If you try to ignore the excrement floating beneath her floorboards, the view from Mrs Sefali's shack could almost be regarded as idyllic. At sunset, green dragonflies hover outside her back door, which leads directly to a turquoise lake.
Along the narrow lane in front of her flimsy bamboo home, rickshaw drivers carry exhausted women back from sweatshops where they make clothes for poverty wages.
This is Dhaka - probably the most squalid, wretched, and perversely beautiful city on earth. The capital of Bangladesh is home to 12 million people, a quarter of whom live in slums, in conditions of unimaginable filth. They include Mrs Sefali, who moved into one of the city's numerous illegal slums, Mirpur, 10 years ago.
Her tiny two-roomed bamboo shack has been constructed next to dozens of others. With so little land available, settlements like Mirpur have sprung up above Dhaka's many emerald-green lakes.
"Seven days ago there was heavy rainfall and the water came up through the bottom of my house. It rose up to my legs," Mrs Sefali said.
But it is not just the floods that transform life for the slum-dwellers of Mirpur into a watery hell. It is the sanitation: there isn't any. Mrs Sefali and her family do not have a toilet. Instead they use a hole in the bottom of their shack that leads directly into the lake below.
Some of her neighbours have devised a system of "hanging latrines" - precarious bamboo platforms raised a few feet above the water and screened by rags.
The tiny alley to Mrs Sefali's house goes past four or five other shacks, where families of up to 10 people live packed together. The smell is appalling: just outside her front door, human faeces sitting in nearly a metre of water bob up to meet you.
All the slum-dwellers are forced to use the lake as a collective latrine. They use the same water to clean their cooking pots, to wash clothes, and to bathe in. "We know this water is not good for washing ourselves in. But what can we do?" Mrs Sefali asked. "We don't have much choice."
It is hardly surprising that the inhabitants of Dhaka's sprawling slums suffer from a variety of diseases. In the rainy season they got jor - a debilitating fever. And then there is diarrhoea, dysentery and tuberculosis. Both of Mrs Sefali's children have scabies - a universal complaint - while her husband has TB.
"My neighbour's child died recently of diarrhoea," Mrs Sefali said. Only the carp that feed off the excrement floating in the city's slum-ponds appear healthy.
Bangladesh is one of the poorest, most squalid, most corrupt, and most densely populated countries on earth. Millions of people face the same problem as Mrs Sefali and her neighbours.
There is an abundance of water in Bangladesh. Most of the country is a vast delta fed by the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, which flow via a series of lagoons and shifting islands into the bay of Bengal. But much of this water is polluted.
The country has also suffered from bad luck. Since Bangladesh won independence in 1971, western donors have funded the construction of thousands of wells, especially in rural areas. In the early 1990s, however, many were found to be contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic. Nobody knows exactly how many people have died, but as many as 50 million may have been affected by arsenic poisoning. The west has hardly noticed.
Nearly half of the country's 129 million people, meanwhile, live in dire poverty. It is their desperate search for employment that drives them into the squalid slums of Dhaka and Chittagong, Bangladesh's second port city, and to colonies like Mirpur.
Until recently the women here had to travel miles to fetch water from a mosque. Others bought it at inflated rates from the mastaan, local slum barons who specialise in ripping off the poor.
Earlier this year, however, the British charity WaterAid introduced a scheme that means that for the first time more than 100,000 of Dhaka's poorest residents have access to safe drinking water.
The city water board has been persuaded to rethink its policy that slum-dwellers should not be supplied with water because they are squatting illegally.
WaterAid and its local partner won permission to establish a communal waterpoint, which is a few hundred yards from Mrs Sefali's flimsy bamboo home. It also signed a contract for the new connection, guaranteeing that bills would be paid regularly. They even persuaded the mastaan to let local women control the supply.
The scheme has revolutionised life in Mirpur, though there is still no proper sanitation. The waterpoint consists of a hand-pump inside a concrete shower-block. The women levy a fee of 50 paisa (half a penny) to fill up a large pot of water - far less than the mastaan were charging. Most days, around 250 people make use of the pump.
But despite WaterAid's efforts, the situation in Dhaka remains desperate. The slum-dwellers face the constant threat of eviction: last month the city authorities bulldozed several hundred illegal waterside houses.
Dhaka's only sewage plant, meanwhile, has broken down. The sense that the country is descending into squalor and chaos is hard to avoid, even if you are rich.
"The infrastructure almost doesn't exist for the middle class or the elite, let alone the poorest," Timothy Claydon, the head of WaterAid in Bangladesh, said. "Millions of people are living in utterly appalling conditions."
Tomorrow in Education Guardian, David Ward examines Fairbridge's work with under-16s who have dropped out of school; and on Wednesday in Society Guardian, John Vidal reports on the greatest problem facing mankind - 3 billion people without enough water.
· Pump priming
Bangladeshi population: 135 million
Infant mortality: 58 per thousand births
Life expectancy: 59 years
Those with access to safe sanitation: 53%
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