Inside the “Play Labs” Helping Refugee Kids Heal | Erum Mariam | TED: transcript

In August 2017, the genocide in Myanmar had exploded overnight. The military were killing Rohingya people, setting their villages on fire. This was part of the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. The women and men who had escaped were now flooding across the border, carrying infants and young children on their backs. Within four months, over 850,000 people crammed into refugee camps in Bangladesh, in a town called Cox's Bazar. I am Bangladeshi, and I live in Dhaka.

I have spent my career working to make sure children have access to play when everything else in their lives has been in chaos. I have worked with children for over three decades now through BRAC, the world's largest NGO. While the Rohingya refugees were arriving by the thousands in Bangladesh, I got an urgent call from my BRAC colleague. He told me I had to go visit the refugee camps in Cox's Bazar and see how the children were doing. I thought about how much those kids had been through.

They saw things that no child should ever see. I wondered how would they ever recover. I believed play might help them reconnect with what they lost: their culture and their sense of home. I believed play might heal them. And what we discovered over time was that it was not just any kind of play that would help them heal. It was specifically play from their own Rohingya culture that helped them feel pride, gain confidence and experience joy after being violently forced to leave behind their home.

So I'll go back to the beginning. After that phone call in 2017, I traveled to the camps in Cox's Bazar. Aid workers had set up safe spaces for the children. I found children drawing guns in their art. That was not unusual, but I saw something that surprised me. Someone had donated Scrabble sets and Uno cards for the children. It was a generous gesture, but the children had never seen these games before. They didn’t know the rules. They didn’t speak the language.

Even the adult facilitators didn't know how to play. They were arranging the Scrabble tiles into patterns because that's what made sense to them. Standing there, I thought, there's got to be a better way. These kids were used to wide-open spaces with trees and flowers, and now they were crammed into a refugee camp with a million other people. Every shelter was a copy-paste of the next: bamboo frames, tin roof, blue and black plastic tarp held back the monsoon rain.

The air smelled like still water and human waste. But none of the kids ever complained. And there were no signs of frustration. Instead, some kids were just withdrawn. Others were restless. Some wouldn't engage with kids or with adults. This was painful to watch, but typical of kids who have gone through such extreme conditions. But even the kids who were withdrawn would come alive and express more joy when they were playing in a certain way: the Rohingya way.

So for the next few months, we watched them and we asked lots of questions. What did you play in Myanmar? How did you play it? How did you decorate your home? Why? What does it mean? Children, parents, grandparents and siblings would show and tell us. From the kids, we heard the stories their grandparents told. We heard rhymes that their siblings knew by heart. We watched physical games that their parents did when they were little, and we watched them make traditional Rohingya art, the kind of art that would be hanging in every household back home.

And from that, we built what we now call the “Humanitarian Play Lab:” small welcoming spaces for kids three to five, decorated by the Rohingya community itself, with hand-embroidered cloth hanging from the ceiling and artwork of flowers and homes and animals, images that the children recognize from a life they were forced to leave behind. Each Play Lab is facilitated by young Rohingya women, who spend up to five hours simply playing with the kids.

Each Play Lab is also supported by other women trained in psychosocial support to help kids manage their emotions. At 9am, those kids leave their home to walk to the Play Lab through narrow passageways. It takes them only three minutes to step into a different world while still in the camp. A Rohingya woman, their play facilitator, greets 30 young children. She asks, "How are we today? Are we all OK? Here we are, like friends and siblings.

At home, respect those who are older and love those younger." Then she asks, "Who wants to lead the rhyme?" One child steps forward to lead. Hands are up, bodies move. They chant, they play, they jump, they giggle, they listen to stories, they draw. One of the girls is Noor. Noor is just eight years old. Five years ago, Noor was undernourished, withdrawn and shy. She was physically weak with continuous diarrhea. When Noor started coming to the Play Lab at the age of three, she sat quietly.

She watched. Then she learned the rope game from the facilitator. The game she plays is a traditional Rohingya one. Two kids hold a long rope, flipping it back and forth, while Noor leaps over it without touching it, reciting a rhyme while she's jumping. She's tracking the rope, she's controlling her feet and she keeps the words coming, all at once. Noor kept playing. As she played, she became stronger. Her mother noticed that Noor became less shy and [more] confident, and once Noor learned it, her mother encouraged her, telling her to jump higher, go further, be bolder.

When you watch her jump rope, you forget for a moment where you are. She doesn't just jump. She flies. Now Noor walks around the camp with a rope in her hand, just in case she finds a space to jump. She may still be shy to speak to strangers, but she will jump in front of any audience. That's not a small thing for a kid who used to fade into the background. Noor's mother played this game as a girl. "This is not a Bangladeshi game," she says. "We Rohingya call this 'Rosi Fal Doní.'

This has made my daughter stronger. She's not scared anymore. She has courage." Then there is Muhammad. Muhammad is about seven years old. He lives with his parents and four siblings, and he is known as the seesaw boy in his neighborhood. This game is not the seesaw that we imagine. The Rohingya seesaw is where two kids wrap their legs around each other like acrobats and swing together, going up and down. At the Play Lab, he learned something that was even more important than the skill to balance during the game.

Muhammad learned that he needs to be careful while playing the seesaw game. One wrong move and the other kid will get hurt. Children learn to pay attention to someone else's body before their own. So he prefers not to play with the younger kids, not because he doesn't want to, but because he is concerned that he might hurt them because of his strength. Playing taught him to pay attention to how others might feel. He became more thoughtful of his mother and his younger siblings.

When he gets biscuits in school, he chooses to bring [them] for his younger siblings instead, and he cleans the house and washes the pots so that his mother can get some rest. He hopes to be a teacher someday. Now let's talk about Tuhinur. Tuhinur is four years old. As a two-year-old, she was shy and quiet. Other children teased her and called her Fuli, meaning fat. She never responded. She cried silently to her mother. Her mother, Yasmin, worried how she would raise her daughter to be more assertive.

When Yasmin became a facilitator at the Play Lab, she brought Tuhinur with her. Soon, Yasmin noticed that Tuhinur would be the first to raise her hand to lead the Kabia, a traditional Rohingya rhyme with hand movements and body gestures. Tuhinur learned the entire rhyme and when and how to move her body and when and how to add hand movements. She now leads the Kabia. She stands at the front, reciting the words in a clear, loud voice and moving her hand and body in a way that the other kids follow.

Some of those following her are older. She doesn't seem to notice. Leading the Kabia meant doing this perfectly so that others could learn and follow. She became the lead at age three. Tuhinur loves leading the rhyme so much that she will practice at night with her shadow on the bamboo wall and dance with it. Yasmin says Tuhinur is bold and no one can tease her anymore. These are just a few examples, and we've been running the Play Lab since 2017, reaching 50,000 children across 350 humanitarian Play Labs in Cox's Bazar.

We've also used this approach in the Rhino refugee camp in Uganda. We've been working on it for the last five years and will be scaling and setting up 150 Play Labs, reaching 63,000 children in Uganda. I believe this work really matters. The Play Lab helps children to get ready to enter school feeling confident and proud. When I visit the camp now, parents say “Shukriya,” or thank you, for recognizing Rohingya play.

The children here didn't choose to be refugees. They didn't choose to leave behind their home and where they belonged. But through play, we’ve helped them rediscover their own culture -- the Rohingya culture. And in doing so, they showed us something extraordinary: their ability to find confidence, joy and pride, even when a place is so unfamiliar. And that is something that every child deserves, not just the children in Cox's Bazar. Every child everywhere deserves the right to play their own play.

Thank you.