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'She looks like Mowgli from the Jungle Book': Jamie Hewlett
'She looks like Mowgli from the Jungle Book': Jamie Hewlett's painting of a Bangladeshi girl. Photograph: Jamie Hewlett/Oxfam
'She looks like Mowgli from the Jungle Book': Jamie Hewlett's painting of a Bangladeshi girl. Photograph: Jamie Hewlett/Oxfam

Gorillaz artist journeys to Bangladesh to document climate impacts

This article is more than 14 years old
Jamie Hewlett's paintings of Bangladeshi villagers capture the beauty and fragility of their flood-threatened existence. He speaks of his terrifying journey – and the inspiration he found

In pictures: Hewlett's watercolours

There are only two numbers you need to know to grasp Bangladesh's problem. The country makes up less than 10% of the land mass of south Asia, yet more than 90% of south Asia's water passes through it on the way to the sea. Oh, and 80% of the country is floodplain.

It's never been an easy place to live – a far cry from London W10 where Jamie Hewlett, who drew the cult comic strip Tank Girl and designed the virtual band Gorillaz, has his studio, an anonymous three-storey, ex-factory building. He shares it with the former Blur frontman Damon Albarn, who does the music. When they're not busy with other stuff, they hold table tennis tournaments on the roof.

Hewlett, a slight and engagingly chirpy chappy who rolls his own fags and has pictures of (among other things) bare female bottoms on the wall above his desk, has recently returned from a week in Bangladesh. He went with Oxfam to meet people for whom climate change is a matter of more than passing importance, and painted them.

The results are striking: sepia-washed watercolours of children, trees, huts, rickshaws, some painted on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes. The images exude a powerful feeling of fragility – which is fitting, since Hewlett and the rest of his party very nearly never made it to their island destination of Char Atra.

After a stopover in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital ("an insane place, pure chaos, incredible colours – got hit by a rickshaw"), and a gruelling six-hour truck ride in sweltering temperatures of 40C to the river Ganges, the group boarded a ferry.

"It was going to be a very long crossing," Hewlett says. "The ferry was pulled by a tug, and it was jammed solid. About an hour and a half in, the lightning started. It was a huge storm: high winds, mammoth waves. Then the towline broke and the ferry broke free; it was thrashing around all over the place, trucks and cars and buses sliding everywhere. The women were screaming, the men praying. There was this incredibly heavy rain, lashing down . . ."

Amid the mayhem, one of Oxfam's local workers, Shumon Das, to whom Hewlett would very much like to say thank you in print, bided his time, waited for the two vessels to drift close enough, and leapt from the ferry to the tug with a new line.

"He basically saved us," says Hewlett. "It was all pretty freaky. Then the storm eased, we made it back to land, a whole lot more people and trucks and stuff got on, and we set off again. Thankfully, we had a bottle of whisky with us."

Char Atra, an island of seven towns and 10,000 people in the middle of the Ganges, is experiencing ever more serious flooding due to climate change. Oxfam has been active in the area for a decade or so, working in particular with local women (the men, most of whom are fishermen, are away for months at a time) to help them prepare for the monsoon and ensuing annual flood. They learn, Hewlett explains, how to raise their homes on a clay base (maybe a foot a year or so, if they can afford to), how to store food and firewood and other essentials on a wooden platform above their beds to keep it dry, how to save a little money, and how to rebuild.

"I was there before the floods, obviously," Hewlett says. "So what struck me first was just what a beautiful place it was. Calm, lush, all these stunning kids running around playing in the river. Wonderful. But it's incredibly hard to get your head round the idea that for up to two and half months a year, it's basically covered in filthy floodwater. Or half swept away."

Not that Char Atra is safe even after the waters have receded. One of the women Hewlett spoke to, Sufia, had lost her five-year-old boy to the strong currents that continue to swirl when the worst of the water has gone. Another, Nargis, was seven months pregnant when Hewlett met her; she will be giving birth to her fourth child in the middle of the floods.

"There's a kind of communal shelter, a raised building for cattle and the most elderly," he says. "But her options are basically to gamble on a four-hour boat ride to the mainland, or have her baby on one of the raised platforms where everyone lives during the floods. There are women there who have given birth alone, up a tree, surrounded by floodwater."

It was the children, Hewlett says, who made the biggest impression. "I did a session at the school with some of them, all immaculate, in spotless uniforms. They sang songs and threw us flower petals. We did some basic animation; a little flick-book. They drew pictures of houses being washed away, of themselves swimming to school carrying their books on their heads. It scares them, of course: the flood's their bogeyman. But they deal with it. It's part of their lives."

On average, more than 6,500 people a year are now killed in Bangladesh by natural disasters, with almost 11 million people affected annually from the total population of 150 million. Climate change is making a bad situation worse: advancing glacial melt in the Himalayas is forecast to cause rivers and tributaries to overflow further. Steadily rising sea levels mean that more water can be swept inland in storm surges, and that saltwater is infiltrating the water supply, making it unsafe to drink and, in some places, impossible to grow staple crops such as rice. Paradoxically, there is also a greater risk of drought: the winter rains are likely to reduce, and the summer monsoons may come at different times, or not at all.

"Each year it gets more and more unpredictable," says Hewlett, "and the water level gets higher. You see the effects of water erosion everywhere; there are bridges in the middle of nowhere, with the nearest riverbank 100 metres away on either side. It's clear to me it's the poorest people of the world who are suffering now, already, from the effects of global warming caused by the richest. What are our average carbon emissions here in the UK: nine tonnes? In Bangladesh, it's 0.3."

Hewlett counts himself as "a fairly green person. I cycle everywhere, I recycle. But how would we deal with it if it really hits us? Here, when there's a fuel shortage, people are already fighting each other for petrol in Ladbroke Grove. When there are floods, it's terribly inconvenient, but we have insurance. How would we react if we knew you could lose a child every time you open the front door?

"We live in a culture that's become anaesthetised to it all. Look how much we throw out. In Dhaka you see rubbish everywhere, mountains of it. Here we don't, we have no idea. It just gets taken away."

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