Helping Burmese children on the edge
Inspired by The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, a British woman is bringing hope to the forgotten Rohingya (Burmese Muslim) children filling refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Rachel Bentley flicks through some photographs on her laptop, stopping at one of a young woman with careworn features.
"We met her on the second day. Her husband had been badly beaten by the military as they were forced back across the border. She'd lost her week-old baby."
She then brings up another shot, this time of a sprawling, makeshift camp spreading over a lumpy landscape of mud and stunted trees.
"That's an unofficial refugee camp in Cox's Bazar district, in southern Bangladesh. Home to the Rohingya, Burmese Muslims who can neither marry, nor lead safe lives, inside Burma. They flee to Bangladesh, where they face an equally uncertain future."
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| Charity Children on the Edge helps thousands of marginalised children across the world. Photo: Children on the Edge |
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Bentley is currently focused on helping Rohingya (Burmese Muslim) refugee children in camps on the Bangladesh-Burma border |
"We met her on the second day. Her husband had been badly beaten by the military as they were forced back across the border. She'd lost her week-old baby."
She then brings up another shot, this time of a sprawling, makeshift camp spreading over a lumpy landscape of mud and stunted trees.
"That's an unofficial refugee camp in Cox's Bazar district, in southern Bangladesh. Home to the Rohingya, Burmese Muslims who can neither marry, nor lead safe lives, inside Burma. They flee to Bangladesh, where they face an equally uncertain future."
Bentley, 42, director of a ground-breaking international charity called Children on the Edge, looks over the sea of shacks and children's faces, then sighs.
"Since October 2009, the camp has grown by 6,000 people, with 2,000 of these arriving in January 2010 alone. It's grown by a quarter in just those few months, to around 30,000 people."
"Now the government are threatening to expel them all again and malnutrition and starvation are stalking the population," she adds. "They're trying to eke out a living as best they can and give the children what little schooling they can afford. But for how long? They don't belong … neither in Burma or in Bangladesh. It's a tragedy that few in the world know."
A life-changing trip
It was 1990, just a few months after the Berlin Wall had tumbled and Eastern Europe's most feared dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, had been executed – much to the delight of his people.
For one young The Body Shop volunteer, it was also the start of a journey that would change her life and that of thousands of the world's most vulnerable children today.
"Everything was changing. For the first time we were seeing these awful images of orphaned children, abandoned, hungry and helpless, held in terrible conditions inside state institutions."
Rachel Bentley was a 22-year-old law graduate when she joined The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick and a small group of volunteers on a life-changing aid trip to Romania.
"The Body Shop had never done anything like this before," she says. "It was Anita's vision to put together a team, gathering whatever we could, to go and help refurbish the orphanages."
She adds: "We slept on the floor of a clinic in rural Romania; myself, a friend, and Anita and her two daughters. Anita was very motherly," Bentley smiles. "She would go down to the market every morning and just cook up this wonderful Italian food for us and the kids."
Roddick died of a brain haemorrhage in 2007, but Rachel Bentley has taken up her mantle. Children on the Edge, the children's rights charity which Bentley shaped and now heads, was born out of that first, desperate Romanian trip.
Still with strong The Body Shop links (both have their headquarters on England's Sussex coastline), it has gone on to help marginalised and vulnerable children across Eastern Europe as well as Asia: helping ravaged Indonesian communities cope after the Boxing Day Tsunami, building schools for the blind in Bosnia, and developing "child friendly spaces" (special community centres) in war-torn East Timor.
Without Children on the Edge's help, many of these youngsters or their families would never gain access to an education, a safe place to play or a chance to recuperate from trauma. In fact little stops the organisation which has earned a nickname in the aid fraternity as the "Médicins Sans Frontières of the education world".
"Ultimately it comes down to our name: Children on the Edge," says Bentley, speaking softly from her tidy office nestled above a bright-pink bakery in the picturesque city of Chichester. "We can go in, under the radar in many cases and help extremely marginalised children."
There are now dozens of former Romanian orphans, successful young men and women, who have her to thank for their education and livelihoods.
"For me, that's the reward," Bentley replies modestly.
Born near Birmingham, England, Bentley moved with her family to the island of Fiji when she was just two years old. She then spent the next 10 years of her life on the island whilst her father worked as an engineer for an international development agency. "I grew up running around barefoot," she smiles. "I was really at ease with different cultures from a very young age."
At nine she went to an international school, then the family returned to Britain two years later when she was 11. It must have been something of a shock to the girl running barefoot on beaches and mingling in the Pacific sun with all races of the Earth.
