Joanna Kakissis's Blogs

  • The Man-Eating Tigers of the Sundarbans

    I’m not sure why I expected to see a Royal Bengal tiger slink through the swamp during our recent boat trip through part of Sundarbans National Park. Maybe it's because I saw images of the tiger everywhere -- on brochures, on a faded poster in our hotel's lobby, on oil paintings in the dreary offices of forest officials.

    Everyone talks about the tigers, but not many people see them, at least those who live to tell about it. The younger Bengal tigers eat spotted deer and boars,

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  • Salty land and worried farmers in southwestern Bangladesh

    I’ve read plenty of reports on how rising sea levels in the Bay of Bengal are slowly killing the fertile plains of southwestern Bangladesh. But at first glance, the land here looks anything but troubled. It’s a lush, green expanse of rice paddies and coconut trees canopied by a mercurial sky that, with little notice, alternatey pours sun or rain on the water-carved landscape. Everywhere, you can make out the moving figures of women in electric-colored saris and men in lungis

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  • Photo gallery: Dhaka’s street kids and environmental displacement

    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

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  • Dhaka’s street kids and environmental displacement

    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

    Read More

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