Since 25 August 2017, targeted violence against Rohingya communities in Rakhine State, Myanmar, has forced 671,000 people – mostly women and children – to flee their homes. This exodus has become one of the fastest growing refugee crises in the world. As of 7th January 2018, UNHCR’s Family Counting Exercise 720,000 children in need of humanitarian assistance. Finally, more than 450,000 total Rohingya children aged 4-18 years old are in need of education services based on ISCG SitRep 31st December 2017 and the number is increasing. To contribute in the humanitarian crisis management of Rohingya refugees’, government of Bangladesh has been taking many initiatives which are appreciated worldwide. UN organizations, national and international NGOs are providing different immediate supports for the Rohingya refugees.
The SHP will provide a secure and children friendly zone for the Rohingya Refugee children to spend some time to get relief from their sufferings. Our aim is to ensure learning and to provide children to spend some time for recreation and get relief from the distress situation as children friendly zone within their community. Safe Haven project is in located at Unchiprang, Putibonia, Whaikkong, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. In this camp currently Rohingya Refugee population is 21314. From that population safe haven is providing support to 500 children where girls and boys are respectively 244 and 256. To ensure a supportive environment for exploring and expressing themselves, a number of social and emotional development activities are planned. To cope up and handle with the traumatized situation a psychological support are provided to the distress targeted children through counseling. A number of caregivers are allocated to care, support and execute the activities to separated zones.
The project activities are helping them to spend some productive time and provide children chance to develop their motor skills and analytical skills as well as the space of expressing their feelings and experiences. The focus of the project is to develop the basic life-skills of 500 traumatized children aged from four (4) to Fifteen (15) years old through socio-emotional learning intervention strategy. The activities are designed to strengthen the brain building and emotion regulation skills along with some positive social and conflict resolution skills. To achieve this, different activities related to logical skills development and gross motor skills development such as physical activity, in door games, art and craft works, singing, dancing and story-telling and various informative and recreational videos for positive social skills development are incorporated.
All the activities are executed in 3 different zones. The project activities are operating in two shifts from 9 am to 2 pm and each shift runs for two and half an hour.
In play-zone, children do different physical activity and play indoor games, share various memorable experiences, act out, sing, recite and perform dances.
In creative and learning zone, children do some logical activities, art and craft works. Here they also discuss about general knowledge, safety issues, hygiene and manners related information to develop positive social and conflict resolution skills.
In digital-zone children watch recreational and informative child-friendly videos and documentaries to enjoy and to develop emotion regulation and positive social skills.
Psychosocial Support for Future
In safe haven project we will provide counseling support to handle different psychological situations of the children. A counselor will visit safe haven project zone once in a month to talk and listen their problems to counsel them so that they can alleviate post traumatic disorder and to cope up with the problems for coming out from the situation. This will help the children to recover their bad experiences easily and come back to their normal life. This counseling support will start from the month of April, 2018 based on the initial diagnosis of the children.