Heat, Dust, and the Weight of Statelessness: Living Standards and Lost Dignity in the Rohingya Camps

Photo by the Author

The Rohingya crisis is not a new tragedy; it is a recurring wound in the conscience of South and Southeast Asia. For generations, the Rohingya people, an ethnic Muslim minority native to Myanmar’s Rakhine State, have lived as a community stripped of belonging. The crisis deepened in August 2017 when a brutal military operation in Rakhine drove over 700,000 Rohingya across the Naf River into Bangladesh. It was not the first exodus; smaller waves had occurred in 1978, 1991, and 2012. The United Nations later described it as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Bangladesh, despite its limited resources and high population density, responded with extraordinary compassion. Communities in Cox’s Bazar and Teknaf opened their schools, mosques, and homes. People stood by the roads distributing food, water, and clothing to exhausted families crossing the border. “They came with nothing but pain,” one local teacher told me. “We could not look away.”

Within months, a quiet coastal district became the site of the world’s largest stateless Rohingya settlement, a sprawling patchwork of bamboo, tarpaulin, and tin spread across hills that once held thick forest. International aid agencies rushed in, and the Inter Sector Coordination Group (ISCG) was formed to coordinate relief under the oversight of UNHCR, WFP, and the Government of Bangladesh. Initial donations poured in from abroad, and the early mood, despite despair, carried solidarity.

As years passed, compassion began to collide with fatigue. By 2023, more than one million Stateless Rohingya lived in 34 camps around Ukhiya and Teknaf. Each camp was a microcosm of survival with overcrowded shelters, limited food, water scarcity, and restricted movement. The host communities, already poor, began to feel the burden on land, forests, and wages. Prices rose, forests vanished, and tensions grew. Aid began to decline while births inside the camps outpaced deaths. The humanitarian emergency slowly hardened into a protracted crisis where temporary became permanent.

The international community oscillated between empathy and inaction. While the International Court of Justice and the UN Fact-Finding Mission documented atrocities in Myanmar, the political will to ensure accountability remained weak. Donor fatigue set in, worsened by global economic shocks and competing crises from Ukraine to Gaza. By 2024, the UN’s Joint Response Plan for stateless Rohingya was only 60% funded, leaving health, education, and environmental programs under severe strain.

For Bangladesh, this became both a moral and logistical dilemma. The government reiterated that the Rohingya’s could not remain indefinitely but also refused to forcibly repatriate them without safety guarantees in Myanmar. In this limbo, human lives, each one scarred by violence, were suspended between two unwelcoming realities: a homeland that denied them and a host land stretched to its limits.

The Rohingya story is not only a tale of statelessness. It is a story of how the loss of nature deepens human suffering. When I visited the camps in March 2021, I witnessed not only poverty but a kind of ecological suffocation, where human deprivation and environmental degradation fed each other until both became inseparable.

The First Glimpse: Arrival at Ukhiya, Teknaf

When I reached Ukhiya, the season was shifting. Days were already growing hot, but the nights still carried a thin mist. Our small group of teachers and friends began early from Cox’s Bazar, following the narrow coastal road toward Teknaf. The green hills that once rose above the road were gone; only pale slopes of exposed soil remained. We stopped briefly at Angelina Jolie Point, where the camps stretched as far as the eye could see, endless rows of bamboo frames and plastic sheets shimmering under the sun.

By ten in the morning, the air inside the settlement felt heavier than the road outside. The heat did not move; it pressed downward. The shelters, each built of bamboo, thin plastic, tin, and paper sheets, trapped the sun’s radiation, turning every room into a furnace. The sound of people was constant: children crying, hammers striking bamboo, a loudspeaker calling for a lost person. There was no breeze, no tree, no shade.

As we walked deeper into the camp, the absence of nature became painfully clear. Once green hills had been cleared to make space for nearly a million Rohingya’s. Without trees, even air felt stripped of life. The temperature, already above 40 °C, seemed to rise with every step. The smell of burnt plastic, open drains, and cooking smoke mixed into a single, suffocating scent. I covered my face with a scarf but could still taste the air, metallic and thick.

