Rohingya Refugees Quotes

preeminently powerful country upended by fear that their toy vineyards and hobby stables, their world-class beaches and lavishly funded public schools, would be inundated by rivers of mud, the community as thoroughly ravaged as the sprawling camps of temporary shacks housing Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in the monsoon region of Bangladesh. It was. More than a dozen died, including a toddler swept away by mud and carried miles down the mountainslope to the sea; schools closed and highways flooded, foreclosing the routes of emergency vehicles and making the community an inland island, as if behind a blockade, choked off by a mud noose.

A friend of mine was working with an international NGO in a refugee camp in Bangladesh in 2017 when she noticed something odd: there were children older than five and younger than two, but very few two- to five-year-olds. It was, she discovered, because when the Rohingya fled from the army and the militias, children of that generation couldn’t run as fast as the older ones and were too heavy to be held by their parents. They fell behind, and the soldiers advanced on them with machetes.