Woman Headed Households

It took us an hour and a half to get to Obat, riding in a van (an improvement over the bouncing Tom Tom) and walking through the Kutupalong Camp with Jasim, a volunteer.  We walked passed a learning center with about twenty children reciting their ABC. 





Men, women and some children were diligently digging up gnarled roots of trees which had been chopped down to accommodate the huts. Without the roots, the slopes would be even more vulnerable to erosion when the rain comes.



We immediately started to see patients with Faruq as my translator. I was given a bucket filled with hard boiled eggs, tiny Mandarin oranges, bags of groundnuts and small bottles of fruit-flavored drinks.  These were to be given to the patients who looked malnourished, almost all of them received their little gifts with wonder and surprise.



A 25-year-old woman came in with four children ranging from 7 months to 7 years, so many children at such a young age. Her husband had gone missing and she had to take care of her children and now lives in the camp with them; a whole load of burden on her young shoulders. I gave her a whole bag filled with eggs, oranges, groundnuts and juice, her children flashed me their wonderful smiles but she remained stoically quiet, holding the bag and her baby and walked out.

Two patients were referred out, one was a middle-aged man coughing up blood and sent to a TB center to rule out pulmonary tuberculosis and the second one was a two and a half-year-old baby with trouble breathing, she was sent to MSF hospital.

After clinic we took the up and down winding dirt path through the camp, the last time I would be walking this way.  We were joined by a group of children chorusing, “How’re you? Bye.” Words they had learned by heart through previous volunteers. Men and boys carrying heavy bags of food passed us, WFP was distributing food at the center right across from the entrance of the camp.  I asked Jasim who would carry such a heavy load for household headed by women, he said they would have to pay someone to do so.


 

As we walked over the last bridge to the street, we heard the happy loud croaking of a frog but could not detect it in the murky water.


The setting sun was an orange glowing ball hovering in the hazy sky, looking down on the camp.  We stopped at Marina Drive and had some coconut water. It had been a long day. But for the Rohingya, all their days would be long and weary, without hope of returning to a safe place in the near future that they could call home.

https://www.facebook.com/kwankewlai.authorpage/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

At the Obat Clinic

Image
Four of us were dropped off at an intersection and five of us including a worker from Obat, another NGO squeezed into a Tom Tom to travel for 20 to 30 minutes to the entrance of the Kutupalong Camp.  I was sitting at the edge with no safety guard to prevent my falling into the road; I felt as though every bump was attempting to expel me from the bouncing vehicle. On the tarmac road, it was not as bad until we turned into a brick/dirt road when it became more precarious. We were then dropped off the entrance of the camp.  Crossing a bamboo bridge, we walked uphill into the camp. Tarp houses held together with bamboos scattered haphazardly over the slopes. There were shops selling snacks, bananas, vegetable and fruits.  The hills had been deforested to accommodate the flimsy dwellings, only dirt surfaces remained.  Through the doors of some houses, one could catch a glimpse of dirt floors, women hunching over cooking fires inside smoke-filled rooms.  Childre...
Read more

Hunger and Children

An unexpected day-off. I would rather run a clinic for Rohingya but it was not to be.   Had I known that we had no clinic far ahead of time, I would have booked to fly home a day earlier. A group of us toyed with the idea of hiring a van to go to visit the camps.   I would have loved to walk in the camp to get a deeper sense of how the refugees live. It was quite expensive to hire a van to go there and we would have to have a MedGlobal person to accompany us. In the end some of us decided to take a Tom Tom to see the reclining Buddha in the Buddhist Monastery. The road that we took was teeming with big long-distance buses and heavy trucks, which weaved in and out and sometimes coming dangerously close to us. The reclining Buddha is not quite as impressive as the one in Bangkok, nevertheless in a Muslim country, it is amazing that this monastery exists. After that we did not request the Tom Tom to take us anywhere else. Another volunteer from Australia came this afte...
Read more

A Red Bundle

Image
Most of last week’ volunteers stayed a week and left, three male doctors from UK joined us. Right around late morning at the Hope Clinic, two young men carrying a red velvet bundle into my room, preceded by a distraught middle-aged woman, brows knitted into a worried frown. When they unwrapped the bundle, it revealed a miniature woman, a 27-year-old woman with achondroplasia or dwarfism. sitting quietly crossed-legged on the floor. The young men reached down and heaved her to the bed by her arms.  With her puffy eyes lowered, she neither moved nor uttered a word. Using a thick branch threading through knots they made in the corners of the velvet blanket, they had carried her from the camp to the clinic. Mom said she had been bleeding for 10 days.  There was no actual bleeding when I examined her but her conjunctivae looked pale. Her hemoglobin was low, signifying that she was anemic. She was transferred to the Red Crescent Hospital, we did not know whether ...
Read more