We passed narrow footpaths where open drains ran with stagnant water, green with algae and waste. Children jumped over them barefoot. A young boy laughed as he slipped and splashed dirty water on his friend; for him it was a game, but I could see rashes covering his legs. Flies swarmed around garbage heaps piled beside shelters. According to the UNHCR WASH Sector Report (2023), only 43% of water points meet WHO standards, and sanitation coverage has fallen below 75% because of damaged latrines and overcrowding. Those numbers came alive before my eyes; every statistic had a smell, a sound, and a face.

In one section, the stench was unbearable. My lungs protested, my head spun, and for a moment I thought I might faint. I leaned against a bamboo wall slick with moisture, but it offered no relief. When I finally stepped out into a patch of sunlight, I vomited. It wasn’t revulsion; it was the body’s rebellion against an uninhabitable world.

The gendered burden of survival is sharp here. Women fetched water from shared tube wells, faces hidden behind black veils, some carrying heavy jerrycans under the blazing sun. I saw a few washing clothes while wearing Borkha. Modesty and safety confined them to their blocks, and simple chores became both a physical and psychological punishment.

Sanitation and hygiene fall mostly on women’s shoulders, yet the infrastructure surrounding them is unsafe and insufficient. According to IOM (2024), one latrine serves an average of 35 people, and 64% of families report difficulty obtaining hygiene materials such as soap and sanitary pads.

Inside the shelters, space was measured not in square feet but in breaths. A family of five or six lived in a room smaller than a roadside shop. Families of different generations share the same small enclosure. A bamboo partition sometimes divides two households, but voices, smells, and heat cross freely. “There is no inside or outside here,” said a young man who had once been a schoolteacher in Maungdaw. “We live in each other’s breath.” According to the ISCG Joint Response Plan 2023, the average shelter space per person is only 16 square feet, barely half the humanitarian minimum. Under the midday sun, indoor temperatures often exceeded 45°C. We met an elderly man fanning his grandson with a torn piece of cardboard. “The air doesn’t move,” he said softly. “It stays with the heat.”

Dependence on humanitarian aid is near total. According to the 2023 ISCG Joint Response Plan, more than 95% of the Rohingya population relies entirely on aid for food, water, and shelter. Food distribution follows a token system: rice, lentils, oil, salt, sometimes flour. Rations are measured in survival units, not nutrition. Some Rohingya who arrived earlier, those with connections to camp management or local markets, occupy informal positions of authority. Aid packages are sometimes diverted or resold. During my visit, I heard that better-quality rations were occasionally sold quietly in nearby bazaars. Those without access, mainly new arrivals or widowed women, waited longer in line and received less. “If you have a cousin in the committee, your name stays at the top,” one man said. “If not, you wait.”

Beyond hunger and heat lies another wound, the sense of invisibility. The camps are fenced and patrolled, and movement is restricted. Stateless Rohingya’s cannot legally work outside or travel beyond camp limits. The days unfold with little change, fetching water, cooking, queuing for supplies.

Some of these men had once been farmers or fishermen. Deprived of legal work, they now rely on rations and occasional informal jobs inside the camp. Boredom pushes many toward risk. Local newspapers frequently report petty crime and drug circulation, especially yaba tablets smuggled across the border. A field officer from a local NGO confided that addiction is rising sharply among idle youth. “When there’s no future, any escape becomes a kind of hope,” he said.

I met a group of young men sitting near a damaged drainage line. They were smoking silently. One of them looked at me and said, “We used to have names. Now we have numbers.” His words stayed with me. In humanitarian systems, efficiency often requires numbering people. But numbering, when it becomes identity, strips away the last thread of dignity.

Children, Education, and the Lost Generation

Children define the soundscape of the camps. Their voices rise above the hum of generators and the chatter of adults. A UNICEF field officer in Ukhiya described the situation bluntly: “This is a generation without classrooms, without play, without childhood.”

The Inter Sector Coordination Group estimates that 60% of Rohingya children between 6-14 attend learning centers at least part-time. These centers are often improvised bamboo huts with tin roofs and floor mats, lacking ventilation or light. Classes run in shifts because of space constraints, one group in the morning and another in the afternoon. Teachers, many of them stateless Rohingya’s themselves, receive modest stipends from NGOs. “We teach English and Burmese alphabets,” one teacher told me, “but mostly we try to keep them from forgetting what learning feels like.”

