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Bangladesh floats school boats to adapt to climate change

The air is so heavy with humidity that you can scarcely breathe. But the giggling children, mostly girls wearing salwar-kameezes—the typical tunic and trousers of Bangladesh—waiting along the bank of one of the several rivers that feed Chalan Beel, an oxbow lake in the marshlands of northwestern Bangladesh, seem unaffected.

Then a solar-powered boat with a sign "Nauka [Boat] School" suddenly appears on the horizon and slows down as it draws nearer to pull up beside the bank. The dripping children queue to get to their classes on board—a rainy day is not an excuse to play hooky in this part of the world. "Nauka schooley jaye khoob moja hoye [When we attend the boat school, we enjoy ourselves]," a giggling Shakila Khatoon, 9, said in Bengali, or Bangla, the national language.

Women and older villagers watch the bobbing fishing boats from the bank while they wait patiently to catch the "health boat," the "library boat," or even the "agricultural extension boat," all due to arrive sometime that day. Architect-turned-activist Mohammed Rezwan is determined to prove that Bangladeshis can survive the climate change scenario, in which land steadily vanishes beneath relentlessly rising water, by staying afloat. "This is the future—various climate change forecast models have predicted that one-fifth of Bangladesh could be under water by 2050," he said. Read more about the floating school at IRIN News online.

Posted by Louise Ash on 23 October 2008 in Global Literacy

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