This trip to Bangladesh is special, not just because it is my 25^th visit to that country, or that I am traveling with a new class of Sustainable Development students, but also because my daughter Elizabeth is here with me. She grew up hearing tales and seeing pictures of my trips to Bangladesh, always asking, “So when are you going to take me?” Now, that time has arrived.  

My course uses Bangladesh as a focal area to bring together multiple Earth science and environmental issues and their intersection with the human population living here. The undergraduate Sustainable Development program aims to provide students with background in the wide range of disciplines that are necessary for the advancement of human well-being without irreparable harm to the Earth. Many of these issues intersect in Bangladesh, where a large and growing population lives in one of the most dynamic and sensitive environments on Earth, subject to multiple natural disasters and threatened by climate change. As part of the class, we come to Bangladesh, where the experience of seeing the country and talking to people teaches them so much more than my lectures ever could.  

The students also have two group projects interviewing people in four villages around the country. One is similar to a project that we did in 2023, interviewing people about “Climate Extremes and Migration in Bangladeshi Delta.” This is being supervised by Robert Stojanov of Mendel University in Brno, Czechia, who has joined us for the field trip. The other is, “Explaining the Impact of Heat Stress Adaptation in Bangladesh through an Intergenerationality, Intersectionality and Spatiality Lens,” looking at changing perceptions of heat stress among younger and older people, who remember when things were different. This is being supervised by Bishawjit Mallick at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, although he is originally from Bangladesh.  

Leaving Thursday evening, March 13, we arrived in Bangladesh on Saturday morning. At the airport we were met by 10 Dhaka University (DU) students who gave us all flowers. We then went to the 29-seat bus that would drive us around for the next four days. There were also two professors, Kazi Matin Ahmed and Mahfuz Khan, who would help lead the trip. 

Our first stop was the National Martyrs’ Memorial in Savar, outside the capital, Dhaka. In Savar, we began with lunch for those who were eating. It was Ramadan, and all of the DU students and two of my students were fasting during daylight hours for the month. Refreshed, we went to the memorial with its large upward-pointing monument of seven isosceles triangles set in a manicured, ardent setting that includes 10 mass graves for people killed during the War of Independence. This site was one of the killing fields for the Pakistani Army during the 1971 war. It is estimated that up to 3 million people were killed in the nine-month war, until the intervention of India helped end it.  

From there, we traveled northwest to our hotel near the Jamuna River, the name for the Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh. This is because about 200 years ago, the river shifted west, or avulsed, from what is now called the Old Brahmaputra River, in a small existing channel already called the Jamuna River. We settled into the hotel in time for “iftar,” the meal for breaking the Ramadan fast. It is a light meal of fruit, chickpeas, fried eggplant and other foods eaten just after sunset. After iftar, we went to the nearby city of Tangail for shopping. My students, helped by the DU students, bought fans, lungis, saris and other apparel, before returning for dinner.

After a good night’s sleep, we headed to the Jamuna River. The river is braided, meaning that in the dry season it consists of many crisscrossing channels and sandy islands called chars. During the increased flow of the monsoon, it is almost all water, 3-6 miles across. Still, over 700,000 people live on the chars, farming and raising cattle during the dry season. Some live there year round, while others only seasonally. In this dynamic river, the chars are always shifting, and people have to move on average every 10 years.  

We sailed north under the Jamuna Bridge and new railway bridge to the char that I had picked out. We found it changed from my maps when I last was here. After a false start, we sailed to the site I had chosen. A channel had shifted westward, eroding the char on that side, but depositing a wide apron of sand on the east where the river had been. The detour delayed us, but we disembarked and hiked to the closest small village. At the village, the students split into multiple groups of Columbia and DU students and started conducting interviews about life on the chars and how it has changed. Since the village only contained six families, we walked to the next village to continue our interviews in the 98-degree heat.  

Near the village, there was a shallow tubewell, and we poured the cool water over our heads for relief. The multiple groups continued to interview people in the last village until it was time to leave. The teams gathered many stories of people who had lived on the char, left when it was eroded, but returned when it reemerged from the river. Others moved to it later. Some people lived on the char year round, others spent the monsoon season, when most if the char is submerged, on the mainland.  

There was a bit of a mix-up when leaving. Our boat shifted to a closer place, but overshot where we were and had to return. The groups took different paths to the shore of the char, but we all eventually made it back to the boat. We returned to the ghat (dock) and then the bus took us back to the hotel in time for iftar. We concluded our first full day with a concert of traditional Bangladeshi baul music followed by dinner.