1. Staying

For many families in the delta, the most decisive act is not leaving. It is staying, and staying takes work. One morning after a storm, two brothers set out early with bamboo poles and shovels. The embankment near their house had slumped in the night; without waiting for instructions, they joined neighbors to patch the breach before the tide turned. In another village, a girl and her sister checked on an elderly neighbor during the spring tides, carrying her chickens to higher ground and promising to come back after school. A group of boys in Satkhira described taking turns walking younger children to class along a safer inland lane when the usual path went under water.

These are not heroic stories; they are ordinary ones. But they add up. Out of the 120 journeys young people mapped, 83 described some form of shared action; escorting, repairing, planting, delivering medicine, or pooling money for pump repairs. “Keeping the routes open” was the phrase participants themselves began to use. It meant testing the tubewell pump together, keeping watch over the embankment at night, warning neighbors about a broken ferry, or quietly redrawing school routes during flood weeks so that no one had to walk alone in the dark.

Staying, in this sense, is not immobility.Footnote ¹ It is a dense pattern of small moves—coordinated, repeated, remembered. It is knowledge passed across generations about which lane stays dry, which courtyard is safest for gathering at high tide, where the next pump still runs sweet, and when to leave the livestock and hurry to the shelter. These acts turn exposed households into linked nodes of care. Without this everyday labor of staying in place, the larger story of resilience in the southwest delta would simply not hold.

2. Leaving and looping back

Migration from the delta is often told as a one-way story: people leave and do not return. The young people we worked with traced a different rhythm.

One boy described leaving his village after the embankment failed and staying with his uncle in Khulna for a month. He helped with harvest work, earned a little money, and learned how to send WhatsApp alerts when cyclone warnings came. Then he came back, just in time to help fix the roof of his family’s house and pass on what he had learned about early warnings. A college student from another village traveled to town during exam season, stayed in a hostel near campus, and spent weekends home tutoring younger cousins and updating neighbors about school admission rules. A girl in Satkhira moved temporarily to an aunt’s house on higher ground during a severe flood but returned within weeks, bringing back both saved cash and new ideas about how to store drinking water safely.

None of these journeys was final. In our set, 44 percent of mapped routes went beyond the home village, and more than half of those were explicitly round trips within the same season.Footnote ² Students commuted weekly to schools in town. Seasonal workers left for brickfields or markets for several weeks, then returned with wages, tin sheets, or construction materials. Families shifted to relatives’ homes or shelters during flood peaks but looped back once the water receded and repairs were possible.

These movements are not abandonments. They are deliberate strategies to keep ties alive, circulate resources, and bring skills, cash, and information home. Gender, safety, and cost shape who can travel and who must anchor the household, but the pattern is clear: leaving and returning are woven together. The loops themselves become routes of care—holding the community, much like the embankment, but through motion rather than concrete.

3. Protection

Protection in the delta is not a single shelter. It is a circuit people walk every day. One girl explained that she skips two pumps near her house because the water there tastes salty; instead, she walks to the school tap, and if her mother has time, they boil the water before drinking.Footnote ³ “Sometimes,” she added, “we buy packets from the bazaar when it is too bad.” Another student recalled feeling dizzy in class and a friend immediately leaving with him along the embankment to the health center, stopping only to tell the teacher, “We are going to the doctor; we will come back.” A group of boys described an unwritten rule that, during peak tide weeks, no one walks the exposed stretch to the bazaar alone after dark—someone always joins.

In our maps, more than a third of protection routes involved detours to alternative water points during the dry season or after embankment damage. Twenty-seven journeys ended at school–shelter sites during the 2022 floods, when classrooms doubled as cyclone refuges and safe waiting spaces for news.Footnote ⁴ In villages with recent TRM works, young people reported shorter diversions—around 24 minutes on average, compared to 37 minutes elsewhere—to reach drinkable water during monsoon, a small but tangible easing of strain.

Markets form the last leg of this circuit. They are not only for rice, salt, or packet water; they are where people swap warnings about embankment cracks, rising prices, broken pumps, and ferry delays. “We hear it first in the bazaar if the tide is breaking through,” one boy said.

Taken together, these overlapping paths—to water points, clinics, schools, markets, and shelters—show that protection here is not a fixed building but a moving network. Safety is made and remade in motion each time someone chooses the longer way to the good pump, walks a neighbor to the health center, or redirects children toward higher ground. These circuits are routes of care in their most literal form.

