The water storage is located about 600ft below,” Kipsan says. The water from the reservoir is yellowish and has a strong, unpleasant taste. No wonder a good number of people of Pasingpara suffer from diarrhoea
The sun beats down on the dusty trail that meanders through the mountain. A man trudges on through the narrow dirt path, a basket perched across his shoulders. The man stops occasionally to catch his breath and draw comfort from the faint stirrings of spring in the air. He finally stops at the bottom of a dry waterfall.
He takes out a “toon” (a water container made of pumpkin shell and carried by hill people), scans the horizon and climbs back up about twenty feet where he finds a thin flow of water still snaking down the slippery rock face. He lines up his “toons” under the thin thread of water and prepares to wait for a few agonising hours to fill his containers.
The man, Drumsingh Bawm, is from the nearest “para” (hill village) called Taikhang,’ which is a 45 minute trek through a landscape marked with narrow trails for a tiring walk down. He has to go through this laborious walk as he has no other options; this is the nearest water source to his hamlet.
“We had a small “jhiri” (hill river) running by the side of our para. But the water dries up in summer, forcing all of us to come down to this waterfall, which is reduced to a thin flow during this time of the year,” Drumsingh says in broken Bangla. Taikhangpara is a remote Bawm village. One needs to undertake a six or seven hour trek from Ruma Upazila to reach the place. During a recent visit, this correspondent came across the lifestyle of people living in the village - people who spend a major part of their day looking for water in drying up falls.
The situation is no different in Pasingpara, which is situated 3,062 ft above sea level, the highest point in the country where the Murong tribals live. Kipsan, the karbari (leader of the village), said that the chief source of water for the para is a small stream in the nearby Keukaradong range, but that has already dried up.
“We put up a bamboo dam and mud at the jhiri, to divert the water into a reservoir. The water storage is located about 600ft below,” Kipsan says. The water from the reservoir is yellowish and has a strong, unpleasant taste. No wonder a good number of people of Pasingpara suffer from diarrhoea.
Just 800ft below and an hour-long trek from Pasingpara, Darzilingpara is where the hill people flock to catch a rickety old SUV, “Chander Gari” (moon buggy). The SUV comes twice a day from the nearest town in Rumabazar upazila. Over a dozen passengers squeeze into it as it precariously makes its way to the bazar. This is the only vehicle available to people seeking to go to town for treatment of diarrhoea. Things are a little different in Darzilingpara as people there use spring water distributed across the para via bamboo pipes.
Lalram, a resident of the Darzilingpara, meanwhile was a bit tense. The “Jhum” season had begun and they were setting bushes on fire for slash and burn cultivation, but there was no water. Days without rain have made him jittery and every day he looks up to the sky for traces of clouds, only to be thwarted in his attempt by a blazing sun.
“We are used to struggling for water during dry seasons. But this particular season, the hills that we have selected for jhum is too far away from the water sources,” Lalram says. “But we will have to trundle up the steep mountain path with water in hundreds of buckets and store them in the jhum ghar (temporary hut for Jhum farmers atop the hills),” he says.
This remote part of Bangladesh has been experiencing scarcity of safe water and other bare necessities for decades. People like Lalram, Drumsingh and their women folk spend a major part of their life fetching water and gathering other bare essentials. This is the kind of life that would challenge even the wildest imagination of city dwellers like us.