"It was quite a shock coming back!" Bentley agrees with an infectious giggle. "We came back in the middle of winter. I was horrified to suddenly have to put on this jumper and blazer. I remember being teased about my 'Australian' accent. It was all a bit alien. I now also know all the flora and fauna of these exotic plants where I grew up, but I'm not so great on the native British species!"
But instead of a quiet life in the beautiful Sussex countryside, it was to Burma, one of the world's most repressive military regimes, that Bentley became drawn.
Vulnerable children
Burma is ruled by one of the most brutal military dictatorships in the world, headed by General Than Shwe. The military junta, called the State Peace & Development Council (SPDC), refuse to hand power to the democratically elected National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Tens of thousands have been killed, imprisoned, tortured or forced into slavery by the brutal regime. Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighbouring Thailand, India, and Bangladesh as well as nearby Malaysia and the Gulf and Arabian states.
Bentley says that she went to the border area between Burma and Thailand [where over 100,000 Burmese have settled] in 2006, to simply meet as many groups as she could.
"You get introduced to one, then another. Often they're women's groups, but not always," she says. "It's eastern and western Burma where all the troubles are going on," she goes on to explain. "So it's people groups from western Burma living in exile who set up their own organisations helping their own people within the neighbouring countries like India and Thailand, but also organising cross-border support for their people back in Burma."
"Everywhere I travel I meet vulnerable children," continues the Sussex woman, with a sad smile. "Those who've lost out to war, famine, natural disaster … In Burma, there are thousands upon thousands of them in state institutions. We wanted to operate inside the country, to help those children, but our hands were tied by the dictatorship there. There would be no way we could operate effectively there with the military government."
Her kind-looking eyes flash with anger. "Did you know that the Burmese military has destroyed twice as many villages as in Darfur? Over 100 different minorities are threatened inside Burma – they face forced labour, rape, torture and some can't even legally marry."
"Once they [the refugees] get to places like Bangladesh or other nearby countries, they're regarded as illegal immigrants, unable to work, treated as slave labour, threatened with detention or, like the women we met, often violently expelled."
"And of course it's the children who suffer the most. There's really no life... no life at all," Bentley repeats, with a shake of her head.
Then the flicker of a smile returns as she remembers the children of the unofficial refugee camp in Bangladesh rushing out to meet her last year.
"They are Rohingya," she explains, pointing to the images on her laptop screen. "Burmese Muslims. One of the world's last great stateless nations."
Bentley is one of few western women to visit the Rohingya. Having spent the past three years travelling to Burma's neighbours – supporting basic "apartment schools" run by Chin [Burmese Christian refugees] in Malaysia and refugee schools for the Karen [also a Christian Burmese minority] in Thailand, even risking life and limb to go inside Burma where Children on the Edge brings education materials and provides teachers' stipends to minority groups running several children's nurseries – she was asked by the Rohingya to come and see their lives alongside the heavily-militarised Bangladesh-Burma border.
The conditions in the camps are some of the worst she has ever seen.
"It's become very bad. Squalid. When I spoke to the children and the mothers, I could see the fear in their eyes – they used to live alongside the Bangladeshis in their villages. Now they're being forced to move to these camps and live in terror of being sent back [to Burma]."
Most people have never heard of the Rohingya, she says. Last year boatloads of these refugees were intercepted at sea by the Thai army. After days in outdoor detention they were towed back out, then abandoned with no food or water and no motors to power their boats. Over 500 men, women and children died.
"It was shocking … disgraceful," says Bentley.
Alongside Children on the Edge, several international aid organisations and human rights groups are warning of starvation and beatings facing the Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh.
Conditions in the camp are indeed tough. According to The New York Times, the dirt paths, flimsy shacks and open sewers have grown by 6,000 people to nearly 30,000, with 2,000 arrivals in January alone.
Denied the ability to work or receive aid in Bangladesh, the population has grown as Rohingya seek refuge from a wave of violence that has forced them out of their long-established homes in other Bangladeshi towns and villages.
Researchers from the Arakan Project, a human-rights group documenting the plight of the Rohingya, claimed children from the surrounding makeshift camp were begging for food from the refugees in the one "official" (government-sanctioned) settlement.
MSF reported that: "People are crowding into a crammed and unsanitary patch of ground with no infrastructure to support them. Prevented from working to support themselves, neither are they permitted food aid. As the numbers swell and resources become increasingly scarce, we are extremely concerned about the deepening crisis."
