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Fishermen to the Rescue: Refugees in Indonesia

Indonesian FarmersIndonesia is estimated to currently host 9,991 refugees and 3,158 asylum seekers, with 57% from Afghanistan, 10% from Somalia and 5% from Myanmar. During 2022 alone, more than 2,000 people are thought to have taken the dangerous journey across the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal in the hope of reaching Indonesia. In 2022, almost 200 individuals reportedly died on this journey. But despite this tragedy, there is an underlying story of hope and humanity from the people of Indonesia. A report from the United Nations showed that in the last six weeks of 2022 alone, Indonesians helped save 472 people from four boats.

In a collaborative effort between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Indonesian Government, other U.N. agencies and local people, the country has attempted to protect refugees and asylum seekers by identifying solutions for their situation. This has included provisions for emergency assistance and attention to the specific needs of individuals arriving on their shores.

Rohingya Refugees in Indonesia

A huge proportion of those refugees reaching Indonesia are Rohingya men, women and children. In 2017, nearly 800,000 Rohingya fled persecution from their homeland of Myanmar, where they experienced segregation, discrimination and removal of their citizenship. Since then, thousands of refugees make the perilous journey to reach Muslim-majority regions like Malaysia, Bangladesh and Indonesia. While residing in these Bangladeshi refugee camps, the Rohingya face overcrowded, unsanitary and crime-ridden conditions, which is resulting in greater numbers taking the extremely dangerous trip across the sea, where the likelihood of death increases.

Since November 2022, there were 918 Rohingya refugees registered in Indonesia, in comparison to 180 in the entirety of 2021. In a case from December 2022, over 180 Rohingya refugees arrived in a wooden boat on the shore of western Indonesia, supposedly from Bangladesh, including a pregnant woman and children. These journeys are made in poor-quality boats and often increase between November and April when the seas are supposedly calmer. The UNHCR described 2022 as “one of the deadliest years at sea in almost a decade for the Rohingya” which is predicted to continue into 2023.

Generosity of Indonesian Fishermen

Despite the increasing numbers of refugees making this journey, there is an underlying story of hope and kindness in the actions of some Indonesian fishermen. At the end of 2022, Indonesian fishing crews were praised for their part in rescuing over 200 people adrift at sea, in what has since been described by the UNHCR as an “act of humanity.” In doing so, they have provided urgent medical care for survivors suffering from exhaustion and dehydration. The compassion of these Indonesian fishermen has, according to UNHCR Indonesia Representative Ann Maymann, undoubtedly helped to save people from “certain death, ending [the] torturous ordeals for many desperate people.”

In a case from late June 2020, 99 Rohingya asylum seekers arrived on the shore of Aceh after being stranded at sea for more than 120 days, and local fishermen from nearby villages were quick to help them to safety. The Rohingya have been welcomed by the Indonesian people, even being invited to participate in festivities celebrating the 75th anniversary of Indonesian independence.

There have been numerous explanations as to why the people of Indonesia, particularly the Acehnese residents, have demonstrated such acceptance and humility toward those in need, when so many others have refused to act. For example, the Acehnese people abide by the customary maritime law called Panglima Laot, which obliges all fishermen in the region to help those in distress at sea. This is a central part of village life in coastal communities across Indonesia. Similarly, they honor the cultural tradition of Peumulia Jamee, which encourages them to demonstrate kindness and hospitality, particularly towards children.

Supporting the Humanitarian Effort

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has supported the Indonesian Government along with their humanitarian partners, by aiding the huge numbers of Rohingya refugees arriving on the coast. This includes provisions for water, health care and COVID-19 testing. Moreover, the IOM has worked with local authorities to obtain approval to transfer refugees to a new site in Peunteut, Lhokseumawe, which will greatly improve safety and security. The assistance provided by the IOM to the Rohingya refugees is funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) and the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO).

