From poor to beggars

Aila turned their livelihood upside down

At school-going age, a girl is catching fish for a living at Aila-hit Gabura union in Satkhira. Since the cyclone struck the area in May last year, most of the locals have remained unemployed. Photo: Anisur Rahman Porimol Palma, back from Gabura, Satkhira

The seven-member family of Sabut Ali lived fairly well before the cyclone Aila hit the southwest coast on May 25 last year. Ali used to work as a day labourer and his son ran a small grocery. Besides, he had another source of income from his 41-decimal land leased out to shrimp farmers.
Now members of the family remain unemployed. Fifty-year-old Ali's land in Shora-9 union in Gabura is still under water. The shrimp farms he used to work with were washed away. And his 22-year-old son Hafizur Rahman is jobless as his grocery was completely destroyed.
"I now try to catch crabs and sometimes collect fire wood in the Sundarbans. But I do not dare to enter the forest always because of robbers, who often extort and even kidnap people," said Ali of Shyamnagar in Satkhira.
The entire family now runs on about Tk 600 they can manage per week.
They used to receive rice under the Vulnerable Group Feeding programme for the first seven months after the cyclone, but then it stopped.
"I have not gone through such hardship in my life. We did not have a good meal for so many days," Ali told this correspondent.