Dhaka’s street kids and environmental displacement
By Joanna Kakissis | September 16, 2009 | Bangladesh
Jamal is the kind of boy you notice right away: Smart and soulful, with a quietly magnetic charisma and the budding good looks of a teen idol. He’s 12, fancies meeting new people and looks out for a posse of much-younger friends who, like him, live on the streets of Bangladesh’s teeming capital, Dhaka. His father died when he was a toddler, and he moved to Dhaka with his mother after she could no longer support herself in their flooded village. She remarried in Dhaka but abandoned him when her new husband did not want him. It’s a terrible story, but for environmentally displaced people, terrible stories abound.
Over the years, millions of rural Bangladeshis have migrated into the mega-city of Dhaka and smaller (but still large) cities like Chittagong in the east and Khulna in the southwest. Many have been forced from their homes because the very land itself is failing them: villages are chronically flooded because of river erosion and sea-level rise, the salinated soil cannot support rice paddies and people cannot live off the land. Their fate in Dhaka is often grim. Since many villagers are not skilled in urban trades, often their best hope is to work as rickshaw drivers, a man’s job. Women and children like Jamal are forced to beg or at risk of being preyed upon by human traffickers. As United Nations’ Copenhagen summit on climate change nears, climate justice advocates are asking: what will happen to Jamal and millions of other climate migrants who are most acutely feeling the effects of a warming world?
I’m in Bangladesh for a little over four weeks on a research fellowship through the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies to study the role of climate change in migration and displacement in one of the world’s most fascinating and beleaguered countries. Tune in here for little stories, photos and anecdotes from the fieldwork.
Meanwhile, here’s one more image of the street kids of Dhaka, who energized my day yesterday.
Click here for the accompanying photo gallery to this blog post
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