By Santosh Digal
Cox Bozar, Bangladesh, Dec. 11, 2018: Caritas Bangladesh and the Jesuit Relief Service (JRS) have been providing psycho-social support to Rohingya children.
One of the compelling sights in all the 30 makeshift camps in Cox’s Bazar is that of little children and youth filling the camps. Their sad and pain-stricken faces are enough to reveal how much pain, stress and psychological wounds they are carrying inside.
The UNICEF figure puts the total number of children in these camps at 360,000 out of a total of 706,000 newly arrived refugees, including 6000 unaccompanied and separated children. That is more than 52% of the total number of Rohingya refugees who are now sheltered in these sprawling camps since last August 2017.
After a spot survey and study of the Rohingya refugee crisis in Cox’s Bazar in October 2017 by a JRS team, it was decided that JRS and Caritas Bangladesh would reach out to Rohingya children and youth to provide quality PSS (psychosocial support) by setting up a few CFSs (Child Friendly Spaces) in the camps, Father V. Raj, JRS ministry, Bangladesh, told Matters India.
PSS is a special kind of service in humanitarian settings that aims to restore as well as rebuild in the affected children his or her sense of ‘psycho-social well-being’. A Child Friendly Space program is thus designed with such activities and play items which mitigate stress and promote ‘psycho-social well-being’ in traumatized children, he said.
Accordingly JRS in collaboration with Caritas Bangladesh is currently running six CFSs in UU zone at Balukhali-Kutupalong Expansion Camp.
Each CFS caters to a total of 350 children and youth per week. They come into the Child Friendly Spaces according to four age groups, namely 4 – 6, 6 – 9, 9 – 12, & 12 – 16, and happily participate in all activities: playing with toys, drawing, singing, action-based rhymes and songs. These six CFSs are each christened as Hope, Love, Harmony, Grace, Joy and Peace, to help children imbibe these values as well alongside.
Each of the CFSs is staffed by one woman facilitator from the host community and one woman caregiver from the Rohingya refugee community. Besides, a team of psychosocial support case workers and counsellors is also made available to provide assistance to children and youth in need of special attention. These CFSs are literally like little oases in the 30 vast and cramped camps!
Drawn from the host community, the 26 CFS ‘facilitators’ and field practioners are mostly young women full of goodwill and generosity but they lack skills and capacities required to serve in a CFS set up. To fill this gap, JRS has been organizing appropriate capacity building training as well.
May 2018 was a memorable month for the 26 CFS facilitators and PSS team members at Cox’s Bazar. They all had a week long unique training in Clown Science Skills by Mayra and Jaume, a Spanish couple, who are specialized in Clown Science Skills and conduct training across the globe. Knowing how much good this Clown Science exercises can do to mitigate pain and stress from the lives of the conflict affected children in the Rohingya refugee camps, Jesuit Father Stan Fernandes, JRS Regional Director, took this timely initiative to plan this novel Clown Science training for the CFS team at Rohingya refugee camp.
Thus, the trainer couple, Jaume and Mayera, of ‘Clown Science Dreams’ was flown down to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, to conduct this 5 day training from 5thto10th May, 2018. This training of trainers’ workshop(TOT) was well received and appreciated by the CFS facilitators as the variety of participatory exercises helped to bring out the ‘play child’ or ‘clown character’ in each of them and enabled them to laugh at themselves and at their own hilarious actions.
‘After participating in these wonderfully devised clownery exercises we ourselves deeply feel relieved from our stresses and pains of our past. It has certainly helped us to connect with our deeper self and overcome some unresolved fears and hurts in our life,’ said Andrew Avijit Das, one of the participants.
‘The training has given us many new ideas. Now we too could be creative and use different exercises with our children, which would not require any extra materials and toys. This way we would be able to avoid monotony and engage the children in variety of activities which we have learnt here in this training’, said Ms Anzuma Begum, facilitator at CFS 4 – Peace – in UU Zone, Kutupalong camp.
More than 700000 Rohingya refugees are residing in 20 makeshift camps in Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh.
Caritas Bangladesh is one of the reputed NGOs of Bangladesh, the social service wing of Catholic Church that responded to the Rohingya crisis as soon as the influx of the Rohingya began in late August 2017.
Caritas Bangladesh dispatched an experienced team of social workers, educationists, crisis managers to immediately reach out to the tens of thousands of fleeing, wounded, and traumatized Rohingya refugees as they desperately streamed into Bangladesh from across Myanmar border.
In the first months of the crisis, Caritas Bangladesh was mainly engaged in distribution of food, relief materials, setting up of tents, arranging for WASH (water and sanitation for hygiene) and engaging in site development works. In the last few months, over 85,000 Rohingya refugees have benefited from the service of Caritas Bangladesh.
JRS and Cartias Bangladesh’s work for the Roihngyas is following the Pope Francis’s emotional meeting with a group of them in Dhaka during his visit to the country in November 2017 and his deep compassion for this minority and most persecuted Muslim community in a corner of the world, said Father Raj.
“The efforts and services of Caritas Bangladesh and JRS are to show that the church’s broad view and concern for all irrespective religious affiliations just like Pope Francis wants us to do,” he added.