Beyond the River: Ukina's Seven Sheets of Tin

Oped by Jarin Tasnim Mim (*)

Dhaka, Sep. In Sukh-er Bati, a village tucked into Roumari upazila in Kurigram, people speak of Ukina Bano the way you'd speak of someone whose luck ran out a long time ago. Some call her unlucky. Others say God tests those He loves most. Neither explanation touches what she is actually carrying. 

Ukina is sixty-two. Her story came out of fieldwork done under EBAAN - Evidence-Based Approach to Address Non-Economic Loss and Damage, a project run by the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). EBAAN was built to capture the kind of loss that never shows up on a damage form, the kind that has no unit attached to it. Ukina's life is a hard argument for why that work matters.

Roumari sits at the northern edge of Kurigram, inside the floodplain of the Brahmaputra. It is arguably the most flood-prone stretch of land in Bangladesh. The river does not sit still. It eats one bank while quietly laying down another somewhere else. The chars, those sandbar islands that rise up and vanish again, can disappear in a single monsoon season. For people who have built their lives on that kind of ground, the river is not an abstraction in a report. It is the thing that decides, year by year, who still has a roof. 

What’s harder to measure

Ukina used to have her own house. A house near the Brahmaputra, where she lived with her husband and raised what life they could out of that soil. The river never let her keep it. Flood and erosion tore it down again and again, and each time she rebuilt with what she could scrape up. There was nothing left to rebuild last year. Last year, there was nothing left to build on. The river had not just taken a house. It had taken the ground itself. Now Ukina lives under seven sheets of tin. That's the entirety of her shelter, standing against a river that has already proven what it can do.

Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD) is the term researchers use for the kind of loss that resists a price tag. Economists can put a figure on lost land, lost crops, lost income. What's harder to measure is what happens to a person's sense of home, dignity, and belonging when the ground under her has vanished more than six times in one lifetime. 

Ukina's husband died nine years ago. Since then, she has kept herself going through work that spares nothing; cooking meal over a brick kiln, digging soil for daily wages, cleaning and cooking in others houses. After doing all these things, she works for women who have things she has never had. She walks to a neighbor's house whenever she needs a toilet. It sounds small. It is not. It is a daily, quiet erosion of dignity that no compensation scheme was ever built to count. Her daughter is divorced now, raising a child alone. Three generations of women are shouldering a loss that, in a way, started with a river simply changing its mind. There's no budget line for that.

There's a gendered weight to what Ukina has lost, one that NELD research has only recently started to reckon with. Widowhood here is not just the absence of a husband, it strips away the layer of social and economic cover that a husband's name and land usually give a woman. Ukina has faced unemployment, landlessness, and the daily labor of holding a household together completely alone, without the safety net most families fall back on after disaster. Her daughter's divorce only deepens it, since a woman without a husband in rural Bangladesh tends to lose ground on land, credit, and standing, no matter how hard she works. None of that shows up in a flood damage survey. It only surfaces when someone sits with a woman like Ukina long enough to hear the whole thing.

Resilience, strength… injustice

Resilience, in most climate conversations, gets described as something a community builds over time, with the right support behind it. Ukina never had that kind of resilience, she had a river that kept demanding it of her; whether she had the resources or not. Each time her house fell, she found a way to keep going, not because anyone had set her up to survive this, but because quitting was never really an option for her. Call it strength if the word fits. But, plainly, it's an injustice. No one should have to dig this deep into themselves just to stay on land they were born to. Strip the support away, and resilience is not empowerment anymore. It's survival, forced onto someone by conditions nobody should be facing without help. 

Kurigram sits on the Brahmaputra floodplain, and few districts in the country lose more land to erosion. Families here watch their ground disappear the way Ukina's did a crack in the bank one year, a shifted channel the next, until a single monsoon finishes it. Most climate finance and adaptation planning aimed at places like this goes toward infrastructure and economic recovery. That matters. It just does not go far enough. It rarely reaches women like Ukina, whose losses sit in the space between relational and psychological, hard to capture in material terms. A rebuilt embankment does not hand a woman back her sense of home. A cash transfer does not undo the shame of walking to someone else's toilet.

This is the gap EBAAN is trying to close building evidence solid enough to shape real policy, evidence that does not stop at the report but follows through into what happens next. The river has taken Ukina's land more than six times. It has not taken her will to keep living. Under seven sheets of tin, she still wakes each morning to cook rice, dig soil, clean other people's homes. 

If climate resilience frameworks are going to mean anything, they have to start by seeing people like Ukina clearly not as a case study, not as a data point, but as someone whose loss runs deeper than any figure can hold. Ukina never chose to become an example of climate loss. She just kept living through it. The least her story can do now is change something for the women who'll meet the same river after her.

(*) The author is a climate justice activist, an ICCCAD Youth Climate Fellow and an independent researcher working with the team of the Evidence-Based Approach to Address Non-Economic Loss and Damage, a project run by the International Centre for Climate Change and Development.