Bangladesh

As we continue production of "Easy Like Water," our film crew re-visited the solar floating schools, libraries, and adult education centers run by the Bangladeshi NGO Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha a year after our August 2009 visit.

This trip we spent seven days with students who use the Shidhulai services, meeting their families and documenting their daily lives, including 10-year-old Rupa Khatun, whom I will get to later.

A year after their first visit, the Easy Like Water film crew re-visits the solar floating schools, libraries, and adult education centers run by the Bangladeshi NGO Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha.

On Bangladesh's river islands, villagers contend with treacherous flash flooding, yet depend on water for jute farming, commerce, transportation, and recreation.

Bangladesh is a horizontal place, and water seeking its own level is constantly re-writing the geography.

On the front lines of climate change, the International Centre for Climate Change and Development offers innovative education programs in Bangladesh.

Easy Like Water is a feature documentary about floating schools, solar power, and the fate of the earth.

In Bangladesh, solar-powered floating schools are turning the front lines of climate change into a community of learning. As the water steals the land, one man's vision is re-casting the rising rivers as channels of communication, and transforming peoples lives. For more information, visit the Easy Like Water website.

Fleeing natural disasters that destroyed their villages, many Bangladeshis have moved to Dhaka's slums, where disease is on the rise.

See this article as it originally appeared at TIME.com.

Pulitzer Center journalist Steve Sapienza's, "Bangladesh reels from the impact of climate change," video airs 12/8, on Worldfocus.

Where and when to watch Worldfocus on TV

Last year, rising tides destroyed more than 300 schools in Bangladesh leaving children with no place to learn. In response to the worsening floods, social entrepreneur Mohammed Rezwan created 28 "school boats" to bring school to Bangladeshi children. Rezwan, NGOs and governments in poorer countries are trying to address the impacts of climate change now.

Muhammud Yusuf tends a muddy, two acre farm in southeast Bangladesh. He's been here for six years, but a few decades ago, this land did not exist. It was underwater. This land area was created by silt that floats down rivers from the Himalayan mountains. Journalists William Wheeler and Anna Katarina-Gravgaard investigate this new land, and the impact it is having on climate refugees in the region.

The climate story of South Asia begins in the Himalayas, home to thousands of rain-fed glaciers that make up the largest body of ice outside the poles. In the winter, these glaciers capture the precipitation that makes it over the mountains. In the warmer months, they melt away water that feeds major rivers like the Ganga, the Indus, and the Brahmaputra. The system is a 'natural water tanker' for the 1.5 billion people living in the river basins below.The second important feature of the story is its extreme monsoon, in which half the rain for the season falls in only 15 days.

In these slides, Anna-Katarina Gravgaard and Bill Wheeler travel through rural Bangladesh, examining the lives of those intimately impacted by river erosion and rising waters along the low-tide coast.