“I came back and told the men, ‘You have to protect the widows because they are vulnerable. During her outreach work, Rosaria met a woman whose husband and children had been killed in Rakhine. But if not, I can follow up and just listen and do psychological first aid.”Īnother way for men to build hope is to find a new protective role in their communities. “If the stress is pathological, I can do a referral.
It’s a natural response if you’re anxious, if you have nightmares or difficulty breathing. People’s responses are natural in an abnormal situation.
“In most cases it is not pathology I see – it’s the situation that’s the pathology, not the people,” she said. Rosaria works to build hope by reminding the displaced people that fear and stress are natural reactions to their experiences. By 12 December, Red Cross and Red Crescent teams had reached 17,000 children and 20,000 adults with psychosocial support. The Japanese Red Cross groups reach 400 people a week, according to Kyoko Miyamoto, a psychosocial support delegate. The Red Cross and Red Crescent operation to help people displaced from Rakhine runs a variety of groups for women, girls and boys, where – depending on the group – they play games, sew, paint, make jewelry, learn English from newspapers, and make new connections. They have nothing but their identity, their culture, their tradition,” she said. Some arrived naked because they had to swim. “The men of the community have to stay together to strengthen their unity because most of them have arrived without anything. I am not young so they can trust I’m not there just joking and kidding but with real knowledge of their story. They accepted my presence and allowed me to find some good words to give them. “In every bad story if you have a clear mind you can find a small light. She told them, “You’ve been through something terrible. Twenty men came to their first session 42 to the second 65 to the third. She started a men’s group with the help of Sheik Ahmed, a Bangladesh Red Crescent Society community volunteer who himself was a secondary school teacher in Rakhine only a few months earlier. The Italian is one of several Red Cross and Red Crescent team members running safe spaces and support groups to help newcomers to Bangladesh find strength together. Now at least all the world knows how this community’s doing before, nobody knew what was happening.” “There’s a reason they come here to our men’s group. Their roles have been taken from them and they’re suffering. What can I do with my hands? I can’t provide for my family’. One man told me, ‘I’m a carpenter but now I have no tools. “For the men, continuing their traditional roles is more difficult than for children and for women because they can’t do their usual jobs. If they can, they have to re-orient to the present, not look back on the past. “Two days ago, I met a pharmacist, a middle-class family, who left everything behind. “Can you imagine how your life would be if you left everything behind?” said Rosario, an Italian Red Cross delegate who is part of the Japanese Red Cross team in Cox’s Bazar. Men at the group say they are troubled because they couldn’t protect their families from violence at home or as they fled, and they can’t support them in Bangladesh, where they are not allowed to work.
Psychosocial delegate Rosaria Domenella runs a men’s group in a simple open-plan bamboo and tarpaulin structure a few metres away from a busy dirt road in Hakimpara camp. Yet men are often overlooked in this crisis, in which 646,000 people fled to Bangladesh between 25 August and early November 2017. We have to live in the dark without solar lamps. Men can’t sleep because of the situation here. “Back home, I lived in a solid house that was beautifully decorated, but I left all my property behind. “There are a lot of difficulties with life here,” he said. Men face particular stress, says Hamid Hussein, the top community leader or head mazhi, in Hakimpara camp in Cox’s Bazar, just across the border from Myanmar. When you finally get to sleep, the nightmares come. Living under plastic and bamboo in Bangladesh, you worry about food, water, shelter, rain, dry, hot, cold, wind, the future. You lie awake thinking about the life you had in Rakhine state in Myanmar, and the violence and fear that sent you running.