Mature Beyond Her Age


I abandoned my run this morning because of a planned early start to the clinic but it turned out not to be. It has been difficult to have to wake up the doorman to open the gate for me. I could hear the loud droning fan emanating from his room while I knocked on the metal door.

Again it has been dry all day.

My first family was Shakha with her three and two year-old children; Anuwar and Enan. She has been in the camp for a year and has pretty much settled down. Her husband was shot in the leg and he was carried by various people for four days to Bangladesh. She did not wish to go back to Myanmar.

Nur was sixteen and brought in her three-year-old brother. Her parents were shot by the military and she escaped with her three sisters and her one brother. She is the oldest and is now the head of the household. In the refugee camp she would be labeled as among the vulnerable groups. However she told me that she carries her 30 Kg of rice by herself up and down the slopes for close to two hours every month. Her house is far away from the distribution center, in Block 53 while the center is in Block 1. She has no porters to help her. She looks older than 16, more like in her twenties, perhaps the burden that she has been made to carry for this past year has aged her.



I asked her since her parents are dead now, who will provide her with the dowry she would need to get married. She replied matter-of-factly that she would not marry, she has her siblings to raise now! She has grown up beyond her age.

While she talked, her three-year-old brother leaned against her, his t-shirt spotted the words: EAT, SLEEP, GAME.


Then we met Muhammad a spritely boy who when asked what his journey was like to Bangladesh, he was beaming and recounted his seven-hour journey as being a fun one, walking, riding a buffalo and swimming through water. He loved the camp! His days were filled with religious education and he had to get up at three in the morning to start his day. 

We finished clinic very early today and left for the town of Cox’s Bazar. We were hoping to drive to the Myanmar border but the driver obstinately refused to comply. The only Bangladeshi in our vehicle was a woman, and I have noticed that he seldom accedes to her request.

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