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Ray Martin goes inside a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh where an estimated 50,000 people are blind. Australia's Fred Hollows Foundation is trying to change that.
I guessed the lady with the wrinkled face, wrapped in a colourful shawl, was about 70 years old.
I guessed wrong. She turned out to be barely 50. Horror stories can age you quickly.
We were deep inside the world's largest refugee camp, outside Bangladesh's main resort town, a place with the quaint, colonial name of "Cox's Bazaar".
We were standing in the dingy light of a makeshift eye clinic, set up by the Fred Hollows Foundation from Australia, which was under siege from hundreds of men and women, who had patiently lined-up to get their eyes fixed.
Most told us they had never been to a doctor before, let alone an eye surgeon. They were hoping for a medical miracle.
Still, this lady was clearly stressed, trying to get my attention, finally reaching out and grabbing my arm. Speaking loudly in her Rohingya tongue she kept swiping her hand across her neck, as if cutting her own throat.
I had no idea what she was saying, but I knew it wasn't going to be nice.
The interpreter, who was a local ophthalmologist, just shook his head as she answered his questions.
"Her name is Shamsun Nahar," he told me, his brow all creased and worried.
"She says her family were slaughtered by the Burmese Army. And she's blind in both her eyes from cataracts. Has been for maybe seven years."
More questions, more agonising answers.
The army, she told us, had attacked her village just across the border last August, killing people with automatic rifles — including her husband. Then they hacked her seven children with machetes, cutting off their heads — she insisted — throwing their bodies into a ditch and setting fire to them to destroy the evidence. They then burnt down the entire village, including her house.
She somehow fled with three other women — through the jungle, over the mountain and across the river that separates Bangladesh from Myanmar.
That was eight months ago.
Tonight, the doctor will remove her cataracts, a relatively simple operation that takes about half-an-hour.
Shamsun will be given her precious sight back after seven years of darkness.
But nobody can give her back her family.
'It's a new day'
Marium Kartun is luckier. Now 40 she's been blind in both eyes for almost a decade. After her husband was shot dead by a marauding mob of Buddhist vigilantes, she also fled Myanmar.
She was carried by her 14-year-old son, and a man they hired, on a makeshift hammock for 12 days until they reached the refugee camp.
Tomorrow, after her cataract operations, she'll meet the teenage son she hasn't been able to look at since he was just a four-year-old boy.
Marium has an amazing smile for someone who's been to hell and back.
Pia Mohammad is a 45-year-old fisherman with seven children. He's been blind for three years, embarrassed because he couldn't protect his family when the soldiers came — especially his daughters.
He sold his boat, his house, his watch — everything — to escape to the refugee camp. For 15 days he held his children's hands along the jungle trail, "feeling old and useless" he tells me.
Now, he laughs, "It's a new day."
'Most persecuted, unloved people on earth'
Every adult we spoke to had unbelievable tales of trauma and terror.
There are now over a million people in this camp, displaced and overcrowded, in shelters made of bamboo and black plastic, sprawled across 3,000 treeless acres.
They're all Rohingyans, a Muslim minority from the wild, northwest region of Myanmar, who fled a murderous army crackdown that began on August 23 last year.
Almost 700,000 crossed the border in barely six months.
In Myanmar, these sad-eyed people are stateless — without basic civil or human rights. They can't marry or even travel freely, they're not allowed to become doctors or teachers, they have no formal government recognition.
The United Nations calls them "the most persecuted and unloved people on earth".
Since the Myanmar Army crackdown last August we keep hearing the same story — of a widespread, brutal campaign of killing, torture, mass rape and arson.
Despite a repatriation agreement signed between Myanmar and Bangladesh in November 2017, it's doubtful that Shamsun Nahar and her countrymen will be going home soon. Maybe never.
Nobody can guarantee the Rohingyans safety, or promise that their lives will change for the better.
At least here they get housed and fed and schooled and basic medical care.
Although they're not allowed outside the camp, in some ways the refugees are better off than the poorest Bangladeshis who live on the railway tracks in Dhaka, the capital city, with more than 20 million people.
Indeed, the Bangladesh authorities, the UN and the host of international agencies (including some from Australia) are doing a really good, effective and efficient job under extraordinary pressures.
In the camp — apart from the usual worries about malnutrition, cholera, hepatitis E, diphtheria and measles — the overwhelming concern right now is the monsoon rains, which are due to hit any day. And in Bangladesh they hit with an almighty bang.
Not only is it feared that mudslides will make the huge camp impassable and wipe out dozens and dozens of flimsy houses that cling to the dirt hillsides, but the toilets will also be swept away, spreading contagious diseases into the water system.
Fixing 500 eyes a week
With all of these monumental problems you can understand that eye problems, even cataracts, are way down the list of priorities. Unless you happen to be blind.
The local hospital estimates there are 50,000 refugees in the camp, mostly older people like Shamsun, who can't see.
The doctors admit they were overwhelmed, that they had thrown this enormous refugee eye problem into the "too hard" basket. Until the Fred Hollows Foundation turned up offering them help and funding.
Quite simply, I was told, it was the Hollows Foundation which gave the Bangladeshi's the impetus and inspiration to have a go.
Now they are fixing 500 eyes a week. That's like giving 500 people a week their life back.
Of course, you still see Fred Hollows' iconic face on bus shelters around Australia. I think he's probably the most remarkable bloke I ever met.
It's hard to believe Fred died 25 years ago.
Professor Hollows was an Australian of the Year larrikin, who swore like a wharfie and probably drank way too much whisky.
He certainly had a great sense of the absurd and couldn't stand pomposity.
Still his widow, Gabi, is certain that Fred's sitting somewhere now, sucking on his pipe and smiling with a certain sense of satisfaction.
Topics: refugees, world-politics, unrest-conflict-and-war, eyes, medical-procedures, bangladesh
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