Sons of the Rohingya
- Enoch Eicher
- Aug 30
- 9 min read
Arham (compassionate, merciful)
The open back door sends swathes of sunlight spooling over the white tiled floor. It also lets the mosquitoes in, and the son swats them away from the sleeping body of his youngest brother.
His mother sits at a table in the corner of the sunlit room, the black embroidered hijab she had hastily donned gently contrasting with her light brown face. Her eyes are solemn and heavy.
She isn’t used to having men in the house when her husband is away. “He is killing a cow,” the boy says. There is a lack of halal meat available in Fort Wayne, he explains, so his father and friends pool money, buy an entire cow, and butcher it.
I sit cross-legged on the chair facing the sofa, shifting to be comfortable in the heat. A standing fan whirrs noisily next to me, turning in wide arcs and providing momentary relief to the bodies in the room.
The mother shifts in the corner, her eyes running over her three sons. Her eight-year-old son Arham sits on the low red sofa, lazily shooing away flies that pester the baby. The middle child sprawls on a frayed red-and-white floor mat, eyes transfixed on the educational videos playing on the iPad before him.
This is a Rohingya family in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The Rohingya people are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority group residing in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State, which shares borders with Bangladesh and India.
For decades, the Rohingya have faced extreme suffering in Myanmar. They have been denied access to citizenship and documentation, prevented from accessing health care, education, and work opportunities, confined to camps and villages, and subjected to extreme violence.They did not want to leave Myanmar. They were forced to flee.
“I pray every day to Allah that there will be a ceasefire,” says the mother. Her voice is lilting and deliberate as she speaks in Rohingya through her son. She doesn’t speak English, so she communicates to me via Arham. He is the man of the house when his father is away. Translating for his parents is a burden he will carry for a long while.
She knows well the deep hurt of death. Her eyes gaze out the back door and into the distance. Tears glint at the edges as she tells her story.
Her mother was dying, and she knew it. Growing up in a large family, they were used to finding ways to help each other out, but today she was helpless. They couldn’t step out of the house. They didn’t have papers. The militia were burning houses and killing undocumented Rohingya, and they didn’t want to join that statistic.
With no work came intense poverty. And it was poverty, and the inability to afford a hospital, that killed her mother.
A wave of bullets killed her father. Bold and desperate to provide food for his family, he joined a group of Rohingya men fishing in the Bay of Bengal. They were caught off the shores by the militia, who gunned them down without mercy. Riddled brown bodies turned the blue sea red.
Arham speaks all this in a monotone, his eyes staring at the floor near my feet, avoiding his mother’s face as she relives her pain. She looks away. She doesn’t want her sons to see her cry.
“She mourns a lot,” says Arham softly. “She wouldn’t eat for days, as she thought about her family.”
They, along with other families, send what little money they can back to Myanmar to help fund militias that protect the Rohingya in defiance of the genocidal intentions of the government and its military juntas.
“She is happier to be here than in Burma and Malaysia,” says Arham. Malaysia is where she fled with her husband after most of her family was killed. They endured persecution and targeted attacks by the Malaysian police, who sought to exploit the paperless, and thus powerless, refugees.
The 1982 Citizenship Law in Myanmar ensured that the majority of Rohingya do not have any identity documents and are thus stateless. The United Nations broke that cycle when they were granted UN identification cards recognizing them as refugees in need of international protection.
“Having an identity is a basic human right,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi during a recent visit to Cox’s Bazar. “And remember: many of these people, all their life, did not have a proper identification. So, for them, it’s also an incredible step into a more dignified life.”
For most Rohingya born after 1982, living in Malaysia, the UN card was the first document they had ever received.
After countless interviews with the UN Refugee Agency, Arham’s family was granted passage and refugee status in the United States. The five of them bundled onto a plane, clutching tickets to Fort Wayne.
The largest group of Rohingya in the United States live in Fort Wayne, with more than 1,000 new residents, many of whom began to arrive in 2013.
Yusuf (God increases)
Yusuf knew that. He was on the same plane as Arham, headed to Fort Wayne with his Indonesian wife and four daughters. They were the last of his large family to make it to America.
He walks into the house beaming. Tousling Arham’s hair, he nods a greeting to the mother in the corner. His wife comes in right behind him, greeting us in Rohingya and English, her beautiful wide smile complementing her bright eyes and light pink hijab. His youngest daughter follows shyly.
Yusuf stands tall. Slightly potbellied, his smile is his dominating feature. Wispy strands of hair cross his pate, and he absentmindedly rubs the palms of his tough, calloused hands together.
“Kismat tha,” he says. He’s speaking Hindi to me, as his English isn’t perfect and Arham is tired of translating. Yusuf picked up Hindi while working in Malaysia, where he learned four languages. “Kismat tha,” he repeats. It means, “It was destiny.”
It was destiny, Yusuf says, that he met Arham’s family on the plane and could care for them when they arrived in the States two years ago. It was destiny that he married his Indonesian wife in Malaysia. It was destiny that he made it here to America.
