Monsoon in the Slums: When Rain Is the Enemy

The monsoon arrived in Dhaka the way it always does, with a sky that turns grey in the afternoon and rain that starts as a drizzle and becomes a downpour in minutes. For most of us, rain is an inconvenience, a reason to stay inside, a delay on the road. But in the slums of Dhaka, rain is something else entirely. It is the enemy. I spent time in one of these communities during the monsoon season, and what I saw there changed how I think about rain, about poverty, and about what it means to survive a season that the rest of the city simply waits out.

The slum I visited is home to thousands of families, living in houses built from tin, bamboo, and plastic sheeting, packed tightly along narrow lanes that turn to mud within minutes of the rain starting. The people here are rickshaw pullers, day labourers, domestic workers, and garment factory workers, the people who keep Dhaka running, and they live in conditions that most of the city never sees. The monsoon does not create their poverty, but it makes every part of it harder.

When the Water Comes In

The first thing the rain does is come inside. The roofs leak, the walls let the water through, and the floors, which are often just packed earth or thin concrete, turn to mud. I watched a family try to keep their belongings dry by stacking them on a bed and covering them with a plastic sheet, while water dripped steadily through a gap in the roof above them. The mother told me that on the worst nights, they do not sleep at all. They sit up and move things, and wait for the rain to stop.

Outside, the lanes flood. The drains in the slum are open and narrow, and they clog quickly with waste and mud. Within an hour of heavy rain, the lanes can be ankle-deep in water, and in the lowest parts, the water can reach knee height. It is not clean water. It is mixed with sewage from the overflowing drains and the latrines. Children wade through it to get to school. Adults wade through it to get to work. There is no way around it.

Disease Follows the Rain

Where the water goes, disease follows. The health workers I spoke to in the slum told me that the monsoon is their busiest season, and the most heartbreaking. Diarrhoea, skin infections, dengue fever, and respiratory illness all rise sharply when the rains come. The standing water becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and the contaminated floodwater spreads bacteria through everything it touches.

Children suffer the most. I met children with skin rashes from wading in the floodwater, with coughs that would not go away, with stomachs that were never quite right. Their parents do what they can, buying medicine when they can afford it, taking a child to the clinic when the fever gets too high. But a clinic visit costs money, and a day at the clinic is a day not earning, and for a family living day to day, that is a choice with real consequences. Many illnesses go untreated simply because the family cannot afford to stop working.

Work Stops, But Hunger Does Not

For the people of the slum, the monsoon is also an economic crisis. A rickshaw puller cannot work in heavy rain, or can only work for a few hours, earning a fraction of what he needs. A day labourer finds no work when the construction sites are flooded. A domestic worker may not be able to reach the houses where she works because the roads are impassable. The rain stops the work, but it does not stop the hunger, and it does not stop the rent.

Many families told me that the monsoon months are the months when they eat less. They cut back to two meals a day, or to one proper meal and a little rice at night. They borrow from neighbours and from shopkeepers, and they pay it back slowly when the dry season returns and the work picks up again. It is a cycle of debt that repeats every year, and it keeps families from ever building the small savings that might help them escape the slum.

And yet, in the middle of all this, people keep going. The rickshaw puller goes out again as soon as the rain eases, even if he is soaked to the skin. The mother cooks over a smoky fire in a flooded kitchen. The children go to school in wet clothes, because school is the one hope for a different future. The resilience is extraordinary, and it is also exhausting to witness, because no one should have to be this resilient just to survive the rain.

The Children: Growing Up in the Rain

What stayed with me most from my time in the slum was the children. They are everywhere in the lanes, playing in the rain, splashing in the puddles, laughing in a way that makes you forget, for a moment, how hard their lives are. But the rain is not a game for them. It is the water they wade through to school, the damp that makes them sick, the reason their books get ruined and their uniforms never quite dry.

Many of the children work, too. Some help their parents, some collect plastic and bottles to sell, some look after younger siblings while their parents are out working. Education is the hope, but it is a fragile one. A child who misses too many school days because of flooding, sickness, or work falls behind, and falling behind in a slum school can mean dropping out altogether. The monsoon takes a little more of their future every year.

And yet the children I met were not defeated. They were curious, clever, and full of questions, about my camera, about Pakistan, about whether it rains there too. One boy told me he wants to be a doctor when he grows up, so he can help the sick children of the slum. Another girl told me she wants to be a teacher. They have dreams, and they hold onto them in conditions that would break most adults. That is the part of the slum that the rain cannot wash away.

I left the slum as the rain was starting again, the sky darkening over the tin roofs and the lanes already beginning to fill. A woman was covering her doorway with a plastic sheet, a child was running home with a bag of rice held over his head, and the sound of the rain on the tin roofs was getting louder. It is easy to call the monsoon beautiful when you are watching it from a dry room. In the slums of Dhaka, it is not beautiful. It is a test, repeated every year, of how much a family can endure. And the families there endure it, with a strength that deserves far more than our sympathy. It deserves our attention, and it deserves action, from all of us who can help.