M Jahirul Islam Jewel

Despite high demand at retail markets where it is selling for good prices, lemon growers are failing to sell the produce at profitable rates due to a drop in the number of interested buyers at Bhimruli wholesale market in Jhalakathi Sadar.

It’s water, water everywhere. Strong current coupled by the fierce gales has inundated almost everything that can be seen through the eerie darkness. Women and children have been huddled in a boat tied up with a tree in a nearby jungle with men straining every nerve to survive the perilous night by grasping something firm.

As the crisis originating from the coronavirus deepens, people, especially the poor and needy, are looking up to their local leaders to deliver.

An inadequate supply of testing kits to detect the novel coronavirus across Barishal division has become a headache for doctors in the region.

As some people with more regularised jobs and businesses gradually begin to work from home or enter stay-home modes across the country, livelihoods of low-income people are being hit hard.

Coconut grower Shahinur was shocked to see how a single green coconut was being sold for Tk 80 in Barishal city near Sher-E-Bangla Medical College Hospital. But, at her village, in close proximity to the city, she recently sold each coconut to traders for only Tk 12.

Fishermen of Elisha village and nearby areas in Bhola Sadar upazila can now aspire to be literate as a group of local youths under the banner of East Elisha Foundation, a voluntary organisation, started a school for them.

How long does it take to complete a two-year project for constructing a medical facility? For a government hospital struggling to cope with patient flow, the answer is more than a decade.

Once flowing Rajapur canal in Jhalakathi is nearly dead now, thanks to the mindless encroachment and pollution by locals on both sides of the waterbody.

MV Dudu Mia-1, a clinker-loaded cargo vessel, sank in the Kirtonkhola river in Barishal on December 14 after a head-on collision with a passenger launch. It has not been salvaged yet.

The hapless people of the remote island of Dhalchar union, 35 kilometres from Kossopia on the mainland, have found an innovative way of facing cyclones -- they go deep into the mangrove forest and hold trees to hang on for saving life.

When students of their age usually spend their weekend playing games or hanging out with friends or family, twelve students in Barguna town made it their mission to use their spare time to bring colour in people’s lives.

One month into the attacks on law enforcers, houses of Hindus and a temple in Bhola’s Borhanuddin upazila, police are yet to identify the masterminds behind those or the “hackers” who broke into the Facebook page of Biplob Chandra Baidya.

Jewel and his two siblings were waiting for his fisherman father who promised to return home with new dresses, but they only received their father’s body yesterday morning.

The video starts with one Hasan beating an elderly man -- whose hands and legs are tied and who is visibily unconscious -- with a wooden stick. Shouts can be heard off camera, which then pans to the victim’s around 12-year-old daughter, who tries to come to her father’s aid. “Younger women than you have been raped,” Hasan says to her. At this, she backs away.

A number of religious leaders, including imams, in Bhola had broken their promise to the local administration of taking all necessary steps to postpone the fateful October 20 rally.

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan yesterday told the BBC that they were yet to identify the person who had hacked the Facebook ID of Biplob Chandra Baidya, but Facebook authorities had given the Bangladesh government some idea, not any concrete information about the hacker.

Fearing further attacks, most of the Hindu families in Bhola, have stopped sending their children to schools and restricted their business operations, said the community leaders.

Sattya Prashad Das spent his whole life teaching religious education and humanity to his students, irrespective of religions and caste in his locality in Bhola’s Borhanuddin upazila.

The first phone call which awoke Biplop Chandra Baddya on Friday, right after lunch, may have been the most life-changing one he had ever received.