The light of a single lightbulb powered by a backup generator lasts just long enough for Noor and Sowkat to see the faces of their newborn babies for the first time. The two children were born on the same night on a crumbling foam mattress, its corners ripped to shreds by the thousands of women who have gone into labour here in Camp 22’s makeshift delivery room.
The newborns have just become the youngest residents of the world’s largest refugee camp, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, which is struggling to operate in the face of a 63% deficit in humanitarian aid funding.
In the cramped, windowless room next door, Rajuma, 30, waits nervously for the results of a prenatal test as machines beep in and out of action around her. Rajuma is eight months pregnant and knows that once her baby is born she will need to skip meals in order to feed her family; there has been a series of ration cuts this year.
Noor, 23, Sowkat, 24, and Rajuma are Rohingya, a Muslim minority group from the north-west of Buddhist-majority Myanmar, Bangladesh’s neighbour. Rohingya have faced persecution from Myanmar’s military for decades, but this peaked in 2017. After a particularly brutal crackdown, described by UN investigators as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, about 750,000 Rohingya crossed into Bangladesh and settled into a sprawling network of 33 refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.
... read the full article here: The Guardian
"Inside the world’s largest refugee camp"
A quarter of a million Rohingya people have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh. In the camps there is almost unimaginable suffering, danger and a longing for another life
... read the full article here: The New World
