From Displacement to Resilience: How One Woman Built a Thriving Life Against All Odds
The dark magenta of Bougainvillea in stark contrast with the blue sky, stands out at the entrance of the house. Inside the boundary, you can find a pond, a vegetable garden, and a poultry farm. This is the home of Suchitra Dhali, a resident of Pankhali village in Khulna. While this might paint a picturesque in your mind, things were not as composed as it seems today.
Pankhali is a climate prone coastal village of southern Bangladesh. Suchitra, now a woman of approximately 40 years old, has been living here all her life. As far as her memory goes, she remembers running from one shelter house to another based on the emergency signals. She was displaced from her home several times. But the worst one happened in 2016.
“We used to live by the embankment of Bhodra river (a river flowing across the Khulna district and prone to erosion). It was a small house with two rooms in a congested neighborhood. And one day the river splashed it away with a tidal surge. We ended up living in a shelter house for months. During my stay there, I could not stop thinking of a house where my children can grow up in comfort and without fear” she said.
From losing her house to river erosion to building read more