Everyone is thinking: will we be sent back to Myanmar?

By Himaya Quasem

from ActionAid

Women and girls have very specific needs and this is never more evident than during a humanitarian disaster. This is why ActionAid has built a women’s Safe Space in Cox’s Bazar – a centre where refugee mothers can breastfeed in private, women can receive essential supplies, emotional support, and get medical attention.

During my week in Cox’s Bazar I visited the Safe Space and spoke with women and girls who had fled their homes, to save their lives and those of their children.

One of the first women I met was 35 year old Hasina. During her escape from Myanmar she had to carry her youngest children on her back. By the time she arrived in Bangladesh, she was so exhausted she collapsed.

Hasina told me that her husband was shot while they were swimming across a canal to escape. Panic broke out as the attackers descended upon the villages, and amidst the chaos, she couldn’t even look back to help him because she had to save her children.

Hasina and her children are some of the many people helped by ActionAid, through our camp counsellors like Fatima. She speaks a dialect very similar to that of the Rohingya people so she can listen to their needs and help them access the services they need most.

One of the most pressing needs identified was a private space, where women and girls could wash themselves and their children with clean, safe water. ActionAid has begun building women-only showers and is now in the process of building 50 solar-powered women-only toilets. We are also distributing dignity kits, which include sanitary protection, soap, a pair of sandals, clean underwear and a solar powered lamp.

It was during a dignity kit distribution that I met 12 year old Moshina. She told me how her mother and father were shot dead in Myanmar. She arrived at the camp a few weeks ago and now lives a hand-to-mouth existence in a makeshift hut with her older sister Mamuna and 10-year-old sister Shenina, who has learning difficulties.

Mamuna explained how she was separated from her sisters during the violence and then miraculously managed to find them at the camp. When she was reunited with them she said it felt like her ‘world had come back’.

Everyone here is asking the same questions. Will they get sent back to Myanmar? Will they be safe? How will they survive now their lives have been ripped apart?

For 35 year old Sakina, these questions are compounded by the fact she has just given birth to a baby girl. Sakina went into labour just before the violence broke out and had to run with contractions, before giving birth on a wooden boat full of people. She named her little girl Nur Fatima, after the boatman who helped her when she lost consciousness.

Tiny and malnourished Nur Fatima and Sakina are now being helped at ActionAid’s Safe Space, where our trained midwife is giving Sakina lots of advice on how to boost Nur Fatima’s weight.

It was heartbreaking hearing the atrocities experienced by the women and girls I met, but the world needs to hear their stories and understand the challenges they now face. They are afraid about what is going to happen next and they urgently need our help.

Humiliations are heaped upon the Rohingya women

by Zia Choudhury

from CARE

Yesterday, yet another 10,000 Rohingya refugees crossed the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh. Another 10,000 are expected over the next few days. Less than two months since the first thousands arrived there are now almost 600,000 people. We are all struggling with the scale of this tragedy. My team and I feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and the extreme needs. CARE focuses on women and girls, who have particular needs which are often overlooked in an emergency response. Each of my visits reinforces this.

Pregnant women who are malnourished and in pain, and have not seen a doctor or had a hot meal in days. Girls who have been sexually abused but are too ashamed to tell anyone they need help. Women who relieve themselves into plastic bags inside their tents for lack of safe bathrooms. Teenagers without even a cloth to use for menstruation. Children who go out to pee at night and get lost in the pitch dark, among thousands of tents. The list goes on and on. We are deeply affected.

Where to start? I turn to my expert team. Dr Shahed is cool and focused, despite being shaken and exhausted. He’s been working 18 hours a day for five weeks, finding and treating thousands of malnourished children. “We are already providing food and shelter materials. Let’s quickly build toilets and bathing areas separately for men and women,” he says, well aware that without toilets, disease can spread fast in these crowded camps. Our colleague Humaira is focused on getting women and girls a “dignity kit”. Soap, washable sanitary towels, nail-clippers, hair brush, underwear, flip-flops, a long dress, torch, bucket and jug.

