Life in the Jamtoli Camp

Fatima, (not her real name), and her family are sitting in their shelter entrance and are willing to share their story. They, like most of the displaced people in this camp, have been forced to flee their homes and have experienced great trauma in Myanmar. Compared with many who escaped with only the clothes on their backs, Fatima had some funds to pay someone to build her eight by ten-foot shelter. She is thankful for this as she has no husband or older son to construct the donated building materials into a “home” for them. Fatima, (in pink), lives here with the responsibility of caring for her elderly mother, her three daughters and two young sons. She is not sure if her husband is alive or dead.

Her eldest daughter, aged 20 lives with Fatima. She was married for just 18 days when the soldiers attacked their village and killed her husband. Because she seemed pale, we asked Fatima’s daughter if she was unwell. She replied (through our translator) that she is mostly very sad but also that she had received medication for influenza at one of the camp clinics. Several of the younger children have received medication for fever and cough. Fatima herself has been diagnosed with typhoid and Is getting on-going treatment with inter-venous medication. The Jamtoli camp (one of many camps) is blessed with several health stations. They are essential as is evidenced by the long line-ups of patients waiting for attention.

Nothing can prevent the rains from coming into the shelters as most of the shelters are built on hills. Fatima’s room/home is set up with a bamboo shelf covering the back wall so that their clothes and bag of rice would not be damaged by water. They have no beds and sleep on the floor on a large orange tarp. When it rains, even this will not keep them dry as the water runs onto the floor from outside.

Fatima and her family are thankful that they are managing to have two meals most days thanks to the local people in Bangladesh, multiple government and UN agencies and NGO’s (non-government organizations), thanks to the many donations that have been received from all over the world. Cooking takes place over a traditional “cooking pit” – a hole in the ground used for cooking, with firewood as fuel. A concern is that with so many people needing firewood, deforestation will become even more severe.

Fatima’s family shares a latrine with numerous other families but it is already overflowing so they now use a bucket and discard their waste some distance away. Latrines are dug twenty feet deep but fill up in ten to twenty days due to the large number of people using them. Although they are moved regularly to cover newly dug pits, there are not enough to meet the demand.

This photo below shows a group of people getting water from a tube well – the person on the left is wet and clean after a splash bath! Fatima and her family are using a tube well some distance away from their shelter but we hear that the water level is dropping and some wells are now producing less water. Fatima shared that a new well near her shelter will be activated once a concrete ring is obtained and placed to contain the overflow of water.

On a lighter note, when we asked what the children do for play, Fatima said that they just go outside to hang out with other children when it isn’t raining.  We saw a few that had created some toys of their own. You can see some of these if you look very closely at the photo below. The “playground” is very muddy but the children don’t seem to mind!

Overall, there is much concern and support for the over half million displaced Rohingya people. It is a logistics challenge to coordinate the many organizations that are present and active throughout all the camps. The government and UN agencies are working hard to identify gaps and overlaps and to find the most effective ways meet the numerous needs in the areas of food security, health and sanitation, prevention of gender based violence, shelter, nutrition, education, child protection…the list of needs goes on and on. To compound the issue, even now there are many more refugees arriving daily.

Some good news: We are happy to share, and praise God, that the proposal we have been working on has been accepted by Canadian Food Grains Bank and by Government Affairs Canada.