take my class to bangladesh
This semester I am teaching a class on Bangladesh in the Undergraduate Sustainability Program. I took a spring break trip to Bangladesh with my 10 students and teaching assistants to see what they had been learning. We were accompanied by 2 Dhaka University professors and 8 students. Carol Wilson from Louisiana State University also traveled with us.
Prof. Carol Wilson and Prof. Mahfuz Khan with all our American and Bangladeshi students at the Joi! restaurant. Joe means victory and refers to the 1971 War of Independence.
Students have been learning about the dangers faced by people living on the world’s largest delta. Bangladesh is the size of Iowa, but has a population ½ the size of the United States. The country has emerged from the poverty and devastation of the 1971 War of Independence to become a low- and middle-income country. This improvement has continued despite widespread flooding, tropical cyclones, coastal and river erosion, tearing (massively shifting river courses), arsenic in groundwater, land subsidence exacerbating sea level rise, and earthquakes. Classroom learning cannot compare to seeing the region first-hand in the company of a Bangladeshi.
A photo with my class in front of the National Martyrs Memorial outside Dhaka.
A side view of the monument, where you can see the 7 separate triangular plates that compose it.
We left New York on the evening of Thursday, March 9dayAnd arrived in the capital Dhaka on the morning of March 11day After more than 26 hours of travel. Dhaka University students met us at the airport with our 30-seater bus and luggage van, and we headed to Sarwar to visit the National Martyrs’ Monument. After our first Bangladeshi meal across the street, we visited a memorial built in a killing field outside Dhaka when Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan in a bloody nine-month war. The war killed 3 million people. The 150-foot-tall monument is composed of seven triangles of increasing height, representing the seven stages of the independence movement. It is surrounded by a reflecting pool and mass graves including those who died here during the war.
Everyone disembarks from the 30-seater bus on the Jamuna River. This bus will be our transport for the next few days, along with a luggage truck driven by our long-term driver here, Babu.
We then continue to the Elenga resort near the Jamuna River, where the Brahmaputra is known as the Brahmaputra. After an early night weary travellers, they headed for the river the next morning. The Jamuna is a braided river with many criss-crossing channels and sandy islands called Char. More than 700,000 people live on coke. We sailed under the Bangabandu bridge across the river to some villages on the chars I picked. We can’t get to the access I want due to new rail bridge construction and the other access is too silted up for us to go through. We’re going to have to stop and walk further south than I planned.
We took the colorful boats to explore the charcoal – sandy river islands.
Sit on top of the boat with many students and professors as we sail the Jamuna River.
It was about a mile walk from where we stopped to the nearest village. Along the way, we passed a group of people who were threshing wheat. Machines separate the grain from the stalks, then pour out the grain and let the wind separate the wheat from the chaff. Some of my students as translators are behind the students of the University of Dhaka. My students have 3 group projects. The group that stayed was interviewing people about immigration and climate change, supervised by a professor from the Czech Republic. Another group is working on improving exponential flood insurance using satellite imagery. They were led by a graduate student at the University of Arizona. The final group is investigating the causes of increased tree cover in parts of Bangladesh we will visit later. They will talk to people later in the trip. Another Lamont Research Professor with whom I have worked for many years, Chris Small, is leading the group.
Villagers carry bales of wheat and feed them to machines for threshing.
A villager pours out the separated grains, letting the wind separate the grains from the chaff.
The villagers welcome us into their homes. One woman we spoke to got married here in 1991 and lived off the charcoal until it eroded away. Her family moved to the mainland and owns property there. About 4-5 years ago the coke grew back. Now I have to move here in winter for 4-5 months to farm. For the monsoon, when the water rises to waist-deep, they move back to the mainland with their cattle and other possessions. Charles is a beautiful, sparsely populated place, and she is clearly very attached to the land. The future will tell him if the land will continue to rise so she can move back permanently or continue to move between her two homes.
Walk through the charcoal to a village.
The village we visited on coke.
We’ve heard similar stories from others. After all the interviews were done, we walked back to the boat. We sailed south to where we could see some of the sedimentary structures along the different coke erosion deposits. Back at the hotel, some students went shopping in nearby Tangle. In the evening we had a BBQ at the resort and a traditional Bangladeshi Baul concert with 5 musicians and 4 alternating singers (two men and two women). The band consists of a dholak drum, a bansuri, an organ, a small stringed instrument similar to a ukulele, and a guitar. It was the perfect end to our first day in Bangladesh.
Brendan Moore and Ruhun Kakon interviewed some villagers about their migration history.
Traditional Baul singers and band entertained us on our last night at Elenga Resort.