For adolescents, opportunities almost vanish. Fewer than 3% of Rohingya teenagers have access to secondary education. Restrictions on formal curricula and limited accreditation mean that even those who attend classes cannot use their certificates outside the camp. For girls, barriers multiply. Cultural norms, safety concerns, and the lack of gender-segregated spaces reduce attendance sharply after puberty. Many families fear harassment on the walk to class or prefer their daughters to stay indoors. One mother said quietly, “My daughter is thirteen. She hasn’t been outside for six months.”

Health and nutrition compound the educational crisis. WHO reported that over 12% of children in Cox’s Bazar camps suffer from acute malnutrition, while more than 40% are chronically undernourished. Their growth is stunted, their concentration fragile. In one classroom I visited, several children dozed off mid-lesson, overcome by heat and hunger. The teacher did not wake them. “They didn’t eat breakfast,” she said softly. “We let them rest.”

The absence of structured education fragment’s identity. Many of these children were born in Bangladesh but hold no legal status. They are stateless at birth, citizens of nowhere. When I asked a 12-year-old boy where he was from, he hesitated. “My father says we are from Myanmar,” he replied. “But I have never seen it.” He pointed toward the south, beyond the hills, and asked, “Is it far?”

The psychosocial toll of confinement is immense. The IMO’s Mental Health Report found that one in three adolescents in the camps shows symptoms of anxiety or depression. Without recreation or purpose, frustration often turns inward. Girls confided fears of early marriage; boys spoke of boredom and anger.

Some NGOs attempt to fill the void through sports, storytelling, or art therapy. I attended a session organized by a local group where children painted with colored chalk on cardboard. Most drew houses, rivers, and trees, images of a world that no longer exists around them. One girl sketched a single tree beside a blue river. When I asked her what it was, she said, “Our home before the fire.” Her drawing carried both memory and prophecy, a longing for a place that could breathe again.

The lack of education is not just a humanitarian gap; it is a slow erasure of possibility. Every year without learning pushes this community further into dependency. Humanitarian agencies warn that without sustained support, the camps risk producing a generation unprepared for any future. As one NGO coordinator told me, “If we don’t invest in their minds now, we are planting despair for decades.”

I met Amira Begum, a soft-spoken teenager with a steel bracelet on her wrist. Her story contained the essence of the crisis.  

My name is Amira Begum.I was born in a Rohingya camp surrounded by the hills of Cox’s Bazar. My mother says I was born in Bangladesh, but my homeland is Rakhine - the place she fled from one monsoon night in 1991 when soldiers burned villages, took men away, and assaulted women. “We were human,” she told me, “But in their eyes, we were only a different faith.”

I was born here -yet I belong nowhere.I watched my mother grow older while still dreaming of home. Then came August 2017, when another wave of Rohingya’s arrived. The hills of Ukhiya and Teknaf turned into a sea of people. One of the new arrivals was my mother’s last friend from her old village. That day, I realized we might never go back.

Today, more than 1.2 million of us live in these camps: cramped shelters, narrow lanes, broken drains. During rain, the camp floods; in heat, children cry for water. Mosquitoes, stench, and disease visit us like old relatives.

We are still called guests, but twenty-seven years have passed. Guests have become generations. My generation holds books but has no school. The “learning centers” teach alphabets, not futures. I dream of being a teacher, but I’m not allowed to teach.We cannot attend Bangladeshi schools, and Myanmar’s classrooms are closed to us forever. My mother is sick; the clinic is far, medicine scarce. Half of our children are malnourished.

I am the daughter of the 1991 stateless Rohingya’s, yet I am not a citizen of 2025.Thirty years after my birth, I exist on no paper, under no flag, within no nation. Still, I have a dream - that one day I will stand in a street of some country and say,

“I am Rohingya, but I am not a criminal. I am simply human.”

Such glimpses remind us that education is not merely about literacy; it is about reclaiming humanity. To teach a child to read inside a camp where identity itself is forbidden is an act of quiet resistance. It affirms what every stateless Rohingya’s knows instinctively: that dignity begins with memory, and memory begins with language.

