Race Against the Rains

The race to rebuild the world’s largest refugee camp, where monsoon rains threaten flooding, landslides and disease.
Produced by MONA EL-NAGGAR, MEG FELLING, ALEXANDRA GARCIA, JOSH KELLER, ANDREW ROSSBACK and JEREMY WHITE.
Start

The Haruns, a family of Rohingya refugees, live on a barren hillside in southern Bangladesh in an improvised shack.

The first rains of monsoon season could wash away their home, and many others.

It’s a race against time. There is no workable evacuation plan. If the refugees can’t move to safer ground, aid groups say, thousands may die from floods, landslides and disease.

Nearly a million Rohingya Muslims live here. Most fled brutal attacks in Myanmar last year in one of the most rapid exoduses in modern history. These low-lying structures would be the first to flood.

Other shelters are perched on steep, barren hillsides that could slide away.

Bamboo and Tarp

I met Nur Safah, who lives with her husband and six children in a tiny tent.

The house is held together by donated plastic tarps, worn bamboo shoots and twine, with holes cut in the side for windows. In the afternoon, it feels like a sauna inside.

It’s built on a sharply sloped hillside like this one. Even a small rain turns the dust into loose mud.

Flattening the Hills

The idea is to build new, sturdier houses like this one, out of the path of flooding.

But the rebuilding is slowed by politics. Bangladesh wants the refugees to eventually return to Myanmar, so it prohibits what it considers permanent construction – no brick or cement structures. Now, there may not even be time to build much more than sturdier plastic tents.

This is how much work is left. Slicing the hills might make space for 15,000 people of the 200,000 who are in high-risk zones.

Fortifying the camps

Refugees pave dirt roads, brick by brick, to ensure cars can get in when it rains.

Engineers race to redirect floodwaters with canals and simple concrete culverts.

But time is running out.

The most dangerous threat – disease – could be the hardest to stop. People use more than 40,000 latrines and get drinking water from shallow wells.

The rain could overwhelm these systems and mix sewage with drinking water, risking outbreaks of diphtheria, acute watery diarrhea and cholera.

The camps have given Nur Safah and thousands of families a tenuous sense of home.

But they’re at risk of losing that all over again.

Ben C. Solomon is a New York Times video journalist based in Bangkok.

Produced by MONA EL-NAGGAR, MEG FELLING, ALEXANDRA GARCIA, JOSH KELLER, ANDREW ROSSBACK and JEREMY WHITE.

More stories like this

Sources: Landslide and flooding risk data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration and the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center. Building data from REACH and OpenStreetMap contributors.
Next
Race Against the Rains