4. Why it matters: Meet people’s routes

Big plans already exist for the delta. TRM is a local practice of opening selected polders so rivers can deposit silt and ease waterlogging.Footnote ⁵ The BDP2100 is a century-long national strategy to manage water, infrastructure, and livelihoods across the delta.Footnote ⁶ Both stress participation. Both imagine resilience.

But these plans speak in zones, polders, and risk models. Life here is lived in routes. A half-hour detour to sweet water, a week of commuting for school, a late-night walk to the clinic—these are the scales at which adaptation quietly succeeds or quietly fails. The BDP2100 promises safe water, disaster risk reduction, and secure connectivity; TRM promises drainage and protection. Whether those commitments hold depends on how closely they follow the paths people already walk. If policy does not bend to these lived routes of care, it risks reinforcing abstraction rather than resilience.

What would it mean to design with routes in mind? From the youth maps and stories, four practical pointers emerge:

• • Map real routes first. Ask residents to sketch the paths they take each week—to water, school, clinic, market, shelter—and use those lines as the starting grid for siting embankments, pumps, shelters, and transport services.

• • Recognize staying as care. Nonmigration is not inertia; it is labor. Support it through small repair funds, shared tools, lighting and handrails on exposed stretches, and mobility aids for elders and children.

• • Support looped mobility. Many departures are round trips. Make these safer and cheaper with seasonal ferry passes, protected waystations, reliable information on tides and ferries, and shelters that remain open and accessible for those who return after shocks.

• • Integrate water–health–school. These circuits function as one system. Place pumps and clinics where routes already converge, coordinate detours with teachers and health workers, and update community maps together after each flood or breach.

These measures are not accessories to TRM or BDP2100; they are the ground on which such strategies stand. Designing from routes of care allows national plans to become concrete public commitments, anchored in the everyday movements through which young people already hold the delta together.

5. Ethics and method

This account grows from a participatory project carried out in August 2023. Forty young people, aged 15–22, from five hazard-prone villages in Khulna and Satkhira, created 120 short, geotagged stories about their daily travel. Using their own or shared phones, they recorded videos, photos, and notes, then worked together to map “nodes of care”, pumps, clinics, schools, markets, ferry points, and shelters, on printed and digital base maps.

In the workshops, participants clustered these stories into routes, named their own categories, and debated which paths felt most exposed or most protective. Selected maps and photographs included here (Figures 1 and 2) show youth marking routes, discussing detours, and locating places they rely on.

Figure 1. Study area in Bangladesh’s southwest delta showing Khulna and Satkhira districts and the approximate locations of the five participating villages.

Figure 2. Map of Khulna and Satkhira districts.

All participation was voluntary. Parental consent or youth assent was obtained as appropriate. To protect privacy, GPS points were aggregated and slightly shifted, and identifying details in vignettes were removed or blurred. Translations were double-checked by bilingual team members. Multiple coders independently reviewed the stories to identify recurring practices such as “keeping the routes open,” with discrepancies discussed and resolved. Participants then returned in group sessions to confirm, refine, or challenge these themes. In this way, the project treated young people not as data points but as coauthors of the analysis and as central voices in the vernacular publics that shape adaptation on the ground. The maps and stories are archived in an open-access repository with permissions set according to participant preferences.

6. When the path shifts

Back on the embankment, the tide is still high. The children take the inland turn. The shopkeeper finally coaxes the pump into flowing. Neighbors wave as they pass, checking in wordlessly that everyone has water for the morning. It looks ordinary. It is also adaptation in motion.

A plan that works here must start from these small detours. Ask young people to trace a week of their routes—to water, school, clinic, market, and shelter. Repair the breaks they already know: the collapsed slope, the ferry that fails at dusk, and the pumps that run salty. Align embankments, shelters, and services with the circuits where they already walk, wait, and warn. The rest—trust, time saved, classes not missed, blood pressure lowered on long walks for medicine—follows from meeting those routes.

The future of the southwest delta will not be decided only in government offices or donor boardrooms. It will be built along these paths, walked and rewalked each day, where routes of care hold families in place, loop them out and back, and stitch protection through water, health, and schooling. That is where resilience already lives, and where TRM, BDP2100, and other strategies must meet it if they are to move beyond maps and become lived commitments.