Restless Rohingya in search of a better future

And Mohammed Rohim (28) does indeed have reason to view the world differently.   After all, he is a Rohingya in Bangladesh.  That means that he’s had about a tough a life as it’s possible to have on this earth.
The predominantly Muslim Rohingya come from Rakhine state in western Myanmar, and they are arguably the worst treated of all of the country’s ethnic minorities.  They need official permits to marry, own land or move to another area.  They are often recruited as unpaid porters, used as human mine detectors and heavily taxed in crops and money.  So badly have they been treated, that for years, they’ve been escaping across the river to neighbouring Bangladesh.

Escaping for love, freedom and a better future
Mohammed Rohim’s family was poor, so he couldn’t pay the requisite bribes when the authorities came looking for slave labour.  For at least ten days every month, he was forced to work for nothing at the local army camp.   Mohammed was in love with a girl who lived next door.  The feelings were reciprocated, but the permit they needed to get married, cost an exorbitant 160,000 kyat  (150 euro).  So the young couple, decided to flee to Bangladesh to marry and try to build a life for their family.
“When I left, my parents were crying,” he says, “so crying.  They knew we’d never meet again.”
Rohingya who make the decision to leave their village know they’re burning their bridges.  They are struck off the local registers and become, to all intent and purposes, officially invisible in Myanmar; non people, with no rights to land, to papers, to birth certificates for their children.
The couple had a difficult trip.  They paid 10,000 kyat each to stow away on a cattle barge.  The barge owner hid them in the latrine, where they stayed for most of the 13 hour trip.  They arrived in Teknaf in southern Bangladesh and Mohammed got a job on a fishing boat where for a 9 hour day, he earnt 80 cents.  One day while fishing, he lost a net worth 6000 taka (60 euros).  The owner threatened him, so he borrowed money bonding himself in labour to pay it back.  Over the next three years, he worked as a daily labourer, as a gardener, in shrimp growing, whatever he could find to feed his growing family.

Life is no easier
Mohammed has been in Bangladesh now for 4 years and has three children, but life is not getting any easier.  Mohammed works as a rickshaw puller now.  His wiry body betrays a trace of malnourishment, despite the chiseled muscle of his shoulders and calves.  On his face is an exhaustion that is out of place in a 28 year old man at the prime of his life.
He pays a daily rent of 60 taka for the rickshaw and earns around 200 or 270 taka (2 – 2.70 euro) on a good day.  He sleeps in the rickshaw, eats two simple meals a day, and the rest of his earnings go to feed his family, currently living in a hut made of mud and plastic sheets in Kutapalong camp.  It’s an unregistered camp which means that no one gets any food assistance at all.  It’s too far from Cox’s Bazaar where he works, so Mohammed takes a bus there once a week to bring them money and to make repairs to the hut which is often washed away after a heavy rain.
An act of human kindness
As we near the end of the interview, I ask him whether in all these years in Bangladesh, he’s ever been shown an act of kindness.  He thinks for a while and replies, “a politician came once and gave each family 7 kilos of rice and some soap”.  “No,” I say to him, “I’m not talking of political gestures – I mean, has anyone looked  you in the eyes, and recognized you as a fellow human being, and just been kind to you because of all you’ve gone through?”
He was clearly at sea.  He wanted badly to please me, to give me the right answer, but it was a question that simply defeated him.  After several minutes, he simply said, “just that politician and the rice.”
And what does Mohammed dream of?  “If they would just stop the forced labour, and if I could find work, I would go home.  This is not my country, not my place.”