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Rohingya refugees queue outside Kutupalong camp near the town of Cox’s Bazar, waiting to receive staples
have turned the forested hills into a dusty hive of
bamboo huts and black tarpaulins, Afifa is one
of the luckier ones. Others in the camps have
suffered more. Nur Ayesha, 40, pulls back her
scarf to reveal burns across her face; the military,
she says, set fire to her house while she was still
inside. Ajim Allah, 14, shows me his shriveled
left arm, shattered by a police bullet when he
emerged from a madrassa last October; three of
his friends died of gunshot wounds that night.
Yasmin, a 27-year-old from Ngan Chaung
village, recounts how soldiers took turns raping
her in front of her five-year-old daughter. But
the worst moment came when she went to look
for her eight-year-old son—and found him in a
rice paddy, a bullet hole in his back. “There’s no
hope for us there anymore,” she says, tears rolling
down her cheeks.
There is little hope in Bangladesh either.
Rohingya can’t get proper jobs, enroll children in
schools, or access basic health care. On the road
outside camp, clusters of refugee women beg for
money. Men find sporadic work in the paddies
or salt farms, but wages rarely exceed a dollar a
day. And Bangladesh, already poor and overpopulated,
doesn’t want to host them for long. The
government is floating a plan to move them to a
remote island in the Bay of Bengal.
The last time I saw Afifa, she was sweeping a
rectangular patch of dirt—the site of the family’s
future hut—while her father secured bamboo
poles at each corner. Islam, in his white skullcap
and tunic, attended Friday prayers that day for
the first time since he fled Myanmar. But the misery
has continued. In late May a cyclone ripped
through, destroying the family’s shelter—and
hundreds of others in Balukhali camp. Nobody
died, and his wife and other children finally made
it to Bangladesh. Still, food is scarce, the monsoon
rains continue, and there are reports of renewed
military operations in Rakhine. As a neighbor
lamented: “Bad days for us never end.” j
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