'Lives will be lost': Bangladesh rains promise further misery for Rohingya

A little girl dressed in pink, maybe three years old, is smiling through a rip in a tarpaulin. She is leaning against the bamboo pole holding up her home. Below her is a 15-foot drop, straight down to a dried-up riverbed.

The steep valleys across the huge Rohingya refugee camps are a growing concern as Bangladesh’s monsoon season approaches. Last summer, when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled across the border from Myanmar in the face of an alleged genocide, the Bangladesh government allocated state-owned land for their camps.

The land was Bangladesh’s reserve forest: beautiful, dense, lush woodland that stretched for miles across the south of the country.

Within a few months, the forest was stripped away completely, leaving just compacted silt that collapses to dust at a touch. Bangladesh’s monsoon season will soon begin, with weeks of rain. Cyclones can hit the country anytime between March and July.

“I am very worried about the monsoon,” says Mohammed Rofik, 27. “It was hard enough in Myanmar, where we had good houses. Those houses would get destroyed by the storms. Here, we have houses made of plastic and bamboo.”

The speed of the Rohingya movement across the border last August took aid agencies by surprise. As a result, thousands of homes were built out of nothing more than tarpaulin and bamboo. “Lives will be lost,” says one aid worker. “The houses at the top of the hills are at risk of landslides, the ones at the bottom could flood.”

Source: theguardian