Nature Displaced: Environmental Collapse

Before 2017, the hills of Ukhiya and Teknaf formed one of the lushest belts of forest along Bangladesh’s southeast coast. They sheltered elephants, macaques, and a web of native flora that balanced rainfall and soil. When more than seven hundred thousand Rohingya arrived within months, that equilibrium broke overnight. According to the Bangladesh Forest Department and UNDP, over four thousand acres of forest were cleared to make room for shelters, roads, and firewood collection. The department’s satellite analysis found that tree cover in the surrounding region fell by nearly 45% between 2017 and 2022. The loss was not gradual; it was violent and immediate.

The deforestation changed everything. Hills once anchored by roots began to crumble during monsoon. Landslides became annual disasters, burying shelters and blocking drains. Soil erosion silted nearby rivers, reducing fish populations and contaminating water sources. Without trees, rainwater rushed down slopes, pooling into stagnant ponds where mosquitoes bred. What began as humanitarian shelter construction evolved into an environmental collapse that threatened both stateless Rohingya’s and the local population.

When I visited in March 2021, the consequences were visible. The slopes surrounding the camps looked flayed, stripped to clay. Plastic roofs shimmered where forest canopy once cast shade. The heat radiating from that denuded landscape was intense, an oven created by human displacement. Inside the camps, the temperature rose several degrees higher than outside. Aid workers measured surface heat exceeding forty-five degrees Celsius during summer. The air above the shelters shimmered like metal.

Environmental decline did not stop at tree loss. The absence of organic waste management turned the camp ecosystem into a self-polluting cycle. Open drains overflowed with sewage during rain. Grey water seeped into soil already weakened by erosion. Flies and rodents thrived. The UNHCR Environmental Health Update recorded a rise in respiratory and water-borne diseases by seventeen percent compared with 2020. A medical volunteer told me, “The camp breathes in its own waste.”

The damage extended beyond camp boundaries. Local farmers from Whykong and Palong Khali described dwindling yields in paddy and betel-leaf plots. “We used to cut only dry branches,” one farmer said. “Now whole hills are bare.” Groundwater tables fell because thousands of tube wells drew continuously from shallow aquifers. The Department of Public Health Engineering confirmed that in several blocks, arsenic and salinity levels had increased beyond safe limits.

The loss of forest also meant the loss of sound. Ukhiya once echoed with birdcalls; now it hummed with generators. The silence of nature had been replaced by the machinery of survival. I remember standing on a small ridge overlooking Camp 11, seeing smoke curl from hundreds of stoves. The horizon looked blurred, as if the land itself were exhaling exhaustion.

Some agencies attempted re-greening projects, planting bamboo and fast-growing acacia around the camp perimeters, but these efforts often failed. Seedlings wilted under heat or were uprooted for fuel. Aid budgets prioritized food and shelter, leaving little for ecological restoration. A UNDP field officer admitted, “People cannot protect trees when they cannot feed their families.”

This tension between human survival and environmental survival illustrates what I later understood as a violation of nature’s sovereignty. In humanitarian discourse, the focus is on rights such as food, water, and shelter, but the environment is treated as background, not as a living partner. Yet here, the degradation of land mirrored the degradation of dignity. When nature is stripped of its right to exist, people who depend on it lose their right to live well.

In Ukhiya, existence was denied when forests were razed; liberty was curtailed when rivers were dammed and polluted; dignity vanished in the stench of waste; justice disappeared as those least responsible suffered the worst consequences.

During a later conversation with an environmental scientist from Chattogram University, he noted, “The camps have created a micro-climate. They are hotter, drier, and more polluted than the surrounding villages. It is as if nature itself has become stateless.” His phrase haunted me. The idea of displaced nature captured the tragedy better than any statistic.

Environmental damage does not remain static; it multiplies. Each monsoon now brings landslides, flooding, and disease outbreaks. Each dry season brings water scarcity and fire hazards. In 2021, a massive fire swept through Camp 8W, destroying over ten thousand shelters. Investigations later showed that the combination of plastic materials, dry air, and lack of vegetation turned the camp into a tinderbox.

For host communities, the burden of coexistence is growing. Forest depletion has reduced firewood availability for local households; grazing fields have vanished; elephants, deprived of habitat, increasingly enter villages, sometimes causing fatalities. Environmental degradation has thus blurred humanitarian lines: stateless Rohingya’s suffer inside the camps, and locals suffer outside them.