This list costs £14. Women’s faces light up when they see the contents - every item is used within hours. The torch is genius. Charges up all day in the sun, providing enough solar power for the night. Women feel safer now to go to the toilets. They still go in groups, but now they can go to one of the growing number of women only bathing blocks to have a bath and wash their clothes. They come back safely, fresh and ready to sleep.

The CARE team work closely with another DEC partner, Oxfam. They build safe water points, while we build safe toilets. Refugee men and women help us to build, and also volunteer to keep things clean and orderly. Meanwhile, Dr Shahed has put together a team of 14 doctors, nurses, counsellors and a pharmacist. A self-sufficient medical team. They have mapped out an area deep inside the camps, where no clinics exist. This coming week, three clinics are being built for them to use - but until then they walk systematically through the camp, finding women and children in their tents to treat.

This is how your donation to the DEC is making a difference. With your money, CARE can buy these everyday items that help people stay cleaner and safer. Some 10,000 people will benefit. Maybe it’s a drop in the ocean. Maybe we will help prevent an epidemic. But we are already helping people to live with dignity.

These brave people juggle life and death every day

by Antony Bushfield

from Tearfund

It was 9pm and I had woken up on a stretcher, disorientated and unable to remember basic information about my life. What was my name? Where did I live? Which family member should the hospital call? I knew something traumatic had happened but I had no idea why I was in a resuscitation unit.

Just a week before I arrived in the refugee camps of Bangladesh, surrounded by people enduring unimaginable suffering, I had the frightening experience of going into anaphylactic shock and being rushed to A&E in Scotland.

In my case, I’d eaten something I didn’t know I was severely allergic to - I didn’t carry an epipen and had it not been for the expertise and quick reactions of the medics who saw me, I don’t know if I would be writing this. It was terrifying but I live in a country with medical specialists on hand who are well trained, alert and focussed, who can assist me free of charge.

In the case of the stoic Rohingya people, I have had the privilege of meeting, they have to prioritise on the basis of life and death every day. There is no A&E. There are no ambulances. Medics are stretched.

Is it more important to queue for treatment for an open head wound or to join the eight hour line for food? How can you provide for your family when the pain you are in from days of journeying from violence in Myanmar is so severe you can’t sleep?

During my time in the camps I witnessed everything from missing limbs to malnourishment to complicated pregnancies. And in the midst of it all were some amazing medics having their skill and capacity pushed to the limit by an ongoing stream of people in need of urgent medical care.

In one week alone while I was there 20,000 people arrived. This is a disaster that will not go away anytime soon.

The relief and development agency I work for, Tearfund, has been trying to assist new arrivals. I was astounded to see young doctors of a similar age to me, working with Tearfund’s local partner COAST Trust (Coastal Association for Social Transformation Trust), making quick and accurate assessments and advising on how people could survive in the absence of hospital beds and enough medication. From offering pain relief to dressing wounds and examining congenital conditions worsened by camp life, these are experts on the frontline working in the midst of dire situations. And the queues aren’t getting any shorter.

I know I was truly grateful when I woke up on that stretcher back in Scotland - I recognised the deep relief and gratitude I saw in the eyes of every person who was seen to by a medic in the camps.

In recent weeks the UK’s 13 biggest aid agencies have come together to try to tackle this humanitarian crisis. But we are in urgent need of more funds, not just to scale up the medical work we do as more and more people arrive, but to address other basic issues - food, sanitation, shelter. Things most of us take for granted.

I’ve returned home now and have spent the last week processing what I witnessed with my family in Glasgow. I know I’m once again in a place with the resources to assist me if I found myself in need of medical help. But the people I’ve met can not return home. They can’t process. There is no reassurance. For now, it is simply a matter of survival.

Overview

When a major crisis hits one of the world’s poorest communities, the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) brings together a unique alliance of the UK’s leading agencies and broadcasters to make an urgent joint call for funds to provide relief.

The experts in the DEC network assess the severity and urgency of the crisis, how well placed the member agencies are to provide rapid and significant humanitarian relief on the ground as well as the likelihood that the public are aware of the compelling need and are inclined to help.

By working together the DEC makes your money go further and provides vital funds to save and rebuild lives.

Please take one step to help at www.dec.org.uk