Please help Rosia and Halimah and their sick, starving, and homeless children and babies!

The Family:

Rosia is a Rohingya refugee and mother-of-nine who has been living in a slum in Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur, since her husband Daudkhan passed away in a tragic motorcycle accident seven months ago. Married at 13, with limited education, Rosia and her husband escaped persecution in Myanmar and attained UNHCR status in Malaysia. Rosia's Malaysia-born children and grandchildren are also refugees.

Rosia (40) is currently living with Halimah (19), Mohd Nuru (17), Zarina (14), Fidhaz (11), Abas (7), Sofiyah (5), Hafiz (1), and Halimah's two children, Soleha (2), and Zulaika (3 months). Rosia's two older adult children live nearby. Up until the 22nd of March the two women and eight children were crammed into a small, filthy, dilapidated room with just two beds. Other displaced Rohingya often slept in the room as well. All of the family members have developed a severe case of scabies and impetigo, and are clearly malnourished. Abas, age 7, weighs just 16 kilos. Little 5 year old Sofiyah weighs much less, and is unable to feed herself because she cannot bend her fingers - her hands are covered in open wounds.

As 'foreigners' this family are charged 'foreign' rates at public hospitals, and there is a lot of evidence that they are frequently dismissed by medical staff without proper examinations or due care.

They eat what and when they can, but often it is not enough, and it can be infrequent and poor nutrition.

They face discrimination in finding housing - and once they find it there are no guarantees. The landlady of the slum-room they lived in for three months in Chow Kit kicked them out with no notice because the babies and children were noisy and had a skin infection.

They have received little to no formal education. Halimah was able to attend a UN school until the age of 15, but none of the other children have ever had a chance at schooling. 14 year old Zarina would love to go to school. 19 year old mum-of-two Halimah would love to become a doctor. If she could go anywhere in the world, she would visit New York - she has seen it on TV and it looks very cool. Rosia, the pragmatist, would like to learn English (her teenagers mock her attempts to speak English and she laughs along with them, but her mother spoke English, and she'd like to think she could). These dreams are both heartwarming and soul-destroying, as there is little hope that they will ever be able to do any of these things unless their status changes dramatically.

Currently Rosia financially supports the whole family through the only work available to her on the streets of Chow Kit. Halimah and the older children look after the babies. Life is a day-to-day struggle to survive. To quote Halimah: "It's crazy, always crazy."

My hope is that, through a concerted campaign, we can lessen some of the crazy.

The Wider Context:

We all know that there's a Refugee Crisis going on in the world right now.

We have all seen footage of the millions of people attempting dangerous journeys across land and sea as they attempt to reach Europe, all to escape persecution, war, famine, and hardship in neighbouring continents.

We know that boats of asylum seekers routinely attempt to reach Australian shores, making hazardous voyages in vessels that are often not seaworthy. We know that, in the words of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire:

"no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land".

The United Nations estimates that more than 43 million people are currently forcibly displaced. 15 million of these people are refugees living outside of their home countries.

According to Amnesty International, "most rich countries are still treating refugees as somebody else’s problem. Hiding behind closed borders and fears of being “flooded”, they have conveniently allowed poorer, mainly Middle Eastern, African and South Asian countries, to host an incredible 86% of all refugees."

I have heard anecdotally that there could be as many as 150,000 Rohingya refugees residing in Malaysia, maybe more. These Rohingya are stateless - as a persecuted Muslim minority they are denied citizenship in their homeland of Myanmar, and can never become Malaysian citizens. Once in Malaysia, even if they have official UN refugee status, they are not legally allowed to work, attend school, or access any state support. The same applies to their Malaysia-born children, and their children, and their children's children, and so on. There is no way out of the cycle of poverty.

Malaysia, like other countries in the region, has agreed that refugees with UNHCR cards can legally stay in the country, but that is all. As one of the only peaceful Muslim countries in the world at the moment, and one of the more affluent countries in South East Asia, Malaysia is seen as a best last-resort option for many Rohingya refugees who are fleeing for their lives. Unfortunately Rohingya in Malaysia still face institutionalised racism, discrimination, derision, the threat of deportation, and social exclusion, alongside inescapable poverty.

Your contribution:

With your donation, we hope to help the family back into good health with the right care and medicine, and to provide shelter, food, and clothing. There is no good longterm solution for them right now, due to their refugee status, but we hope to address the immediate critical situation as best we can. By we, I mean myself working with other volunteers and supported by a number of NGOs including:

?Ananti Rajasingam and Nor Fadilah binti Alias at Yayasan Chow Kit, a 24-hour crisis and drop-in centre providing meals, activities, therapy, case management, and educational programmes for at-risk children of Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur. http://www.yck.org.my/

Rohingya community leader Ustaz Rafik, who runs the Selayang Rohingya shelter and 'Rainbow of Hope' school.

Chia Wei Sipatos, a Malaysian based activist at Humanwire, an organisation that supports refugees around the world and helps folks in relative positions of wealth to donate to specific causes and people. https://www.humanwire.org

All money raised over and above the family's immediate needs will go to Yayasan Chow Kit crisis and drop-in centre, and the Selayang shelter and "Rainbow of Hope" school. These two groups will manage the money that comes in and ensure that the family are adequately provided for.

I hope, through this campaign, to get this family out of survival mode as much as possible. So that Sofiyah can eat and doesn't cry every time her fingers touch something. So that Abas is able to hold his arms at his sides and not up in the air to protect his pus filled wounds. So that the open wounds on teeny tiny baby Zulaika's ear and neck disappear without a trace. So that little Hafiz and Soleha can stop scratching and crying. So that they have clothes and beds and warm food in their tummies.

I also hope to increase awareness of the global nature of the current refugee crisis and the exact nature of refugee status and rights in so-called 'holding' countries.

Finally, it would be good to inject some much needed money into the organisations that are on the ground supporting people like Rosia and Halimah and their children.

Please help! XXX