Shifting sands

Bangladesh

Island dwellers of Afzalpur are at the mercy of water-borne diseases

Luke Harding reports

To reach the remote island of Afzalpur, you need to take a boat across the vast, murky, brown Jamuna River. From a distance the river island - known as a char - looks idyllic. Cows graze under a blue sky next to fields of lush green sugar cane and flourishing banana plants. Yet the reality for the inhabitants of this neglected part of north-western Bangladesh is that life is generally unpleasant. There are some three million char people, who live on the numerous sandy, shifting islands on Bangladesh's many rivers. They have not settled here by choice, but because they are too poor to buy plots on the densely crowded mainland, and reluctant to shift to Bangladesh's squalid cities.

The residents of Afzalpur have few amenities of any kind. They have no electricity. The island's single mosque has a leaky tin roof. There is no sanitation.

All this would be tolerable were it not for the fact that during the monsoon most of Afzalpur disappears under several feet of water.

'The major problem for us is the floods,' one villager, 32-year-old Rokeya Khatoon, explained. 'Every June and July our island is submerged. The water comes up to our waists. We have to raise our beds up to the level of the roof. It is very difficult to cook because the fire keeps going out. We don't have much to eat. And the children are stuck at home all day.'

'I don't like it. We get very bored,' schoolgirl Mariyam Khatun, aged 10, said.

With its sister organisations the Guardian, Guardian Unlimited and Guardian Weekly, The Observer is supporting the British charity WaterAid in its Christmas appeal.

WaterAid, which has been working in Bangladesh since 1986, can do little about the monsoon storms that wash away many of the island-dwellers' flimsy bamboo houses. But it is trying to improve sanitation levels for this desperately poor community - which, like half of Bangladesh's 129 million people, lives below the poverty line.

Over the past year WaterAid has paid for a health educator, Abdul Aziz, to talk to the char-dwellers about the need for basic hygiene, such as wearing sandals when going to the toilet and washing their hands afterwards.

'People here suffer from worm infestation. They also get dysentery,' Aziz said. 'We want to change that.'

There are currently no proper latrines on the island, a 40-minute journey by boat from the riverbank, where local people spend the day under a fierce white sun optimistically trying to catch silvery basa fish using freshwater mussels as bait.

On Afzalpur the villagers relieve themselves in open toilets. These home-made latrines lead directly into a murky drainage channel. WaterAid hopes to persuade the char-dwellers to build their own household pit latrines - by giving them a loan of 700 taka (£7.50). It also plans to construct more tube-wells (cost, £21), to discourage them from taking contaminated brown water from the river.

Most of the village children are malnourished and suffer from scabies; several of the adults have tuberculosis. Everybody uses the Jamuna for bathing and washing.

Even with better sanitation, the villagers will continue to face other, more deadly problems.

'My niece recently died in childbirth together with her new baby,' Rokeya Khatoon said. 'We couldn't find a boat to take her to hospital. In the rainy season if someone gets ill we are unable to get them medicine.' Why, then, didn't she move to the mainland? 'We don't have any money,' she pointed out.

During periods of severe flooding, the char people are forced to move around on tiny boats made from banana plants. These sometimes sink.

In the cooler, sunny winter months, after the waters subside, the island has an air of fecundity. Because of the rich soil, the aubergines and the sugar cane plants grow vigorously, and the fields look like something out of Jurassic Park. Unfortunately, the char-dwellers don't eat these giant vegetables themselves: they sell them on the mainland to buy rice. Several villagers, meanwhile, are refugees from other chars that have completely vanished as the Jamuna - which flows from the Himalayas via India (where it is called the Brahmaputra) - has changed its course.

'My island got washed away,' villager Ibrahim Sikder, 42, said. 'Even here we are submerged for three months a year. Each monsoon we lose several good goats and cows.'

No amount of aid is likely to make the char-dwellers prosperous. But it might make them healthier. 'If we had latrines at least the nastiness on the island would disappear. Our environment would be improved. We would feel happier,' Sikder said.