ROHINGYA KIDS

Childhoods lost as refugee children care, provide for sick family members

BALUKHALI (Bangladesh)

TAHERA Begum walks 1.6km alone at dawn to collect firewood for her ill parents and four siblings, an enormous burden for a 10-year-old thrust to the head of her family in the world’s largest refugee settlement.

“I do it because no one else in my family can. Both my parents are sick. They cannot move without assistance,” the Rohingya girl said while chopping vegetables in her family’s tarpaulin shanty.

An estimated 1,400 children are sole providers for their families in crowded refugee camps along the Bangladesh border, where more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have sought sanctuary from violence in Myanmar since August.

Charities fear they are especially vulnerable to illness and emotional stress from shouldering such responsibility, or exploitation as they struggle to provide for their families in the overstretched tent cities.

“This may lead them to child labour and explicit sex work. These families may also experience a spike in child marriages, which is very concerning,” said Save the Children International spokesman Rik Goverde.

For Tahera, the day starts at sunrise, with a long trek into the forest to gather firewood for cooking. It’s an arduous slog carrying the heavy load back to the family tent, a plastic sheet strung across a bamboo frame on a crowded hillside here.

But she barely rests before embarking on her second chore — jostling with other refugees to fill an urn at the single water pump in her corner of the camps.

Later in the day, Tahera carries what’s left of the lumber to the market to trade for basic supplies.

The refugee influx over the past two months has sent prices skyrocketing, so the little girl must barter hard alongside adults for food and other bare essentials to feed her family and earn money for medicine.

“All my siblings are younger than me. Being the eldest, I am just doing my part,” she said.

The sight of children carting water jugs, queuing at relief stations or dragging sacks of grain the size of their own bodies is not uncommon in the camps.

More than half of the 607,000 new arrivals are children, and aid groups say they are bearing the brunt of Asia’s worst refugee crisis in decades.

An estimated 40,000 children have crossed the border completely alone, their parents killed or displaced by violence in Myanmar the United Nations has likened to ethnic cleansing. AFP