Rohingya teen plans for higher ed
2,999 views · Published 15 October 2018 · 1:31 · Indexed 26 September 2026
Channel: AP Archive · 2018 · News & Politics
(10 Oct 2018) At an age when many young Rohingya women have children, Rahima Akter has other plans. From the refugee camp in southern Bangladesh where she was born, Akter, a 19-year-old with a confident smile who goes by the name Khushi, says she aspires to become the most educated Rohingya woman in the world. Akter was born and has lived her whole life in the camp, a makeshift settlement of bamboo and tarpaulin huts spread out over rolling hills that were once protected forestland. Her parents were among a wave of 250,000 Rohingya Muslims who escaped forced labor, religious persecution and violent attacks from Buddhist mobs in Myanmar during the early 1990s. She sees education as her ticket out of the camp. "If we take education then we will be able to lead our life as a life," she said. A United Nations fact-finding mission reported last month that at least 10,000 Rohingya are believed to have died in the violence. The U.N. has called for Myanmar's top military generals to be prosecuted for genocide and crimes against humanity. But while the Rohingya have found a measure of safety in southern Bangladesh, access to education is far from assured. Akter said she is among only a few Rohingya refugee girls to have completed the Bangladeshi equivalent of high school, a feat she could only achieve by sneaking past the camp's checkpoints and bribing Bangladeshi public school officials for a placement. Most Rohingya girls are expected to get married by the age of 16, and sometimes as early as 14. She had to fight off her father who said her time for marriage had come. Akter cried for days and begged her parents with hands clasped to let her continue studying. While she is mostly busy preparing university applications, Akter also spends time going door-to-door at the expansive camp, documenting accounts of people who fled Myanmar last year. She hopes to eventually publish her research when she is in college, where she plans to study human rights. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APArchives Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/ You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/5019c9ea1281364ba490f27ac0b74654
