‘I’m spending Christmas with 655,000 Rohingya refugees’

I am writing this from Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, a coastal district on the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar. I'm spending Christmas here, along with more than 655,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled Rakhine State in Southwestern Myanmar into Bangladesh.

Christmas Day here will be very different than it would have been back home in Limerick. Although it’s winter in Bangladesh, we are in the cool dry season, which usually lasts about two or three months. The average minimum temperature during the day is 21.5°C and there is very little, rain, if any.

Acquiring an authentic Christmas tree is way down our list of priorities; palm trees tend to predominate, and they don’t lend themselves well to being brought indoors. So far we have come up with a small houseplant and some tin foil. We will have to see how far our imagination will take us from there.

I’ll certainly miss spending time with friends and family back home but my priority is ensuring that me and my colleagues at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) do the most we can to respond to this humanitarian emergency.

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My role here is emergency coordinator, which means I manage the medical work carried out by MSF teams in some of the 24 medical posts and hospitals MSF has set up in Bangladesh, to ensure we respond to the health and humanitarian needs as quickly and effectively as possible.

Since this crisis started we have massively scaled-up our response, with around 2,300 people now working for MSF in Cox’s Bazar District. We run 24 different health facilities, where we conducted almost 143,000 patient consultations by the end of November 2017.

When the latest phase of this crisis began on August 25th, our teams were treating people for gunshots, blast and shrapnel injuries, and were hearing story after story of horrific violence taking place on the other side of the border in Rakhine State.

Here in Bangladesh, the Rohingya people live in overcrowded camps and makeshift settlements, and access to proper sanitation and clean water is still a major issue. Right now, we are mainly treating patients in our health facilities with respiratory infections and diarrhoeal diseases, mostly caused by poor living conditions.

We are also seeing a continued increase in the number of measles cases, and the emergence of acute jaundice cases as well as diphtheria. Vaccine-preventable diseases show how little access the Rohingya population in Myanmar had to routine healthcare.

MSF also plans to open a 60-bed inpatient department (IPD) close to Moynarghona, a makeshift settlement, by New Year’s Eve. The IPD will have an emergency room, and will offer services for pregnant women and children with severe acute malnutrition (inpatient therapeutic feeding centre), as well as general paediatric and neonatology wards. Mental health services will also be available for all our patients.

One of our projects in Cox’s Bazar provides medical care across three makeshift settlements for a total of 101,300 people, about the same population as Limerick. It is striking to think of the contrast between those back home who will be sitting around their Christmas trees and the people here, who have little beyond their bamboo and tarpaulin shelters and their jerrycans for collecting water.

On Christmas Day, internet connection permitting, I will have a Skype call with my family to send them my wishes. Since we are in the middle of an emergency, we will probably be working on the day, so we won’t have much time to celebrate. But at minimum, we will have a team dinner in the evening.

Christmas is one of my favourite times of year because everyone is at home with plenty of opportunities to catch up. But this year, my focus is on responding to this emergency. The public health situation here is extremely precarious, the needs of the refugees are huge, and I want to make sure we do our very best to help them.

[ msf.ie ]