Steps are being taken to help the Indonesian people assist those arriving on their shores, but it is indicative of a much larger problem. Nevertheless, Indonesian fishermen are aiding refugees by showing kindness.

– Bethan Marsden
Photo: Flickr

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Human Trafficking in Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp

Human Trafficking in Malawi's Dzaleka Refugee Camp“The [human trafficking] situation was much worse than we first envisaged,” says Maxwell Matewere from the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Malawi. “I even witnessed a kind of Sunday market, where people come to buy children who were then exploited in situations of forced labor and prostitution,” he says to the U.N. The place in question is Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp. Created in 1994, the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR)  built the camp to accommodate 10,000 refugees escaping war and violence from neighboring countries. It now houses more than 50,000 refugees with even more refugees forced to return to the camp because of the government’s decree. The UNODC and Malawian Police Service have uncovered instances of human trafficking in Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp.

Human Trafficking in the Refugee Camp

Human trafficking in Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp takes many forms. Traffickers force men into hard labor while women and girls face sexual exploitation inside the camp or traffickers move them to the city or other countries in southern Africa. Traffickers even recruit children for farm labor and domestic work. Oftentimes, traffickers require refugees to pay off a debt accumulated from “being smuggled into Malawi.” Traffickers then force the victims into labor or prostitution to pay off the debt. The UNODC suspects that the camp may even be a transitory point for larger international human trafficking networks.

Why Human Trafficking Persists

Since the discovery of human trafficking in Dzaleka, the UNODC has taken measures to dismantle the organizations, identify and rescue victims as well as prosecute the perpetrators. However, several factors make dismantling human trafficking networks exceptionally difficult.

  • Victims are Afraid of Testifying. According to the Malawian Police Service, prosecution is difficult because many victims are afraid to testify in court. According to the U.N., the primary reason is that victims fear that traffickers may target them or their families. In some cases, victims related to the trafficker will object to testifying out of a remaining “sense of love or loyalty.” Furthermore, victims are sometimes reluctant to cooperate because they do not trust the officials.
  • Distrust of Law Enforcement. Many victims have difficulty trusting law enforcement. Not only does this make victims reluctant to testify but this also makes it more difficult to identify and rescue victims. According to Deutsche Welle, the basis of distrust comes from a history of corruption among Malawian officials. As Caleb Ng’ombo from People Serving Girls at Risk (PSGR) said, “We still have high levels of corruption, and so most of the trafficking cases are thriving… The people entrusted to do their job cannot do it because someone is paying them under the table.” With an underlying sense of distrust, victims from Malawi’s refugee camps may doubt the intentions of undercover police officers attempting a rescue, complicating the process.
  • Untrained Staff. Upon the discovery of human trafficking in Malawi’s refugee camp, the UNODC held an initial training at Dzaleka to train the staff on identifying and preventing human trafficking. According to Matewere, “There’s very little knowledge of human trafficking among the camp staff.” In fact, after initial training, some members experienced feelings of guilt when they realized the prevalence of trafficking within the camp. Now, the camp has implemented the Protocol on Trafficking in Persons in order to effectively prevent and respond to incidences of human trafficking.

Anti-Trafficking Measures

Despite the difficulty of dismantling human trafficking in Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp, the UNODC and UNHCR are determined in their goals. Not only have they implemented new training and anti-trafficking procedures, but they have also coached 28 camp officials who will train their colleagues in turn. Furthermore, with U.N. intervention, victims now reside in safe houses instead of being placed in jail alongside perpetrators. With these steps in place, the UNODC has rescued more than 90 victims from the Dzaleka Refugee Camp as of June 2022.

Numerous NGOs are also working on the ground in Malawi. People Serving Girls at Risk (PSGR), for example, cares for women and girls who have faced trafficking or exploitation and handles more than 200 cases a year.

