Inside Rohingya children’s lives in world’s largest refugee camp - Rachael Waugh

THREE KEY FACTS:

• More than 700,000 Rohingya have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh since 2017 to escape ethnic violence and persecution.
• Rohingya been denied citizenship in Myanmar and other rights for decades.
• Myanmar is recognised as a hunger hotspot by the United Nations, which says “acute food insecurity is likely to deteriorate further in coming months.”

Rachael Waugh is the director of international programmes at Save the Children New Zealand.

OPINION

The scene in the artwork gifted to me in Camp 4 of the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, is familiar. Painted with a child’s imaginative eye and careful hand, it shows children playing a game of football in a back garden. The space is open, with trees around and a gentle stream running nearby. Two onlookers – a mum and sister maybe – watch on from the family home.

But how this idyllic scene differs to the everyday reality of the child who painted it.

It is a challenge to put into words the vastness of those sprawling camps. The hills where camp after camp has been erected to house the close to million Rohingya refugees, more than half of them children, who are stranded there with no end in sight. The flimsiness of the dwellings - bamboo and tarpaulins - where too many live. Everything fragile. Everything temporary.

The artwork gifted to Rachael Waugh.

I am thankful I have not come in monsoon season to visit the health posts that New Zealand’s Disaster Response Programme helps fund alongside Save the Children supporters. During that time, I can’t imagine these tenuous bamboo bridges holding firm against the flow of the swampy dark water.

It’s now seven years since more than 700,000 people – half of them children – fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh to escape terrifying violence.

But even now, there is no solution to the plight of the Rohingya people. The children have no access to formal education, their parents, no access to work. Fires regularly break out inside the camps, fuelled by the highly flammable makeshift materials that home refugees. There is inadequate sanitation or clean water. Our team at the health post tell us outbreaks of communicable and vector-borne diseases, such as Covid-19, dengue, acute water diarrhoea, and scabies are common, while flash floods and mudslides wreak devastation through the camps.

Crime is rife, and children are exposed to a range of abuses including physical and domestic violence, sexual violence, child labour, child marriage, drug abuse, and trafficking.

A refugee camp is no place for a child to grow up.

Rachael Waugh and her team in refugee camps.

Global funding cuts mean this year less than 30% of what is needed to support the full Rohingya humanitarian response plan will be spent. The world’s attention has turned to other crises and sadly, that will be felt by the hundreds of thousands of children and their families trapped in the camps.

Inside the health posts and the informal learning centres that Save the Children is running, a peaceful safe area for kids has been created. There is a well co-ordinated response across education, health and child protection, where thousands of children have been supported.

Children like 10-year-old Riaz*, who was born with hydrocephalus, a condition that left him unable to walk since the age of 2. The team provides regular rehabilitation services, while his new wheelchair has expanded his world.

The health posts are always full. Around 100 refugees visit each health post every day, lining up to access a range of primary health services, including maternal and postnatal care, to mental health.

Rachael Waugh and her team visit world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

There are many mums with new babies, part of those 30,000 children born every year inside the camps. The babies are stateless, unrecognised, but here they receive postnatal support not too dissimilar to the care experienced by mothers in Aotearoa. The baby is happy, thriving, a reminder of what living can look like inside the camps, rather than just surviving.

It is outside the informal learning centre where the child hands me her artwork, a gift to say thank you to the visitors who have come to see her classroom. I thank her for it and go to ask my usual question for every child I meet in our programme work: “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

But I don’t ask. Because without a viable solution to this longstanding crisis, where will she go?

As other global pressures and crises mount, there is a fear that this crisis will be placed in the “too hard basket”. A place these people have sadly been before.

Rachael Waugh is the director of International programmes at Save the Children New Zealand.

We must do better for Rohingya people. Children inside these camps want what every child wants: a home, a proper education and a safe place to play and grow. A future.

Rohingya children need hope. They need legal protections and status. And they need the international community to show solidarity by increasing financial and political support to Bangladesh for continuing to shelter the nearly one million refugees that now call this place home.

*names have been changed to protect privacy