Half a million people. In one month. It’s the world’s fastest developing refugee emergency and children are at the heart of it – 60 per cent of the 519,000 Rohingya refugees now in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, are children. But beyond the astonishing numbers are heartbreaking individual children’s stories. Of loss, suffering,… Read more →←
Topic: Children in emergencies
“We all want to go to school,” 11-year old Fatima* tells me, talking on behalf of all eight girls in the wooden hut. After listening to the horror of their stories, it’s not an answer I necessarily expected. I’m in a displaced persons camp, on the outskirts of Maiduguri town, Borno’s state capital, in northeast Nigeria. A… Read more →←
What’s the situation? A humanitarian crisis of near biblical proportions. Since 25 August, 515,000 Rohingya have crossed from Myanmar to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. They tell stories of villages being burned, family members being executed, children killed, women raped. It’s truly a children’s emergency. A staggering 60% of new… Read more →←
“Mommy, don’t cry,” says four-year-old Adriana Joseph, with tears welling in her eyes, as the overflowing river rushes dangerously under their feet and into their house. “The hurricane will calm down,” she adds trying to comfort her mum. But her mother, Abigail Walsh, broke down in tears. It was 8pm and Hurricane Maria had… Read more →←
In Grand Turk Island, the capital island of the Turks and Caicos, 14-year-old Danessa Estime writes rap lyrics in her notebook about the night Hurricane Irma battered the island: “Wake up, wake up! But 5:32? Why the hell am I waking up at 5:32? Ma, what’s going on? What do you want me to do? Did something happen to be up at 5:32? She… Read more →←
When I lost all my family at the age of 15 I decided to leave the Gambia. Since I didn’t have any money to buy a bus ticket I left by foot, walking for hours towards the border of Senegal. I had to cross five countries during my travels: Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Libya. The entire journey took me seven months. All in all,… Read more →←
I will always remember that night in December 2013. My family had had dinner and spent some time discussing the events of the day before heading to bed. About 30 minutes later, I heard gunshots. I thought they were the usual gunshots that I often heard in Juba but these continued throughout the night. At some point, my father gathered us… Read more →←
End of August 2017. I am visiting the primary school of Malandji in Kananga, capital of Kasai Central Province, Democratic Republic of Congo. There is a lot of activity. The director receives one mother after another, in his small office for the enrollment in the new school year. Nothing special, you would think. In thousands of schools… Read more →←
Impressive. That’s the word I’d use to best describe what’s happening at the shelter for Barbudan evacuees I visited. At the National Technical Training Centre in Antigua, I saw that, despite the trauma of Hurricane Irma, people were trying to get back to some kind of normal routine. There were a couple of seven year olds happily… Read more →←
There is enormous devastation here. Most of the telephone poles are down, roads are blocked, lots of trees uprooted. Many houses have lost roofs, including mine. Part of my house has a galvanised roof and most of these have blown off. Some buildings have totally collapsed. Across the whole island, electricity is off completely. We have… Read more →←