An undercover policeman trained by the UNODC identified and rescued a 16-year-old Congolese girl from forced prostitution. Trafficked at just 10 years old, she came to the camp in 2009 after leaving the DRC due to conflict and violence. At first, she did not trust the officer, but, eventually, he gained her trust. “That evening, I had been beaten by one of my clients for refusing to have sex due to a cut that was bleeding. I was in pain and it was visible. The officer was friendly and he took me to a safe house,” she said to the U.N. Now, she is taking computer literacy lessons and hopes to reunite with her family.

Looking Ahead

Although the path to eradicating human trafficking in Malawi’s Dzaleka Refugee Camp is complex, progress is visible. Hopefully, with the combined efforts of the U.N. and the government, Malawi can eradicate human trafficking in the refugee camp.

– Emilie Zhang
Photo: Flickr

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Resource Distribution in Refugee Camps

Refugee CampsRefugee camps house people who had to migrate as a result of unsafe conditions in their home countries. Displaced people hve to leave everything behind in order to find safety. Recently, the United Nations reported that two refugee camps in Ethiopia were on the verge of running out of food. The refugees, dependent on organizations to bring them that food, were at risk of starvation.

What is Happening in Ethiopia?

Conflict has enveloped the Tigray region of Ethiopia. In November 2020, The Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the government began fighting. Two refugee camps in this region containing 24,000 refugees recently could not access aid. About 170 food trucks transporting the necessary food supplies ended up in the Afar region and were unable to move. Without these resources, the refugees will likely starve.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is working to relocate the refugees. They are also trying to ensure safe travel out of the camp by discussing the issues with Tigrayan authorities.

The Increase of Refugees

The amount of refugees and displaced people around the world is higher than ever. As of 2020, the world had the largest refugee population ever recorded. About 25 million people experienced displacement, including 11 million children. This has only made conditions in refugee camps worse, as overcrowding compounds with a lack of resources.

The Problems with Refugee Camps

Displaced people who come to live in refugee camps often have nothing. They have no income, few to no possessions and no food. They rely entirely on what humanitarian organizations can provide for them. Unfortunately, what organizations can provide often falls short of what is necessary to survive. Two main problems that refugee camps deal with are inadequate food and water. The malnutrition and dehydration that occurs in refugee camps increase the risk of disease, like diarrhea and cholera, for the people living in the camps. Improving amounts and access to food and water will help to improve health conditions at refugee camps.

The UNHCR recommends at least 2,100 calories and 20 liters of water per person per day. However, in 2006, refugees in Tanzania received only 1,460 calories per person per day. A 1987 study of a Thailand camp showed that 30% of the camp’s population suffered from malnutrition. The UNHCR also estimates that more than half of the refugee camps across the world are unable to provide refugees with the 20 liters of water a day that they need.

Part of the problem with water is that it must also be accessible to all people in the camps. One way the UNHCR aspires to provide this is by ensuring there are water taps within 200 meters of every household. This way, individuals do not have to travel long distances to retrieve water, burning the already limited amount of calories they have.

Ways to Improve

There are a few things that can improve living conditions at refugee camps around the world. One important way is to begin to place a higher emphasis on making camps a long-term solution. When a refugee experiences displacement for more than five years, the UNHCR calls their situation a protracted refugee situation. Currently, two-thirds of refugees live in a protracted situation and the time they spend in this situation increased to 20 years. This means that more people live in camps for longer periods of time.

If displaced people are living in camps for such extended periods of time, then they are no longer temporary placements. This translates into a need to make refugee camps more permanent and more equipped to support people actually living there. The construction of more permanent housing, rather than tents, and fully functioning toilets and showers would help achieve permanent living conditions.

Camps can also allow refugees to set up businesses like barbershops and fruit stands. Some camps in Bangladesh currently allow refugees to farm patches of land to grow fruits, vegetables and spices. This is another way to increase food production and better conditions in the camps.

