One room. One roof. One shelter of 150 square feet to accommodate one family. A refugee’s world isn’t very big to begin with.
In the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, one of the world’s most densely populated places, I have seen firsthand how cramped conditions can get. Sweltering in the summer, drenched in the monsoon -- the bamboo and tarpaulin shelters barely provide enough cover from the elements.
Refugees worldwide often have to make impossible choices in search of safety from conflict and violence. Many leave their homes, their livelihoods, farms, shops, jobs, and families as they flee, exchanging their known communities for an uncertain future in difficult conditions, surrounded by new people.
This is the sad reality for a staggering 123 million people around the world who are currently displaced.
Here in Bangladesh, more than a million people live in the world’s largest refugee camp, having fled the violence in Myanmar and crossed an international border seeking safety. Leaving behind their rural villages or bustling towns for life in a camp where opportunities are limited. Their homes now a shelter of 150 square feet.
When people become refugees, their world shrinks. But their hopes, dreams, ambitions and dedication do not. Among my favorite places to visit in the Cox’s Bazar camps are the skills training centres, where young people learn vocational and life skills that help them navigate life in the camps and prepare them to have a productive working life, if and when they are able to return to Myanmar.
Classrooms full of young women and men learning how to repair solar systems and electrical wiring, pour concrete, sew clothes, bags and sanitary napkins -- there, I can see how determined people are to stay busy. It may be different from the dreams they told me they had -- maybe becoming a doctor or an architect or a veterinarian -- but, when given the chance, they keep developing themselves and expanding their world as much as possible.
They remind their communities, as well as the humanitarians working beside them, that refugees are not passive victims. They are individuals with potential, talent and skills. They are not defined by what they’ve lost, but by how they thrive through adversity.
They represent rays of hope in a place where after eight years of displacement, hope can sometimes be hard to find.
But the current crippling funding shortfall that is impacting humanitarian organizations worldwide is threatening these programs, and others like it. Organizations such as my own have no choice but to look at basic necessities such as education, healthcare, shelter, water and sanitation -- and decide what people can do without.
As we commemorate World Refugee Day, I wish we had more to celebrate. But instead, let’s take a moment to stand with the refugees who are marking this day from their shelters, and collectively wish for them a bigger, brighter future. Let them know that they are not forgotten.
Juliette Murekeyisoni is the acting UNHCR Representative in Bangladesh. Having grown up as a refugee in Burundi, today she dedicates herself to protecting and supporting other refugees.
