ON THE NIGHT of November 15, death came as a mercy. It was those that survived the carnage of cyclone Sidr along the coastal districts of Bagerhat, Khulna, Barguna and Barisal that survived a fate far worse. While the images that emerged from the cyclone-hit areas in those initial days shocked the world – canals strewn with bodies and the carcasses of dead animals – the full extent of the horror of that night is still being unravelled. Will the statistics – over 3,000 dead officially, and 15,000 according to the aid agencies, 9 million people affected, 90 per cent of the homes and 97 per cent of the crops destroyed — bear an adequate testimony of that night for posterity? For a father to have to bury his children without a shroud to cover their bodies, for children – many of them infants – to return to their homes from where their parents had tied them to trees, only to find them dead and mangled, is a tragedy that defies testimony.

I lost six of my family members in the cyclone. I am afraid that the rest of us will die of hunger,’ said Sattar Gazi, a 55-year-old farmer in the village of Nishanbari. ‘For the corpses we don’t have the cloth to wrap them in for burial. We are wrapping the bodies in leaves.’
   ‘More than 300 people were buried here in mass graves in the past two days,’ Abdul Mannan, a resident of Moksedpur in Barguna told New Age on November 19.
   Since then, thousands have shared that fate, while countless thousands more wandered through their locales looking for the dead bodies of their loved ones. In the third week of December, dead bodies were still emerging in ponds and rivers along the coast. In Southkhali, in Bagerhat, journalists found a canal of death, dotted with bloated and decomposing dead bodies, nearly a week after Sidr had come and gone. The television camera crews filmed a child, maybe three or four years old, who silently sat by the tree to which his parents had strapped him during the storm. ‘Do you know where your parents are?’ the journalists asked. ‘The storm took them,’ was his answer.
   And yet, this is not a story of defeat.

On November 18 – two days after Sidr levelled millions of lives and all that sustained them – many of the national dailies in the country carried the news that people had already started to repair their dwellings and look for ways to earn that little bit of money that could tide them over for a few more days. Sleeping under open skies at night, in the mid-November cold, they trekked miles every day to find relief distribution centres. While the aid effort was indeed enormous and the aid agencies deserve plaudits for the speed and the efficiency with which they carried out their operations, even they admit that their effort was only a drop in the ocean. Millions received only a fraction of the aid they need to survive the coming weeks of hunger and disease, while millions more received nothing at all. When some communities in Barguna silently protested in front of the local administration offices demanding more aid last month, they were first threatened with arrest, and then actually arrested.
   A month later, at Sarankhola – possibly the worst-affected area along the entire coast – families are starting to take down their makeshift shelters and build their earthen houses again. Many are finding employment in a government-run food for work programme that is helping the residents of the nearby villages clear the debris of fallen houses and trees from their homesteads, say aid workers. The bamboo-framed dropnets are back, dotting the river-banks at frequent intervals and the farmers are back in the field, harvesting what remains of their crops. ‘Life is 50 per cent back to normal here already,’ said an aid worker travelling through Sarankhola on December 19.
   When global climate change experts talk tall of increasing coping capacities and introducing adaptation techniques for coastal communities in Bangladesh, and for that matter across the world, their projects are hinged on large funds frequently squandered on hare-brained experiments. These coastal communities do indeed need assistance in coping with the natural disasters they are encountering with rising frequency and intensity as a result of global climate change. But perhaps the experts would do well to concede that their academic expertise would be well-supplemented with home-grown knowledge that these communities have in coping with such disasters.
   Bangladesh has witnessed a clutch of miracles this year. Two spells of flooding during the months of August and September completely destroyed thousands of hectares of standing crops and inundated the homes of millions of families across northern, central and southern Bangladesh. Two months later, cyclone Sidr lashed through the coastal south and left death and destruction in its wake. And yet, after every flood, and after Sidr, the rural communities have bounced back in their struggle for survival. They know that when it comes to coping and adapting they are largely on their own. This is what makes them survivors, not victims, and this is what makes them heroes, not just survivors.
   Mahtab Haider