Looking to the Future

The struggle will continue to ensure that people living in refugee camps have enough resources to adequately survive and have livable conditions in camps. Transporting goods becomes especially difficult in war-ravaged regions. Roads are unreliable and food trucks are vulnerable to attack. Displaced persons, however, often have nowhere else to go and deserve for the world to put in its best effort toward helping them. This can begin with creating refugee camps as more permanent establishments, as cities and homes in and of themselves.

– Alessandra Heitmann
Photo: Flickr

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Sesame Street’s Rohingya Muppets Help Children

Sesame Street's Rohingya MuppetsSesame Street is developing two Rohingya muppets to help refugee children overcome trauma. Sesame Street aims to address the effects of poverty by fostering access to education. Poverty affects all aspects of life. Children who live in poverty suffer from many physical, intellectual and emotional complications. Child stunting, for example, is a result of nutrient-deficient diets, repeated infection and a lack of psychosocial stimulation in the first years of a child’s life. This has dire long-term outcomes for children, including impaired intellectual development. Sesame Street’s Rohingya muppets aim to improve the intellectual development of Rohingya children, which directly affects education, and in turn, poverty.

Stunting and Malnutrition in Rohingya Children

The Rohingya people are a stateless Muslim minority group who have lived in a state of flux, between Myanmar and Bangladesh, since they were forced to flee Myanmar. They were violently persecuted by the Myanmar military, an instance of ethnic cleansing. Close to 800,000 Rohingya refugees have escaped to Bangladesh. It is common for refugees to live in refugee camps within Bangladesh.

A group of refugee camps, located in Cox’s Bazar, was the subject of a 2017-2018 study on the rates of stunting and malnutrition in Rohingya children. The study found that the rate of stunting “dropped from 44% to 38% in the main camp.” Although it is positive that the rate of childhood stunting declined, the rate of childhood stunting still remained dangerously close to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) critical health emergency threshold of 40%.

Additionally, the rate of acute malnutrition dropped from close to 20% to nearly 10%. Childhood deaths declined. The rate of diarrhea, caused in some instances by dehydration or bacterial infection, also declined. Nonetheless, these rates remain too high to relieve concerns and the situation is still described as dire.

Malnutrition affects a child’s developing brain, impacting education and reducing the ability of a person to lift themselves out of poverty.

Sesame Street’s Rohingya Muppets

The majority of humanitarian funding is deployed to address acute effects of poverty like stunting and malnutrition. Sesame Street aims to address the effects of poverty by focusing on education and intellectual development. Sherrie Westin is the president of social impact for Sesame Workshop and she identified that “less than 3% of all aid is used for education.”

Sesame Street’s Rohingya muppets consist of two characters, Noor Yasmin and Aziz, to connect with Rohingya children on an intellectual and emotional level. Westin feels that without intervention by Sesame Street, Rohingya children risk growing up unable to read and write or do simple math.

Westin cited scientific research as the basis for her concern. Similar to the way inadequate dietary nutrition and disease lead to physical stunting, stress and trauma stunt brain development. Sesame Street aims to address the effects of poverty by providing emotional and intellectual support to Rohingya children who have endured trauma.

BRAC’s Humanitarian Play Lab

In Bangladesh, Sesame Street partnered with BRAC. BRAC’s Humanitarian Play Labs are designed to help children learn through play and recover from emotional trauma in the process. BRAC designs its play labs to resemble settings that are familiar to the children it works with. In Bangladesh, this means that Rohingya children are surrounded by “motifs and paintings significant to Rohingya culture.”

Sesame Street’s Rohingya muppets reflect an integral part of BRAC’s approach. Children relate best to characters that they can identify with and they flourish in settings that are familiar and comfortable. BRAC’s success speaks for itself. Close to 90% of the kids that BRAC works with complete the fifth grade of schooling.

