More than 82 million people worldwide are on the run, half of them women and girls. For the United Nations Refugee Day, we let a picture speak for you
Who do we see We see a woman in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. She is a Rohingya, a member of a Muslim ethnic group that is oppressed and persecuted in neighboring Myanmar. More than 870,000 people have fled because they feared for their lives. Almost 600,000 women, children and men now live in Kutupalong, which is now the largest refugee camp in the world.
On June 20, “World Refugee Day”, the United Nations calls for solidarity with refugees. Half of the 82 million people around the world who are forced to leave their homes are women and girls. They are fleeing political persecution, civil war and environmental destruction, poverty and violence, the threat of “honor killings” and forced marriage, genital mutilation and rape. More than 40 million women and girls. This woman in our picture is one of them. Let us imagine that we are in their place, at least for the time it takes to read a few lines.
United Nations Refugee Day: More than 82 million people are on the run
She sleeps in a tent, the ground is uneven, she has cleared away stones. She lies on a thin mat, it’s hot, she sweats. The tent offers little protection, a wall of fabric between her and the world. When was the last time she was able to wash? Does she ever lose the feeling of smelly? Does it become indifferent to her? How should she go to the bathroom, especially at night? She has to look for a place in the dark, somewhere behind mountains of rubbish, where she is as unobserved as possible. She is afraid. Always. What does she use to clean herself up? What if she’s on her period? Perhaps she puts scraps of cloth in the only laundry she owns and cleans it up in a river or puddle. The fabric is rough and stained, it rubs against the skin. But she has no ointment and when the cramps come there is no relief. She lies in the tent and massages her stomach and waits for the pain to subside. Mosquitos plague her, she scratches the bites with blood. Your hair is dull. She is afraid of the big spiders that crawl into her tent. She is thirsty. Your child is thirsty. And there are the images in her head that she only let go of when she manages to sleep. Usually she is too exhausted to sleep. How long does it take before she loses the feeling of being a woman?
Who will take care of them? Who is talking to her? Who will help her deal with disturbing, traumatic experiences? We all know women who were victims of war violence and, perhaps, kept silent about it for a lifetime. It’s our mothers, our grandmothers. It is the women who once lived in the house next door and fled political persecution. The teachers were at the school that we attended or taught at the university that we also went to. Who sewed clothes for our mothers. Or handing bread rolls over the counter. So let’s be aware that when we look at this woman in Bangladesh, we see nothing but a damn familiar fate. Tanja Kokoska
