I'm on a boat in southern Bangladesh headed towards Bola, the country's largest island.

We're traveling by ferry on calm waters, but my head spins and my stomach ro just a bit as I imagine how these same

waters nearly destroyed Bola Island. It was

70 in November, under an almost full moon and unusually high tides.

The island was hit by one of the most destructive tropical storms in modern history,

the bolus cyclone.

There were floods.

Back then, there weren't any embankments to stop the water from rising.

Counterclockwise winds, torrential rains, and treacherous waves swept entire villages into the sea.

People held on to whatever they could to keep their heads above water.

I remember at that time the water level rose so high that people ended up on top of trees.

The water had so much force. Many people died.

The Ebola cyclone killed some 300,000 people.

And for those who survived, there wasn't much left to return to.

Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes, their farms, and their access to food.

The man whose voice you've been hearing was one of the survivors.

My name is Shohrab.

I am 70 years old. Shorab was a teenager when the cyclone hit, and in the days and weeks after the storm, he and his family

joined a mass migration of people who fled southern Bangladesh. They traveled about a hundred miles north

from Bola Island to the streets of Dhaka, the busy capital of Bangladesh. There they settled in a makeshift community, a kind of unsanctioned encampment dubbed

the Bola Basti. In Bengali, that word Bosti means settlement or slum in some translations.

The residents forged a community,

...