Sesame Street Addresses Rohingya Poverty

While the humanitarian crisis among Rohingya refugees is ongoing, recognition of the long-term effects of stress and trauma on intellectual development is crucial to lifting the Rohingya out of poverty. Education alleviates poverty and negating the effects of trauma will allow for proper intellectual development to take on educational endeavors. Sesame Street aims to address the effects of poverty by focusing its attention on the intellectual development of Rohingya children.

– Taylor Pangman
Photo: Flickr

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Torch Tile Addresses Housing for Morian Refugees

University of Southern California (USC) has a course called “Innovation In Engineering and Design for Global Crises.” As part of the class, a team of USC undergraduates visited the Moria refugee camp to learn from and engage with the displaced peoples about their experiences. The need for more livable housing was the impetus for students’ project development. The result was Torch Tile — an adaptable, low-cost, user-friendly solution to the sheltering challenges of the displaced peoples in Moria.

Living Conditions of the Sprawling Moria Refugee Camp

On the eastern coast of the Greek island of Lesvos, is the Moria refugee camp. Moria is the largest refugee camp in Europe. It is the landing pad for the daily stream of refugees fleeing from Afghanistan, Syria and Turkey via a harrowing boat trip across a six-mile stretch of the Mediterranean Sea. The camp was originally designed to shelter 3,000 people. Currently, it is overflowing with over 13,000 refugees.

Tents sprawling the foothills surrounding Moria have constituted as impermanent shelters or “homes” for these refugees. Some asylum-seekers have even established residence with flowers, hand-made tandoori ovens and power cords for hijacking electricity. Despite these additions, the tents are no match for the temperature swings of Greece’s climate. In the summers, heat waves can break 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Winters on the island bring lasting snow from the sea moisture. Asylum-seekers can expect to wait a year before their asylum applications are processed ensuring they will experience both extreme weather conditions.

In the past, asylum-seekers have employed cardboard and tarps in an attempt to block out the extreme cold and heat. Increasing the temperature a few degrees led to refugees living in environments with dank, humid air that condenses on the tent inner walls. Running water is only available inside of Moria, and these moist environments put asylum-seekers at risk for health complications. Many suffer from pneumonia and heat stroke, which there are limited resources with which to treat.

In stepped the Torch Tile.

The Product

After over thirty different prototypes and dozens of hours of overnight testing, the team created the Torch Tile. The users’ needs were at the forefront of the creation’s design. The product comes in 36 or 55 sq. ft. sheets that can be laid side-by-side (like tiles) to fully surround a tent. The sturdy, lightweight and flexible material of the tiles is Aluminet.

The knitted screen-like material allows for airflow, reduces indoor humidity and lets light into the tent for visibility. Secured using zip ties and draped over the tent ceiling, the Torch Tile cools the interior by deflecting outdoor heat and light on warm days. Similarly, in winter weather one layers a tarp over the Torch Tile to warm the tent by 5-15 degrees by reflecting body heat inward.

Then, the team founded Torch Global Inc., a nonprofit currently fundraising to mass produce tiles for distribution. The goal is to provide tiles for those in Moria and for the unsheltered populations in Los Angeles.

Protecting Homes during the Coronavirus Pandemic

The distribution of Torch Tiles has been paramount to enabling people to self-isolate during the coronavirus pandemic. One Torch Tile user from Los Angeles shared, “I have COVID and can’t isolate because my tent is too hot. This product will keep my tent cooler, so I can actually stay inside and isolate.” Recently Torch Global Inc. fundraised $13,000 for the ordering of 1,500 more Torch Tiles — protection for 1,500 more people in their homes.

The collective, global mobilization and coordination of resources necessary to resolve the refugee crisis in Greece is unlikely to occur soon enough. Even when it is, situations and conflicts will likely displace more people in the future, and asylum-seekers living in tents will be inevitable. By thermo-regulating shelters, Torch Tiles alleviate one aspect of refugees’ vulnerability and address the downstream effects of displacement.

– Tricia Lim Castro
Photo: Flickr