‘Tai nai sagu sai’

"Tai nai sagu sai" -- these are the first lines from a little kabbiya (Burmese word for poems) that Rohingya children love to recite. Children can be heard reciting this poem and many others taken from their culture, inside the khelakhana or Humanitarian Play Lab centres that Brac has established in the Rohingya camps. The poem goes:

“Tai nai sagu sai (One, two, three, four, five)

Tom le motti dame na (listen with your ears and learn with your brains)

Kru nassi pong kunai siai tabbe sa (Listen well with your ears, we will learn by ourselves)

Kutasse krozame (happy, happy)”

“I like to come to the khelakhana and play with my friends. I love to play with many different toys, and it also feels good when we recite kabbiya. Our serema (play leader) teaches us rhymes very well, and she loves us very much. I love everything about my khelakhana,” said 5-year-old Rahima (pseudonym), excitedly expressing her satisfaction with the Humanitarian Play Lab (HPL) to us during our recent field visit to the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar. The visit was part of a qualitative research project currently being conducted by the Brac James P Grant School of Public Health (JPGSPH), Brac University. 

At the height of the violence in 2017, Rahima’s parents were forcefully displaced from Myanmar and mobilized like other fellow Rohingya community members into Bangladesh. Thousands of children like Rahima did not experience a touch of their motherland, and do not know how their homes were, what the schools back home were like, or how the rhymes and stories in the school books went. The Humanitarian Play Lab or HPL, known to children as khelakhana, has been working since 2018 to preserve the Rohingya culture while ensuring children's early childhood development.

“Their material culture is incredibly resourceful,” says the Field management lead, Child Protection, at Brac HCMP about the Rohingya culture and evolution of HPL.  “Rohingya men are very skilled in bamboo work and handmade alpana (designs). Various cloth-stitched designs done with yarn by the community women showcase their cultural heritage. We have seen women and adolescent girls engaged in making handicrafts sitting inside their tiny shelters. We feel that this issue needs to be given importance.”

Brac University has been associated with research in process documentation of HPL since 2019. While documenting the HPL, we found that Rohingya children were facing barriers to inclusion in the standard model of the Child-Friendly Spaces (CFSs) just after the migration. This is because, in the standard CFS model, children were learning English or Bengali which was not closely linked with their day-to-day lives. Thus, their inclusion was less.

Since then, Brac started collecting various cultural artefacts with the help of their field staff; kabbiya, kissa (Burmese word for stories), and physical play were among them. Games such as hati khela, bang khela, palki choley, iching biching, Sumaiya go Sumaiya are some of the many games that have been collected from Rohingya culture.

Essentially, a team consisting of both Brac and Brac HCMP employees worked extensively with Rohingya outreach workers, teachers, local artisans, and children to collect the unique things which represent the Rohingya culture.

Brac IED introduced content to Brac CFSs that differed from other partners working for CFSs/learning centres. Unlike other CFSs, Brac CFSs focused on play-based learning and healing, incorporating Rohingya cultural aspects and values in order to preserve their culture and build social cohesiveness.

Gradually, these contents were incorporated into the Brac CFS program, and by the end of 2018, the HPL model started its journey as a new entity. The centres of HPL are collaboratively designed with help from the men and women of the Rohingya community. Just as men were involved in the design and construction of the centres themselves, women played an essential role in its interior decoration.

The physical construction of the centres represents the traditional house designs that the Rohingya community lived in back home in Myanmar. Women made hand-stitched shamiana (ceiling hangings or drapery made of hand-stitched clothes with intricate designs on them), as well as a variety of toys with clay and pieces of cloth for the children attending the centres. They made decorations made of paper and plastic cuttings in intricate designs. Children themselves, along with their parents, were also involved in painting on the walls and doors of the centres in whatever designs they preferred. 

The ceiling of the HPL centre; all the designs and decorations are done by the Rohingya women including Play Leaders and Mother Volunteers. JPGSPH, Brac University

The establishment of the HPL was not a simple initiative. As soon as centres were open and being implemented, it was very important to find a smooth way of managing them. BRAC enlists frontline workers from the Rohingya community to run the centres, named Play Leaders and Mother Volunteers, so that the children can communicate in their mother tongue and make the play lab a centre of their own.

As the play lab curriculum is structured with Rohingya kabbiya, kissa, play and dictums, the representation of the Rohingya community enriches the play lab. If you look around a Humanitarian Play Lab centre, you will see many colourful charts and pictures hanging on the walls, many of them written in Burmese in order to tie the children to their roots through their mother tongue and make the content more accessible to them. In fact, in most of the activities employed in the HPL, we find a focus on the Rohingya community’s own language and culture:

“Ara beggun bhaibon,

Ara milijhuli thaki,

Ara kaijja na kori!”

This is how children start a typical session at the HPL; it speaks of the morals children should aspire to emulate, that is, “We are all brothers and sisters, we will stay in harmony, and we will not fight with each other.” Such codes of conduct were not created by the curriculum developers; rather, they were taken from the Rohingya culture and added to the curriculum in their own language.

“We always encourage mothers in the home-based model to tell stories from Myanmar to their children. Even if they say any (fictional) story to their children, we ask them to tell their own stories, so that children do not forget anything about their culture. Because many of the children coming to the centre were born after coming to the camp. You will notice that in the pictures children are drawing, they capture the characters of the stories they are hearing from their mothers,” remarks Maleka (pseudonym) Project Assistant, HPL, Brac HCMP.

HPL operations include Rohingya Play Leaders and Mother Volunteers to enhance community participation and cohesiveness, remove language barriers, and create an empathetic culture. It should be noted here that the elite class of the community, especially majhis, Imams, and teachers, play an essential role in connecting these Play Leaders and Mother Volunteers with the HPL by motivating these families.

Play materials used in the curriculum mainly emerged from Rohingya culture being promoted for healing and resilience. JPGSPH, Brac University

Brac periodically holds material development workshops with the Rohingyas, where mothers make various toys for the children who come to the Play Lab. This workshop aims to preserve their culture and unbiasedly reflect traditional aspects in the play materials. Here, they make such things as pillows from pieces of fabric, mattresses from sacks made of jute, paper flowers, artwork, carry bags, clay-made cooking utensils, bamboo-made flower vases, dresses, etc.

Although these workshops were initially initiated for cultural preservation, several published articles have shown that people who engage in art and craft as a leisure activity play an active role in their mental health and well-being as well. Many mothers described to us that they are in a festive mood when they participate in the play material development workshops. As one of the mothers stated, “We used to make kitchen utensils with the clay when we were in Myanmar. Because of money constraints, we cannot buy toys for our kids. That’s why we attended this workshop and prepared many things for our children.”

Preserving cultural heritage and a community’s local history for future generations is part of preserving an identity that can uniquely present the community to the world. Through the HPL model, various efforts have been made by Brac to preserve Rohingya culture. The multi-dimensional activities they have taken and incorporated are unique. The HPL represents enjoyment, self-esteem, self-reliance, and a place for happiness and well-being, which can be a model for other humanitarian contexts.

Atiya Rahman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Brac James P Grant School of Public Health, Brac University. Nazrana Khaled is a Deputy Research Coordinator at the Brac James P Grant School of Public Health, Brac University.