LocationsThe Woman Who Sleeps in the Trees
July 13, 2026
Every night after dusk, Zarina Begum climbs nearly 20 feet off the ground and waits out the darkness in a tree house she built with her own hands. It isn't for adventure. It's survival. Her village, Marisshar Char, sits in Langadu Upazila of Rangamati District, a stretch of the Chittagong Hill Tracts so remote that even finding it on a google map is difficult, reachable only by a slow combination of roads and waterways.
Wild elephants pass through often enough that staying on the ground after sunset is a genuine risk to her life. So she built herself a perch, and from it, she watches over the garden and animals that have become her life's second act.
By day, the 61-year-old widow works land that most in her community still consider men's territory, heavy labor, unreliable water, and a landscape that swings between drought and relentless rain. She has farmed here for more than 20 years, alone, supporting herself and staying ready to help her children and grandchildren whenever they need her.
It wasn't always this way. For years, Zarina's farming barely kept her afloat. She grew seasonal vegetables with little knowledge of pest control or poultry care, and her chickens kept dying of a disease she didn't know how to prevent. Goat rearing, which could have provided her with another source of income, was out of reach; she simply didn't have the necessary capital. She was stuck, and she knew it.
The turning point was facilitated by the Climate Adaptive Livelihood Options (CALO) initiative of Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which supports economically vulnerable households with training and cash assistance to start their own income-generating activities.
Participants go through 32 to 45 training sessions covering everything from crop cultivation to poultry rearing to marketing, followed by regular home visits to help them apply what they've learned.
Zarina used her cash support to buy a goat kid, a rooster, and two hens, then combined what was left with her own savings to start homestead gardening, bottle gourd, snake gourd, broad bean, yard long bean, and sweet pumpkin. She admits she started with doubt, unsure whether this attempt would go any better than her last.
It did. She learned to make organic compost and vermicompost, manage pests, and source better farm inputs. Her chickens, which used to die young, started thriving. Her goats grew healthy. Since traveling to market isn't easy for her, she sells vegetables, eggs, and poultry straight from her home, then reinvests the earnings back into expanding her garden. Today, her land also produces lemon, taro greens, and stem amaranth.
She earns between BDT 10,000 and 12,000 (roughly $81–$97) now, money she both saves and reinvests, methodically growing her operation season by season. Local Resilience Facilitators still visit regularly, helping her work through new challenges as they come up; the current focus is getting fairer prices for what she produces.
Somewhere along the way, Zarina became something more than a farmer trying to make ends meet. Neighbors now come to her to learn how she turned her situation around, and she encourages them to start gardens of their own, believing the whole community farms better together than any one household could alone.
What drives her isn't only income. Zarina has become a quiet advocate for traditional vegetable varieties, choosing to grow them over higher-yielding hybrids because she believes they taste better and carry more nutrition. "I want to preserve our traditional vegetables," she says. "These provide proper nutrition for future generations."
It is a quiet kind of monument, built despite every obstacle stacked against her- a garden that feeds her, a market that sustains her, a community that now looks to her for guidance and a tree house 20 feet in the air where she waits out every night, keeping watch over all of it, unwilling to let elephants, drought, or hardship take away what she has built.
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