How Play Labs Help Rohingya Refugee Children Recover Confidence and Joy

The talk opens with the violence of August 2017 in Myanmar. Mariam says the genocide broke out suddenly, with military forces killing Rohingya people and burning their villages as part of what she describes as ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.

In four months, more than 850,000 people crowded into camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Those fleeing crossed the border in large numbers, many carrying babies and young children.

Mariam, who is from Dhaka, Bangladesh, says she has devoted her career to making sure children have access to play when everything else in their lives has been chaos. She says she has worked with children for more than thirty years through BRAC, which she describes as the largest NGO in the world.

While Rohingya refugees were arriving in Bangladesh by the thousands, Mariam received an urgent call from a BRAC colleague asking her to visit the Cox's Bazar camps and see how the children were doing. She thought about everything they had lived through, having seen things no child should ever see, and wondered how they could recover.

She believed play could help them reconnect with what they had lost, namely their culture and their sense of home, and that it could heal them. Over time, she says, the team found that not just any kind of play would help.

The key finding, according to Mariam, was that it was specifically the play of the children's own Rohingya culture that helped them feel pride, gain confidence, and experience joy after they had been violently expelled from their home.

After the 2017 call, Mariam traveled to the Cox's Bazar camps. Humanitarian workers had created safe spaces for the children, but she noticed children drawing weapons in their pictures. That was not unusual, she says, but she saw something that surprised her.

Someone had donated Scrabble games and Uno cards for the children. Mariam calls it a generous gesture, but the children had never seen those games before. They did not know the rules, did not speak the language, and even the adult facilitators did not know how to play. The children arranged the Scrabble tiles in patterns that made sense to them. Seeing this, Mariam thought there had to be a better way.

Mariam describes children who were used to open spaces with trees and flowers, now crowded into a refugee camp with around a million other people. Each shelter looked like a copy of the next, built of bamboo with tin roofs, and blue and black plastic sheets kept out the monsoon rain. The air smelled of standing water and human waste.

None of the children complained, and there were no visible signs of frustration. Some children were withdrawn, others restless, and some did not relate to other children or adults. Mariam says this was painful to see but typical of children who had been through such extreme conditions. Even the withdrawn children became more lively and joyful when they played in the Rohingya way.

Over the following months, the team observed the children and asked many questions: what they played in Myanmar, how they played, how they decorated their homes, and why. Children, parents, grandparents and siblings showed and explained these things. The team heard stories grandparents told, rhymes siblings knew by heart, physical games parents played as children, and traditional Rohingya art that would hang in every home in their homeland.

From this, the team created what it calls the Humanitarian Play Lab: small, welcoming spaces for children aged three to five, decorated by the Rohingya community itself, with handmade embroidered cloths hanging from the ceiling and drawings of flowers, houses and animals. Mariam says these are images the children recognize from a life they were forced to leave behind.

Each Play Lab is led by young Rohingya women who spend up to five hours at a time simply playing with the children. Each lab also has other women trained in psychosocial support to help the children manage their emotions.

Every morning at nine, the children leave home and walk through narrow passages to the Play Lab. It takes only three minutes to enter a different world without leaving the camp.

A Rohingya woman, the children's play facilitator, greets thirty young children. She asks how they are today and whether they are all well, telling them they are here like friends and brothers and should respect their elders and love the little ones at home. She then asks who wants to lead the rhyme, and a child steps forward to lead. Hands go up, bodies move, and the children sing, play, jump, laugh, listen to stories and draw.

Noor is now eight years old. Five years ago she was malnourished, withdrawn and shy, physically weak and suffering from continuous diarrhea. When she started attending the Play Lab at age three, she sat quietly and watched.

She then learned a rope-jumping game from the facilitator, a Rohingya tradition in which two children hold a long rope and swing it from side to side while Noor jumps over it without touching it, reciting a rhyme as she does. Her mother noticed that Noor became less shy and more confident as she kept playing, and encouraged her to jump higher, go farther and be bolder. Mariam says that now Noor carries a rope around the camp and jumps in front of any audience. Her mother, who played the game as a girl, says it made her daughter stronger and that she is no longer afraid and has courage.

Muhammad is about seven years old and lives with his parents and four siblings. In his neighborhood he is known as the seesaw boy. The Rohingya seesaw is not the playground version: two children wrap their legs around each other like acrobats and rock together, going up and down.

In the Play Lab, Muhammad learned something Mariam considers even more important than balance. He learned to be careful, because a bad move could hurt the other child, so children learn to watch each other's bodies before their own. For this reason he prefers not to play with younger children, not because he does not want to, but because he worries he could hurt them. Mariam says playing taught him to pay attention to how others feel. He has become more considerate toward his mother and younger siblings, gives the cookies he receives at school to his younger siblings, helps clean the house and wash the pots so his mother can rest, and hopes to be a teacher one day.

Mariam says playing taught him to pay attention to how others feel.

Playing taught him to pay attention to how others feel.

Tuhinur is four years old. At two she was shy and silent. Other children mocked her, calling her Fuli, which means fat, and she never responded, crying quietly with her mother. Her mother, Yasmin, worried about how to raise a daughter who would be more assertive. When Yasmin became a Lab facilitator, she brought Tuhinur along. Soon Yasmin noticed that Tuhinur was the first to raise her hand to lead the Kabia, a traditional Rohingya rhyme with hand and body movements.

Tuhinur learned the whole rhyme, including when and how to move her body and add hand gestures. She now leads the Kabia, standing at the front, reciting the words in a clear, strong voice, and moving her hands and body in a way the others follow. Some who follow her are older, though she does not seem to notice. Leading the Kabia meant performing it perfectly so others could learn and follow her, and she became the leader at age three. She loves leading so much that she practices at night in front of her shadow on the bamboo wall and dances with it. Her mother says Tuhinur is bold and no one can mock her anymore.

Mariam says these are only some examples. The team has run the Play Lab since 2017, reaching 50,000 children across 350 humanitarian Play Labs in Cox's Bazar. The same approach has also been applied in the Rhino refugee camp in Uganda over the past five years, and the team plans to expand and create 150 Play Labs there, reaching 63,000 children.

Mariam says she believes this work really matters. The Play Lab helps children prepare to enter school with confidence and pride, and when parents visit the camp they thank the team for recognizing their children's play.

Mariam says the children here did not choose to be refugees and did not choose to leave their home and the place they belonged. Through play, the program has helped them rediscover their own culture, Rohingya culture. In doing so, she says, the children showed her something extraordinary: their capacity to find confidence, joy and pride even when a place is completely unfamiliar.

She concludes that every child deserves that, not only children in Cox's Bazar. Every child everywhere, she says, deserves the right to play their own game.