Rahima has lived her entire life in a Rohingya refugee camp – for her, education is the ticket to a normal life
Rahima is among only a few Rohingya refugee girls to have completed the Bangladeshi equivalent of high school, a feat she could only achieve by sneaking past the camp’s checkpoints and bribing Bangladeshi public school officials for a placement
At an age when many young Rohingya women have children, Rahima Akter has other plans. From the refugee camp in southern Bangladesh where she was born, Akter, a 19-year-old with a confident smile who goes by the name Khushi, says she aspires to become the most educated Rohingya woman in the world.
Akter was born and has lived her whole life in the camp, a makeshift settlement of bamboo and tarpaulin huts spread out over rolling hills that were once protected forestland.
Her parents were among a wave of 250,000 Rohingya Muslims who escaped forced labour, religious persecution and violent attacks from Buddhist mobs in Myanmar during the early 1990s. She sees education as her ticket out of the camp.
“If we take education then we will be able to lead our life as a life,” she said.
Akter has supplemented her family’s income by working as a translator for aid groups and journalists responding to a new influx of Rohingya refugees who have flooded the camp since August 2017, when the Myanmar military and Buddhist mobs began “clearance operations” against Rohingya in retaliation for insurgent attacks on security posts in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.