And in an emergency report released in March, "Stateless and Starving: Persecuted Rohingya Flee Burma and Starve in Bangladesh", a doctors' organisation called Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) also argued that there were critical levels of malnutrition and a surging refugee population in Kutupalong, one of the "unofficial" camps, without access to food aid.
"In recent months Bangladeshi authorities have waged an unprecedented campaign of arbitrary arrest, illegal expulsion, and forced internment against Burmese refugees," said the report. Deaths from starvation and disease were likely if the "humanitarian crisis" is not addressed.
PHR researchers observed children with severe protein malnutrition and those with swollen limbs and often distended abdomens. One out of five children with acute malnutrition, if not treated, would die, concluded the medical teams.
A European Union delegation fact-finding in Bangladesh earlier this year issued a resolution in the European Parliament on February 11 calling on the government in Dhaka to recognise the unregistered Rohingya as refugees and to extend humanitarian support.
"Since October 2009, the camp has grown by 6,000 people, with 2,000 of these arriving in January 2010 alone. It's grown by a quarter in just those few months, to around 30,000 people."
"Now the government are threatening to expel them all again and malnutrition and starvation are stalking the population," she adds. "They're trying to eke out a living as best they can and give the children what little schooling they can afford. But for how long? They don't belong … neither in Burma or in Bangladesh. It's a tragedy that few in the world know."
A life-changing trip
It was 1990, just a few months after the Berlin Wall had tumbled and Eastern Europe's most feared dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, had been executed – much to the delight of his people.
For one young The Body Shop volunteer, it was also the start of a journey that would change her life and that of thousands of the world's most vulnerable children today.
"Everything was changing. For the first time we were seeing these awful images of orphaned children, abandoned, hungry and helpless, held in terrible conditions inside state institutions."
Rachel Bentley was a 22-year-old law graduate when she joined The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick and a small group of volunteers on a life-changing aid trip to Romania.
"The Body Shop had never done anything like this before," she says. "It was Anita's vision to put together a team, gathering whatever we could, to go and help refurbish the orphanages."
She adds: "We slept on the floor of a clinic in rural Romania; myself, a friend, and Anita and her two daughters. Anita was very motherly," Bentley smiles. "She would go down to the market every morning and just cook up this wonderful Italian food for us and the kids."
Roddick died of a brain haemorrhage in 2007, but Rachel Bentley has taken up her mantle. Children on the Edge, the children's rights charity which Bentley shaped and now heads, was born out of that first, desperate Romanian trip.
Still with strong The Body Shop links (both have their headquarters on England's Sussex coastline), it has gone on to help marginalised and vulnerable children across Eastern Europe as well as Asia: helping ravaged Indonesian communities cope after the Boxing Day Tsunami, building schools for the blind in Bosnia, and developing "child friendly spaces" (special community centres) in war-torn East Timor.
Without Children on the Edge's help, many of these youngsters or their families would never gain access to an education, a safe place to play or a chance to recuperate from trauma. In fact little stops the organisation which has earned a nickname in the aid fraternity as the "Médicins Sans Frontières of the education world".
"Ultimately it comes down to our name: Children on the Edge," says Bentley, speaking softly from her tidy office nestled above a bright-pink bakery in the picturesque city of Chichester. "We can go in, under the radar in many cases and help extremely marginalised children."
There are now dozens of former Romanian orphans, successful young men and women, who have her to thank for their education and livelihoods.
"For me, that's the reward," Bentley replies modestly.
Born near Birmingham, England, Bentley moved with her family to the island of Fiji when she was just two years old. She then spent the next 10 years of her life on the island whilst her father worked as an engineer for an international development agency. "I grew up running around barefoot," she smiles. "I was really at ease with different cultures from a very young age."
At nine she went to an international school, then the family returned to Britain two years later when she was 11. It must have been something of a shock to the girl running barefoot on beaches and mingling in the Pacific sun with all races of the Earth.
"It was quite a shock coming back!" Bentley agrees with an infectious giggle. "We came back in the middle of winter. I was horrified to suddenly have to put on this jumper and blazer. I remember being teased about my 'Australian' accent. It was all a bit alien. I now also know all the flora and fauna of these exotic plants where I grew up, but I'm not so great on the native British species!"
But instead of a quiet life in the beautiful Sussex countryside, it was to Burma, one of the world's most repressive military regimes, that Bentley became drawn.
Vulnerable children
Burma is ruled by one of the most brutal military dictatorships in the world, headed by General Than Shwe. The military junta, called the State Peace & Development Council (SPDC), refuse to hand power to the democratically elected National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Tens of thousands have been killed, imprisoned, tortured or forced into slavery by the brutal regime. Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighbouring Thailand, India, and Bangladesh as well as nearby Malaysia and the Gulf and Arabian states.