The Isolated Hope: Bhasan Char

As Cox’s Bazar reached saturation, the Government of Bangladesh searched for alternatives. One answer emerged from the silt and tides of the Bay of Bengal, a low-lying island called Bhasan Char, roughly thirty kilometers from the mainland. Formed by the sediment of the Meghna River two decades earlier, the island was largely uninhabited marshland until engineers began shaping it into a relocation site.

Officials described Bhasan Char as a humane solution, a place where Rohingya families could live in safer, less crowded conditions with brick houses, solar panels, and community facilities. By 2023, around thirty thousand stateless Rohingya’s had been moved there, with plans for more. Rows of concrete shelters stand behind embankments designed to resist storms, and paved roads cut through zones of order that contrast sharply with the chaos of Ukhiya. On paper, it looked like progress.

Rohingya Settlement in Bhasan Char

When I interviewed humanitarian workers who had visited the island, they spoke of mixed impressions. The infrastructure was undeniably better with solid housing, clean streets, and planned drainage. Yet many questioned whether improved buildings could compensate for isolation. Access to the mainland is strictly controlled, and movement requires official permission. “It feels safe but silent,” said one field officer. “The island keeps people alive, but it doesn’t let them live.”

Environmental vulnerability remains a central concern. Studies by the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology note that Bhasan Char lies in a cyclone-prone zone where tides can rise several meters. The government has constructed a twelve-kilometer embankment and cyclone shelters, but experts warn that sea-level rise and storm surges could overtop defenses. Stateless Rohingya’s on the island feared floods more than hunger. “When the wind howls, we pray,” said one woman.

Human rights organizations have voiced sharper worries. Human Rights Watch called the island “a jail in the middle of the sea,” citing reports of restricted communication, inadequate medical care, and limited educational access. Some stateless Rohingya’s reportedly attempted to flee by boat. The government countered these allegations, emphasizing voluntary relocation and investment in services. Both truths coexist: Bhasan Char offers physical space and better housing, yet it confines freedom.

To understand the island’s logic, one must see Bangladesh’s predicament. Hosting over a million stateless Rohingya’s in one of the most densely populated countries on Earth is an act of prolonged generosity that strains every system, including land, water, employment, and politics. Officials argue that relocation is necessary to decongest Cox’s Bazar and reduce environmental damage. Critics respond that displacement cannot be solved by redistribution. Both are right, and both are trapped by the absence of international responsibility.

Bhasan Char symbolizes the trade-off between safety and sovereignty. The island provides protection from immediate hazards but denies the liberty to move, to choose, to belong. It reflects the global failure to recognize stateless Rohingya’s not only as aid recipients, but as human beings entitled to agency. When protection turns into containment, the moral boundary between refuge and imprisonment becomes blurred.

Dignity, Rights, and Restoration

By noon, exhaustion hit us. We had been walking for hours, thirsty, searching for a place to rest or eat. There were no shops, no shade, no quiet corner. We finally found a roadside salon and bought a single shampoo sachet to wash our hands, five people sharing one. Later, sitting under the sun, we ate dry biscuits and drank warm water. That simple act felt like privilege.

The Rohingya story reveals a double loss, the denial of human rights and the denial of nature’s rights. The humanitarian system sustains existence but rarely dignity. Aid built shelters yet stripped forests; it saved bodies but exhausted the land.

To repair both people and planet, standard of living must mean more than survival. Reforestation, renewable cooking fuel, and safe water are as vital as food. Education is not charity; it is infrastructure. Gender safety is not an add-on; it is governance. Justice for displaced people is not political risk; it is moral necessity.

Bangladesh’s generosity has been remarkable, but empathy must be matched by global accountability, long-term funding, shared responsibility, and pressure on Myanmar to restore citizenship. Without justice, every camp becomes permanent.

The Hope That Persists

As we drove away from Ukhiya that night, the camp lights shimmered behind us like a second horizon. The air was warm, smelling of salt and smoke, yet I imagined it cool, trees regrown, rivers clear, children laughing without fences.

For the Rohingya, exile feels like an endless waiting. They still dream of the day they can return to Myanmar with safety, dignity, and citizenship-the rights every human deserves. But their return must be more than a political act; it must be an act of justice and compassion, restoring what persecution took away.

Here, hope glows like a fragile flame-weak, yet unextinguished. The true measure of civilization lies not in how many we keep alive, but in how gently we allow both people and nature to breathe again.