Compassion and climate change Print E-mail

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sandraby Sandra Bulling, CARE Germany-Luxemburg following the cyclone of 2007


     

©2007 Sandra Bulling/CARE
My last day on a visit to Khulna, Bangladesh, started with a heart-warming story. Stav, CARE Bangladesh's Assistant Country Director, told me that 40 communities receiving aid from CARE's supplementary food program in Gaibhanda, in northern Bangladesh, wanted to give the food they have been receiving to help the people of Khulna. Both communities are already among the world's poorest. People in Gaibhanda live on less than a dollar a day - but they still wanted to give the little they had to those who were affected so traumatically by Cyclone Sidr.


I was amazed by these people's compassion. For the first time, I saw past their poverty to recognize their riches as well - that is, their extraordinarily rich feelings for their fellow countrymen and the social network that unites them.


On my trip, I met many people who were really thankful to CARE for our work. Some were really astonished by the fact that I had come all the way from Germany to collect their stories. "Please, tell people in the outside world what happened," one woman pleaded. Two men were amazed: "You work all day for us and you don't even have lunch."


Well, it is hard to eat lunch when the people with whom you are talking haven't eaten either. They were waiting for a food distribution. Even the small sandwich that carried me through the day lost its taste when I hid in a car to grab a bite. My own hunger was the last thing that I thought about those days.


I talked to many families who no longer had means to buy or even grow food. The shrimp farms and rice paddies that they depended on were devastated by saltwater from the sea surge that came with the cyclone.


"The sea level is rising," my colleague Shawkat, who studies climate change, tells me. "And, then, floods will come more often and people will continually lose their sources of income."


As Shawkat sees it, everything is connected to climate change. Bangladesh seems to be an impressive demonstration of the effect that climate change is likely to have in the coming years. As the glaciers of the Himalayas melt, the threat of severe flooding hangs over Bangladesh like the sword of Damocles. Already, ten million people in northern Bangladesh suffered through the worst floods in decades.


"Most of Bangladesh is hardly one meter above sea level," Shawkat says. "Thirty percent of the country is at sea level."


I can easily picture what will happen when the level of the sea rises. Bangladesh is the Netherlands of Asia - only it is too poor to build the kind of massive systems of protection that the northern Europeans have put in place. That makes me think about the people in Gaibhanda, who were willing to share their relief supplies with the people in Khulna.


I left the village hoping that if Shawkat's predictions about climate change's impact are right, there will be enough people in this world who will be willing to share what they have with the people of Bangladesh.


Sandra photo by Bill Dowell.