Bentley says that she went to the border area between Burma and Thailand [where over 100,000 Burmese have settled] in 2006, to simply meet as many groups as she could.
"You get introduced to one, then another. Often they're women's groups, but not always," she says. "It's eastern and western Burma where all the troubles are going on," she goes on to explain. "So it's people groups from western Burma living in exile who set up their own organisations helping their own people within the neighbouring countries like India and Thailand, but also organising cross-border support for their people back in Burma."
"Everywhere I travel I meet vulnerable children," continues the Sussex woman, with a sad smile. "Those who've lost out to war, famine, natural disaster … In Burma, there are thousands upon thousands of them in state institutions. We wanted to operate inside the country, to help those children, but our hands were tied by the dictatorship there. There would be no way we could operate effectively there with the military government."
Her kind-looking eyes flash with anger. "Did you know that the Burmese military has destroyed twice as many villages as in Darfur? Over 100 different minorities are threatened inside Burma – they face forced labour, rape, torture and some can't even legally marry."
"Once they [the refugees] get to places like Bangladesh or other nearby countries, they're regarded as illegal immigrants, unable to work, treated as slave labour, threatened with detention or, like the women we met, often violently expelled."
"And of course it's the children who suffer the most. There's really no life... no life at all," Bentley repeats, with a shake of her head.
Then the flicker of a smile returns as she remembers the children of the unofficial refugee camp in Bangladesh rushing out to meet her last year.
"They are Rohingya," she explains, pointing to the images on her laptop screen. "Burmese Muslims. One of the world's last great stateless nations."
Bentley is one of few western women to visit the Rohingya. Having spent the past three years travelling to Burma's neighbours – supporting basic "apartment schools" run by Chin [Burmese Christian refugees] in Malaysia and refugee schools for the Karen [also a Christian Burmese minority] in Thailand, even risking life and limb to go inside Burma where Children on the Edge brings education materials and provides teachers' stipends to minority groups running several children's nurseries – she was asked by the Rohingya to come and see their lives alongside the heavily-militarised Bangladesh-Burma border.
The conditions in the camps are some of the worst she has ever seen.
"It's become very bad. Squalid. When I spoke to the children and the mothers, I could see the fear in their eyes – they used to live alongside the Bangladeshis in their villages. Now they're being forced to move to these camps and live in terror of being sent back [to Burma]."
Most people have never heard of the Rohingya, she says. Last year boatloads of these refugees were intercepted at sea by the Thai army. After days in outdoor detention they were towed back out, then abandoned with no food or water and no motors to power their boats. Over 500 men, women and children died.
"It was shocking … disgraceful," says Bentley.
Alongside Children on the Edge, several international aid organisations and human rights groups are warning of starvation and beatings facing the Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh.
Conditions in the camp are indeed tough. According to The New York Times, the dirt paths, flimsy shacks and open sewers have grown by 6,000 people to nearly 30,000, with 2,000 arrivals in January alone.
Denied the ability to work or receive aid in Bangladesh, the population has grown as Rohingya seek refuge from a wave of violence that has forced them out of their long-established homes in other Bangladeshi towns and villages.
Researchers from the Arakan Project, a human-rights group documenting the plight of the Rohingya, claimed children from the surrounding makeshift camp were begging for food from the refugees in the one "official" (government-sanctioned) settlement.
MSF reported that: "People are crowding into a crammed and unsanitary patch of ground with no infrastructure to support them. Prevented from working to support themselves, neither are they permitted food aid. As the numbers swell and resources become increasingly scarce, we are extremely concerned about the deepening crisis."
And in an emergency report released in March, "Stateless and Starving: Persecuted Rohingya Flee Burma and Starve in Bangladesh", a doctors' organisation called Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) also argued that there were critical levels of malnutrition and a surging refugee population in Kutupalong, one of the "unofficial" camps, without access to food aid.
"In recent months Bangladeshi authorities have waged an unprecedented campaign of arbitrary arrest, illegal expulsion, and forced internment against Burmese refugees," said the report. Deaths from starvation and disease were likely if the "humanitarian crisis" is not addressed.
PHR researchers observed children with severe protein malnutrition and those with swollen limbs and often distended abdomens. One out of five children with acute malnutrition, if not treated, would die, concluded the medical teams.
A European Union delegation fact-finding in Bangladesh earlier this year issued a resolution in the European Parliament on February 11 calling on the government in Dhaka to recognise the unregistered Rohingya as refugees and to extend humanitarian support.
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