• Shafiur Rahman - Rohingya kids

    Balukhali Camp

  • Shafiur Rahman - use3
  • Shafiur Rahman - use2
  • Shafiur Rahman - use4
  • Shafiur Rahman - use5
  • Shafiur Rahman - use6
  • Shafiur Rahman - use9
  • Shafiur Rahman - use8

Rohingya kids & recycling

These nine images are of Rohingya children who collect plastic bottles in order to recycle them. For their efforts they are paid $2 for one and half bags worth of plastic bottles.  It takes a child a whole day to fill up one to two of these large sacs. . The bottles are flattened by stamping on them before they are put into the sac. 

Young Rohingya boys and older Rohingya men usually do this scrap collecting work. The boys work up to six days per week. Sometimes even seven days. They often cut their feet stamping on the plastic bottles.  It is almost a given, given that they don't wear any kind of shoe or sandal. The dust in the denuded mounds where they search for scrap plastic irritates their eyes. Bottles are also picked up from open drains, and in the absence of gloves and protective clothing in general, this can be a source of serious infection. 

None of the kids I spoke to go to school.