fever. Local expert Jamal is continuing to help Mahinur and Khalek, and will be there to support them through this difficult time. Mahinur asked if you would please pray for Rabiul’s soul to rest in peace. Please keep the family in your thoughts and prayers.

With no medical care in the village, traditional herbalists and healers are often consulted for disabilities and mental health problems.

Rabiul has metal toggles and padlocks tied with a piece of string around his neck.

His dad says they stop him from falling over so often. But dark marks linger on Rabiul’s cheekbone - a reminder of recent falls.

Earlier, I’d watched Rabiul cook an egg for his dad’s breakfast.

His right arm hung awkwardly by his side, but he had no difficulties unscrewing the lid of a bottle of cooking oil with his left hand – steadying the bottle between his knees.

“He has to write with his left hand,” his dad kept repeating to me. As though the social implications of this are harder to bear than Rabiul’s frequent falls.

I ask Rabiul about himself – his age, his friends, his school. He wriggles in his seat, looks everywhere except at me, and answers with one or two words.

I ask instead if he knows any stories and he grins.

“There was a room and a man lived there,” he begins. “One day, a tiger came into the room. The man caught the tiger and trapped him in the house and the tiger said, ‘But I'm hungry.’ The man said, ‘If I set you free, you'll eat me.’ The tiger said, ‘Please, brother, I won't eat you. I'll just go outside.’ The man said, ‘We'll go to the wise tree and he'll tell us what to do.’”

Rabiul’s story lasts at least five minutes. He talks fluidly, with expression, and his mum can’t contain her laughter.

Rabiul is at his happiest when he’s occupied telling a story, singing or swimming in the river – which he seems to do whenever his mum is asking him to do something he’d rather not.

"Rabiul likes to be outside most of the time," she tells me. "After school, he goes to the playground. He can't play but he likes to watch the other kids playing."

“Year after year, the weather has been changing,” explains Jamal Hosen, a local agricultural expert.

“When I was a young boy, my experience was that we had six seasons. Different, distinct seasons. Now we can’t differentiate. In winter, we have some rain. In the summer, it can be cold.”

Jamal is part of the Caritas aid network, which is known as CAFOD in England and Wales.

He’s been working with families like Mahinur’s for nearly a decade – helping them find ways to cope with the changes in the weather.

He comes to meet me at Mahinur’s home and explains that cyclones, floods and droughts are all becoming more common and more destructive.

Now, it’s likely that every three years a severe cyclone will hit and each year a quarter of the country will flood.

In this community, so close to the Bay of Bengal, when the rivers flood, the fields fill with salt.

“It lowers crop production,” Jamal explains.

“Livestock drink the saline water and they get ill. It upsets their stomachs. We see increased diseases in people, too. Sometimes people have itchy skin or diarrhoea.”

In Mahinur’s village, people now have to wait for four months after each rainy season for the soil to regain its fertility.

It’s precious time they can’t afford to lose.

To help local farmers, Jamal and his colleagues have been providing saline-resistant rice seeds and vegetable seeds.

The varieties are specially-designed to withstand the salty conditions and Jamal explains that the vegetable seeds are even more likely to thrive if they’re planted up on a raised bed, away from potential floods.

It’s these kinds of tips that are helping people survive.

For families like Mahinur’s who don’t own any land for growing crops, Jamal suggests rearing livestock could lead to a reliable income. Or learning a trade that isn’t reliant on the weather –something like tailoring or mechanics.

Once trained, a grant could help families with very little income to set themselves up with their own sewing machine or repair tools.

I realise Mahinur has talked very little about the future. Perhaps because it’s so uncertain.

She hopes her son might get better at maths and calculations, and could one day get a job doing the accounts for a shop.

But she confesses she finds it hard to imagine.

When I ask her about her own future, she takes a moment to think, then replies:

"I wish I could work to earn more money and feed myself properly and die peacefully. That is all."