Baby who got pneumonia in £12m shelters ... that leak
‘EVERY time it rains, the water comes through the walls,’ says Fahima Begum. ‘Our clothes get wet. Our pillows get wet. Everything. When it’s windy, the walls shake violently. Last winter, even after we closed the door and the shutters, the wind got in. We wore all our clothes but still we were freezing.
‘You can’t light a fire in a house like this, so we had to huddle around a 100-watt lightbulb. All the kids got sick and the baby got pneumonia. I had to take them to the doctor many times and borrow money for their treatment. We thought the baby was going to die.’
Mrs Begum, a mother of three, is speaking at her home in Khejur Danga – a lush, peaceful village in south-west Bangladesh. Her house measures 9ft by 15ft and, although it rests on a solid plinth to raise it above potential floodwater, its walls are made from a flimsy bamboo lattice.
A board proclaims the house’s origin: UK Aid from the Department for International Development. Mrs Begum’s house is one of more than 12,000 designed and funded by DFID as part of a project called FRESH – which stands, with unintentional irony, for Flood Resistant Shelters, and cost UK taxpayers £12million. It is part of a UK aid package which has averaged some £250million a year since 2010.
An ‘evaluation’ by DFID in March 2013 – soon after the homes were first occupied – describes FRESH as a stunning success.
In the words of its author, it is ‘one of the best projects that I have personally seen’ – though his
report does admit waterproof walls may have been better.
Mrs Begum points to some panels of the bamboo lattice lying on the roof struts over our heads. ‘See?’ she says. ‘They also built us a latrine, and these were its walls. They blew down in a storm. Whenever it gets windy, I’m terrified the house will be next.’
Mrs Begum admits her old house, which was made of mud, wasn’t perfect – after all, it had been damaged by a cyclone. But she adds: ‘At least it kept the weather out.’
Her house had been built in partnership with the charity Islamic Relief, one of several which DFID used to do the construction. But the design of the homes was centralised. And according to an expert in Dhaka, who asked not to be named, it ignored basic principles of local design: ‘The roofs should come low, to provide additional protection. This is how houses are always built in rural Bangladesh. I told them this – and they ignored me.’ In Amtalagatepara, about 30 miles from Mrs Begum’s house, there is another group of DFID homes, built by the Bangladeshi charity Shushilon, but otherwise identical. Their owners are no more impressed.
‘When the weather turns bad, we cross the yard and get into the old house where one of the walls was destroyed three years ago,’ said Ali Hossain. ‘I don’t like to speak like this because your country gave this to us, but it’s the truth.’