Sesame Street creates Muppets for refugees
Newest characters will identify with escaped families of Myanmar
BANGKOK — Six-year-old twins Noor and Aziz live in the largest refugee camp in the world. They are Rohingya Muslims who escaped ethnic cleansing in their native Myanmar for refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. They are also Muppets.
On Thursday, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that runs the early education TV show Sesame Street and operates in more than 150 countries, unveiled Aziz and Noor as the latest Muppets in their cast of characters.
The twins will appear with Elmo and other famous Muppets in educational programming about math, science, health and other topics that will be shown in the camps.
They will speak Rohingya, the language of a group of people that the Myanmar authorities have refused to recognize as a legitimate ethnicity. Elements of Sesame Workshop’s curriculum will be dubbed into Rohingya.
“They are among the most marginalized children on earth,” said Sherrie Weston, president of social impact for the Sesame Workshop, who traveled to the Rohingya refugee camps several times to help formulate the Muppet twins’ characters and story lines. “For most Rohingya children, this will be the very first time that characters in media have looked like them, have sounded like them, and really reflect their rich culture.”
More than half the residents of the Rohingya refugee settlements in Bangladesh are children. Many suffered trauma after security forces in Myanmar forced them out of their villages, murdering some of their fathers and raping their mothers.
A survey by Doctors Without Borders, released in the wake of a brutal campaign in 2017 that compelled more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee the country in the span of a few months, found that at least 730 children younger than 5 were killed from late August to late September of that year.
The legacy of violence lingers in Bangladesh and has been incorporated into the Muppets’ histories. Noor, one of the Muppet twins, is scared of loud noises, just as many Rohingya children are today, as gunfire resounds in their memories.
Sesame Workshop has long sought to champion diversity and social justice. Characters on Sesame Street have had autism, HIV and Down syndrome. They have been homeless and struggled with the stigma of having an incarcerated parent.