Last updated: 04 Feb 2009

Learners use local information and technology to explore why their climate is changing and how to adapt to an increase in extreme weather events.

Slideshow

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Transcript

Namaste!

Welcome to our school. It's in a small village called Karchua Bori. That's in Assam, in the North East of India.

One of the longest rivers in the world flows past our school. It's called the Brahmaputra.

The river is a very important part of our life. It brings fish and makes it possible to grow rice.

The river also brings floods. These come with the Monsoon rains in June and September.

Floods can be very severe because the Brahmaputra river is squeezed between two massive mountain ranges (The Himalayas and the Cachars) and all the water collects in the valleys in between.

For the past few years the floods have been getting worse and worse. In 2004 water came rushing through the school like a white torrent. Desks, benches and books were swept away. Not even the walls were left standing.

Many friends and families didn't survive. Some couldn't hold on in the strong currents. Others died from snake bites or diseases like malaria.

Our school was totally destroyed. Since then we've not only rebuilt our school, we've started to learn about how to cope if a similar flood happened.

In our lessons we discuss why the floods might be getting worse. We have heard that the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting and that water and mud is travelling down to villages like ours.

We made maps to look at where the floods were worst. We decided to plant trees between our school and the Brahmaputra River. These will help stop the force of the water and protect our building.

Our teachers give us practical demonstrations of what to do in an emergency. We make canoes from banana plants, bamboo and tarpaulin and life jackets from bottles and jerry cans.

First Aid training has been great fun. We are learning how to rescue people from trees, especially if they had injuries like broken arms or legs. We also teach the younger children how to swim.

Our elders teach us about the warning signs of disasters. We check for different colours or cloud patterns in the sky. Animals and birds give clues too. When Kora birds sound 'Dub Dub' during sunset it means that floods are on the way.

This year the floods came again. We stayed calm to set an example to the younger children. We put all our books plus food and water on a platform and stayed with them till the floods went down. We did lose some possessions, but this time no-one died.

We are proud of the work we are doing to help our community. In the future we'd like the people who build schools to visit us. We could give them some tips on how to make schools safer places to be!

Credits

• Photographs by Prashant Panjiar, ActionAid (www.actionaid.org.uk/schools)
• Music: 'Himalayan Sunrise' by Craig Pruess (http://www.amazingworldmusic.com/)