Journalist Claudia Hammond of the BBC and Guardian newspaper was sent to India to report on climate change, but instead stumbled on a different story: Daulatdia, the biggest brothel in Bangladesh. There is a brothel in Bangladesh that services 3, men a day. Sixteen hundred women live and work there, so you can do the math. A reporter who stood outside the brothel wearing a BBC cap and holding a large microphone, she had customers who came up, and they told her very plainly about themselves.
Claudia Hammond is the reporter who visited that busy brothel. How did that morph into the story about the brothel? And we all went to sort of different parts of it.
And we were looking at the effects of climate change and the - what happened with the rising water levels there with the rivers going up. And one of the places we stopped at on our boat was this very, very busy ferry port, and it's the busiest ferry port they have in Bangladesh. And loads of ferries go in and out. And then we found - there was this strange connection there between the effects of climate change and the rising water levels and this brothel, which is the trucks queue a day at a time.
We saw these massive long queues of trucks. And some of these men wait for days at a time. And while they're waiting to cross and get on the ferries to drive their goods across the country, they often go and visit the brothel. And because of the water levels rising, it means that not as many ferries can go as could before, and so they queue for even longer, and so the brothel's getting busier and busier.
And now it is the biggest in the whole country. Is the village unique, or are there pockets of this all over? I mean, there's just the 14, but this one is the biggest of all. And this one is interesting in the fact that it is this, you know, it's almost like a whole town that is a brothel. As you walk around, you know, it's this sort of dusty town, and there's goats and there's lots of men and boys hanging about. And there were also - the thing that makes it different is there are also women standing around in the streets.