It may have been destiny that brought him here, but it was hunger that made him leave home. Growing up in a small village in Myanmar, with genocide raging around him, there was no food at home.
“We used to eat once a week,” says Yusuf. He was seven years old. There was no food, no work, and if he stepped outside, he would be killed.
Thailand was the dream. A friend told him about how there was a lot of money there. And at seven years old, he wanted to go. His parents refused, but he insisted. “I needed to eat,” he says.
When they gave in, an “agent” took Yusuf and other fleeing Rohingya through the jungle, toward the promised land of Thailand. He walked for two weeks with scarce food. When they crossed the border, they were caught by police.
After spending time in a holding unit, he was released in Thailand and immediately looked for work. He needed food for his scrawny belly, and to send money home to his helpless parents. A local store in a small town took him in, promising to send money back on his behalf.
He worked there for two years. Every month, they told him they were sending money, and Yusuf smiled, happy in the thought that he was supporting his family.
He looks me dead in the eyes with a wry smile. “They fooled me,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper. “They never sent money home after the first time. I was a child slave.”
He found this out when a friend from his village told him his family hadn’t received anything.
“I had to run away.” Leaving in the dark of the night, he pleaded with a passing motorcyclist to take him to a larger city where he could work. Taking pity, the man drove him for an hour through thick forest before dropping him at a shanty hotel. “I wanted to go to the city, but I landed in a village in the middle of the jungle.”
Yusuf spent roughly three years there, back in the cycle of child labour. A raid by local police turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
“When the police caught me, I was happy,” he says. “I was not making any money. At least they were going to take me home.”
He ran home through the dense jungles of Burma, running at night. The day was dangerous, with roving militias killing Rohingya on sight. When he arrived, only his father and younger sister were there.
His sisters had been married off to Malaysia, and his mother had followed them. His family was amazed. They had not heard from him in six years and had assumed he was dead. “Voh soche the ki mein duniya se chala gaya tha.” They thought I had left this world.
Fleeing to Malaysia in ’93, he settled there with his family, received UN protection, and watched as one by one, his family left for the US.
He was the last to come. He smiles. He is happy to be here.
Salman (safe, secure)
The McDonald's is loud. I have to lean in to hear Salman speak. His voice is low and confident, matching his lithe body and angular face. His eyes seem to stare through me as he recalls his past. Weaving in and out of English and Hindi, I let him tell his story.
My story is a little different.
I was born in Nayapara refugee camp in Bangladesh. I lived there until the 6th grade, attending madrasa until I turned 15. Life in the camp was tough, and the Bangladeshi police were harsh and controlling. I am one of six brothers, and we all knew we had to find a way out.
We left Bangladesh from Teknaf in a small boat, hoping for a better life. We didn't have passports or the means to buy real tickets—our aukat (status or standing) was low, and we were at the mercy of others. Two hundred of us were crammed into a small boat, headed toward a large ship anchored in deep water. After a day’s journey, we reached the ship, but that was just the beginning.
For twelve days, we were stuck at sea with no food or water. It was raining, and the wind was howling. People were dying all around me, and all we could do was pray to Allah for survival. After what felt like an eternity, we finally saw the shores of Thailand. We had to wait two more days before small boats came to take us off the ship.
But our relief quickly turned to horror. The men who came were human traffickers. They took us to a large cave in a mountain. I was 16. They beat us mercilessly, demanding ransom money from our families. I watched as they beat my older brother in front of me. I couldn't react or show emotion—if they knew we were related, they'd target us even more. It was all about the money. Sometimes you paid and got released to Thailand or Malaysia, and
sometimes you paid and got nothing.
One night, my brother and I decided to escape. We ran with 15 others. They shot at us, but somehow we managed to keep running, holding hands in the dark. We eventually made it to a small Muslim town in Thailand, where people took us in. They gave us shelter in the masjid, and a family there treated us like their own. It felt like a miracle.
But it didn’t last. The police eventually found us and took us to a holding facility. The conditions were horrible, and we felt trapped once again. We organized a hunger strike, determined to make our voices heard. Eventually, the media came. TV cameras exposed the inhumane conditions. After that, they moved us to a larger facility. I gave interviews there, telling my story to anyone who would listen.
Finally, after what felt like a lifetime of struggle and endless legal loopholes, I made it to the United States.
Hadir (the present)
Arham and his younger brother attend school in Fort Wayne. Their father works with Yusuf at a nearby distribution center, and they attend the local Burmese mosque.
Salman is employed at an ice cream store. His family is still in the refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, where they are regularly held for ransom. He has sent money back to free them more than 20 times.
Rohingya refugees, primarily fleeing persecution and violence in Myanmar, have mostly sought refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. The Cox's Bazar region hosts the largest population, with over a million refugees living in crowded camps under challenging conditions. Some have also fled to countries like India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, seeking safety and better opportunities.
The humanitarian crisis remains severe, with limited access to education, healthcare, and basic services, as well as ongoing calls for a sustainable resolution to their statelessness and displacement.
And yet in Fort Wayne, Indiana these three sons flourish. Broken sons of a persecuted race.
The sons of the Rohingya.