Just when the monsoon season is making everything more dramatic, refugees – 100 per day - are still arriving by sea, given the impracticability of mountains. To date, there are about 1,000,000 Rohingya refugees scattered in 15 camps, including 520,000 children. Sant'Egidio has started the construction of the very first and only school for refugees in the Jamtholi camp, in the south of Cox's Bazar.
The robust structure (made with bricks up to one meter high) will offer school education with health and emotional upbringing to more than 300 children, both Rohingya refugees and "native" Bangladeshi children - integration is the future.
The school, whose construction will be completed by the end of May, is the result of a collaboration between the Muslim associations Muhammadiyah (Indonesia) and the We The Dreamers (Bangladesh). It will give salary to four Rohingya teachers living in the refugee camp.
Among the various subjects, children will learn how to read and write both their native language and the Burmese one. It will be a true landing place for all those ch ildren who have lost everything.For this reason, the school will be named "School of Hope and Peace": a place where to find the hope they have lost and the peace that many of them have never known.
