Healthcare for the Rohingya people: traumatised by violence, trapped in squalor

Mohammed Saleh is a 17 year old Rohingya boy who used to live in Buthidaung, a town in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, until his family was forced to flee ethnic violence and take refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh in September 2017.1

Some 16 months later, he is living with his parents and four siblings in a hut made of plastic sheets and bamboo posts among a crowded warren of shacks known as Camp 1E. It is one of the largest camps in Cox’s Bazar, the region of Bangladesh that now hosts, indefinitely, more than 700 000 refugee Rohingya men, women, and children who have left Myanmar.

Saleh is one of 40 young Rohingya who volunteer on a programme launched this autumn by the humanitarian charity Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde) to teach camp residents how to keep clean and avoid getting sick.