SOLAR PANELS A LIFELINE FOR REFUGEES
They can charge phones and power lights, fans
BALUKHALI
THE squalid camps in Bangladesh that are home to some 600,000 newly-arrived Rohingya have no running water and few toilets, but they do have power, thanks to a proliferation of solar panels.
This means refugees can charge phones and power electric lights and fans, a lifeline in tents that become baking hot in the day.
Some refugees said the panels were among the few precious possessions they grabbed as they fled villages in Myanmar that had been burnt in a campaign of retribution following militant attacks on police posts.
Others have used their meagre resources to buy the panels after arriving in Bangladesh, where they have had to set up home in overcrowded refugee camps.
At the entrance to the camp here, one of the blue panels powers Kabir Ahmed’s makeshift grocery store.
Ahmed, 46, who worked at a shrimp farm in Myanmar, set up his business when he arrived in Bangladesh in August after fleeing a military crackdown in Myanmar that the United Nations had said amounted to ethnic cleansing.
He gets enough power from the sun to run four lightbulbs and two small fans.
“Now we can have light at night, and when it is hot, the fan gives us a bit of relief,” he said as he wiped sweat from his body with a cloth.
In the absence of mains electricity, the sun is a precious source of energy for the Rohingya living in camps, where even food and clean water are scarce.
But, many villages in the isolated and underdeveloped Rakhine State in Myanmar, where the refugees have travelled from, also lacked access to mains power.
Some refugees accused mainly Buddhist Myanmar of being unwilling to invest in areas inhabited by the Rohingya, a Muslim minority that the government regarded as illegal immigrants.
It is not just the Rohingya — 50 per cent of the population of Myanmar lacked access to mains electricity.
A handful of power points in tents were available for the 582,000 Rohingya the UN estimated had arrived in Bangladesh since an upsurge in violence on Aug 25.
Ahmed and his family recharge their phone batteries at a nearby market at a cost of 30 taka (RM1.50). However, not all refugees had the money to do that and most cook with firewood and use little, if any, electricity. AFP