Most. Moriom is 32-year-old women from Dalbugonj village in Patuakhali, a highly disaster-prone coastal area of Bangladesh. As her husband is a migrant worker at Middle East, living alone with her 2 kids in such an area; Moriom knew she cannot limit herself within home and had to stay strong to protect her family from any form of harm. She witnessed how each disaster had damaging effects on the lives and livelihood of her family and neighborhood; that’s why she was looking for opportunities to minimize this suffering.
In 2018, she joined the Women-Led Emergency Response group (WLER, ActionAid Bangladesh’s organizational strategy to advance women’s leadership and skills across all levels in responding to disasters). Here, with the facilitation of AAB’s local partner AVAS and Nazrul Smriti Sangsad (NSS), she received several trainings on Disaster Risk Reduction, advocacy, and leadership.
After being empowered with knowledge, Morium soon developed herself as a potential leader and became president of her group. Morium facilitated several courtyard meetings to aware the women from her community about disaster preparedness. Now, every family of her community know about the disaster calendar and how to prepare it by themselves. As a part of disaster preparedness, now they keep dry food in the summer season, the early warning signal, pulling their houses with rope so that strong wind can’t blow their house and so on. During the time of AMPHAN and YAAS, she gave counsel to her community people to take shelter and relocate to safe places. She along with her group, supported the old and pregnant women to reach the shelter. Morium also supported in the shelter management such are preparing separate rooms for women and kids etc.
Morium helped to assess the response of loses at her community after any disaster and bring those issues to the UP and other authorities to address, such as distribution of food, cash, hygiene material, house repair material etc. for Cyclone AMPHAN, YASS and COVID-19 Pandemic.
Due to Morium and her group’s initiatives, 15 community women received VGD and other allowances which is helping them to reduce the disaster risk in a way.
Moriom is the example by herself who did not let any adversity (meager education till class 9, low financial resources, social stereotypes etc.) limit her transformation to leadership and raise her voice for change. Moriom is continuing her effort to voice the demands of her community to the duty bearers and is working to get included in the union disaster management committee this November 2021.
