Padma River – Floods, originally uploaded by Mikey Leung See more photos here.

Remember the movie Waterworld, starring Kevin Costner? Today the unearthly vision of that movie rings true in Bangladesh.

I didn’t really know how bad the flood situation actually was until my phone rang late in the evening two nights ago. It was an old friend of mine from Canada, ringing to ask me for a hit on the afternoon news in CBC Calgary. Because I was on the road I wasn’t following the latest in Bangladesh, namely the fact that 40 of its 68 districts were now underwater because of heavy monsoonal rains. As of this moment, Sunday night, over 120 have died in Bangladesh because of the flooding.

Today we made the trip back from Khulna, and for a solid hour before and after a ferry crossing over the Padma river, we saw life struggling onwards despite the inundation they were suffering. My most vivid image (not on camera) stuck in my mind is that of a rickshaw wallah struggling to pull his vehicle through chest-high waters, seen from the highway.

Of course, for my family and friends out there who might be wondering about the situation here, I am fine and safely tucked away in my fifth floor Dhaka flat, and most highways, despite being inundated on both sides of the road, do still support traffic flows around the country in most regions. Where there is no road, there are now scores of boatmen waiting to ferry you around.

The real concern is with the poorest and most remote people of Bangladesh, most of whom already lack the fundamental basics of the broader society. When their wells go underwater, they no longer have access to potable water. They must then rely on water purification tablets from the government—very slow in coming. Others are telling me that if you’re a rich person and your house goes under, you simply move to a hotel.

From what I understand, this flooding is not nearly as bad as it has been in previous years, and in the northern parts of Bangladesh the water levels are slowly beginning to move down again. However, this doesn’t mean that the flood waters will recede immediately. I read on the news that poorly maintained flood embankments—some of which broke and let floodwaters in—will also have the reverse effect of not letting the waters recede very quickly. Some areas could spend the next two weeks underwater, giving rise to waterborne diseases. The ICDDR,B, an international-level local hospital known as the “diarrhea hospital” for its work on cholera, is now setting up more facilities to treat incoming patients.

More news to come as I find it..