Mother-of-two Ismat Ara* (42), lives with her family in a refugee camp after fleeing Myanmar.
Navigating life as one of hundreds of thousands of refugees in the world’s biggest camp is challenging beyond belief, making Ismat’s resilience all the more remarkable.
Ismat is the mother of two young girls, and was forced to flee her home in Myanmar almost eight years ago as part of the influx of Rohingya Muslims to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.
Today more than 1.1 million Rohingya refugees are living in 33 camps – including over 500,000 children – in the world’s largest refugee settlement.
Families there are facing emergency levels of malnutrition. Alliance2015 member Concern Worldwide has been implementing an Integrated Nutrition Programme within the camps, operating through 12 Integrated Nutrition Facilities.
These nutrition centres serve as a vital platform for the treatment for malnutrition, including growth monitoring and promotion, infant and young child feeding counselling. They also provide therapeutic and supplementary feeding for acutely malnourished children and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
These programmes contribute to reducing the mortality and morbidity among boys and girls under-five, pregnant and breastfeeding women, and other groups in vulnerable situations among the Rohingya population in Cox’s Bazar.
The days when Ismat and her family owned their own home surrounded by trees in Myanmar are a distant memory to her and her husband who, at 55, is paralysed and unable to work.
When they arrived at the camp, she and her husband had a one-year-old daughter. Tragically, she had experienced the loss of two more children during pregnancy before the birth of her daughter Ashmita*.
With her husband unable to support his wife and children due to his medical condition, Ismat struggled to keep her young family going. Little Ashmita became severely malnourished.
Support from volunteers at a nutrition centre run by Concern Worldwide meant that Ismat was able to get Ashmita the treatment she needed.
“Volunteers came to our houses and talked with us. After that, I came to the nutrition centre and collected the token”, Ismat said.
“After attending the health session, they took measurements of my child’s weight and height. They identified my child as severely malnourished. At admission, my child’s weight was 3.5kg at six months of age, while now my child weighs 4.2kg.”
Ismat did all she could to bring her baby back to health, including engaging with the team at the nutrition centre and educating herself on the best ways to nurse Ashmita, while also guarding against disease entering their home.
“They taught me how to stay hygienic and advised me to give my children one pack of ready-to-use supplementary food twice a day. My child’s health has really improved since. She used to cry a lot, sleep very little, and always seemed very anxious. Now, she is a lot better.”
The difficulty of daily life in the camp
Although Ismat has found some peace of mind and the immediate threat of hunger has eased, the constant insecurity within the camp continues to weigh heavily on her each day.
Cox’s Bazar is prone to flooding during Bangladesh’s monsoon season between June and October, while the cramped conditions of the camp also leave these structures vulnerable to fires.
Between January 2021 and December 2022 alone, there were over 220 fires in the camps. A blaze in January 2024, dubbed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation “the fire the world ignored”, destroyed 800 homes and left over 7,000 Rohingya homeless. Many Rohingya have lost their homes multiple times since the crisis began in 2017.
Crime remains a concern in Cox’s Bazar, with incidents of robbery and kidnapping not uncommon among the camp population.
Ismat’s determination to make the best possible life for her family shines through, but her struggles – and the struggles of thousands of other mothers in the camps – continue.
“I want to feed my children good food. I want to raise [them] properly,” she insists, defiantly.
“[But] my daughter only has two pairs of clothes, and I can’t afford to buy her any more. I use an old mosquito net, which has a lot of holes. I only get rice, oil, lentils, eggs, onion, and garlic. This is not sufficient for us to meet our needs.
“We cannot buy any food. For example, yesterday we ate rice with egg and lentils as we cannot afford meat.
“Our food rations have been reduced. Each person now receives just 13 kilograms of rice, and we get even less lentils and oil than we used to. I constantly worry about my child’s safety – if she goes outside, she could be kidnapped. And I wonder how long it will take for my children to fully recover and grow healthy.”
*Names have been changed for security reasons
