On Her Way To Bangladesh

     In 2017 my daughter Claire, a nurse at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago,

...here last October with her husband Miguel working in a makeshift clinic in Haiti,

...went on medical mission trips to Haiti,

...to impoverished, health-care-deprived communities in the Missouri Bootheel region;  

...to the Florida Keys after Hurricane Irma;

...and most recently to the poor environs of Houston where people who lost everything are still suffering from the devastation of Hurricane Harvey,

…and from where she brought home an orphaned kitten named Rosie.  

  Today, January 3, 2018, Claire is leaving for Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh to work among the Rohingya refugees there.

    The most  persecuted and vulnerable population on the planet, the Rohingyas are  Muslims whose ancestors have lived in Myanmar for almost a thousand years, but who have always been a harshly oppressed minority in that Buddhist Country. They are denied citizenship or any human rights or protection under the law. Thus they are a stateless people.

     Over the past year the oppression of the Myanmar Rohingya Muslims has escalated to genocide.
     Considered less than human by their persecutors, the Rohingyas, children as well as adults, have been beaten, shot, macheted, tortured, murdered, raped, starved, burned out of their homes and villages and subjected to the most brutal violence and degradation by Myanmar security forces and mobs of Buddhist civilians.
      Subsequently in recent months the Rohihgyas have been fleeing Myanmar for their lives,

....pour-ing across the border,

...into Bangla-desh.

      The Bangladeshi government, struggling to deal with the continuing flood of refugees, created one massive refugee camp in the coastal town of Cox's Bazar near the Myanmar border.

     There are now between 600,000 - 800,000 Rohingya refugees in the camp in Cox's Bazar.

        That's twenty times more than the number of people who live in my suburb of Gahanna, Ohio.

      International medical aid organizations such as Doctors without Borders, the Canadian Red Cross, Hope Foundation for Bangladesh and MedGlobal have been setting up field hospitals in the camps.

    Tomorrow there will be one more MedGlobal nurse among them.

     To be continued...

References
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/08/rohingya-muslims-170831065142812.html

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/06/asia/bangladesh-rohingya-new-camp/index.html

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41566561

http://www.cnn.com/specials/asia/rohingya