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Ashland teacher travels to Bangladesh to help the persecuted Rohingya Women and children in the refugee camp enjoy a swing set Molly McKissick smuggled, minus the wood, into Bangledesh in her suitcase. [Photo courtesy Molly McKissick] Sunday Feb 26, 2017 at 11:14 AM Feb 26, 2017 at 11:14 AM By John Darling For the Tidings Wading into a virtual war zone on the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar (formerly Burma), Ashland Waldorf Teacher Molly McKissick has a mission — to bring toys to children who had never seen toys and to teach their teachers how to teach in a way that allows time for play and use of imagination. She was only there 10 days, at her own expense, but she got some Ashlanders to make dolls and puppets, stuffed a suitcase with the hardware for a swing set and got donated knitting supplies for adult women. “The children had never heard of a swing,” says McKissick. “They mobbed it until I taught them to make a line and take turns, with 12 swings each. The women had never heard of knitting, but after I taught them how, they loved it.” When the women ran out of yarn, she taught them to twist plastic (there was plenty of plastic in the litter-strewn refugee camp) into yarn and knit with it. She used local wood to make building blocks for the children — and got the men to find wood to fit in the metal swing joints she brought. Using beads, she made a marble run. She used sea shells and stones to make other toys and scraps of cloth to play dress-up — all things familiar to Waldorf students at Siskiyou School. “It was their first time for everything. They just didn’t know about it,” she says. “It was going into the unknown, completely foreign. You could just feel the value for them.” The inhabitants of the refugee camp are the Rohingya, an ethnic group that is Muslim (Myanmar is Buddhist and speaks a different language). They are called to prayer temples (shacks) five times a day, she notes. Their camp is a target for ethnic cleansing by soldiers of both Bangladesh and Myanmar, as both sides, she says, see them as unwanted immigrants and terrorists. Rape and killing are routine and, she says, many children have seen their parents murdered. The Rohingya, she says, are called “the most persecuted people on Earth.” McKissick walked into an impersonal school environment that was on a survival level, with teachers who barked orders, hit children, didn’t know the kids’ names and dealt with overpopulated “sort of mobs that come and go.” How to teach the teachers? Students were taught to wash their hands when they entered, and shake hands when they leave (they’d never heard of a handshake). Teachers were taught storytelling, also unheard of, and to give students this strange new ritual called “free play time.” Instead of barking orders, teachers learned to “just let them alone and learn the whole thing of discovery, imagination and pretend. It’s natural for us but they’ve been traumatized so much, all they think about is getting food.” At first, the children grabbed all of her toys they could carry and went in a corner to hoard them, but after a few days, they learned to put them in the center of the room and share. “I set up four groups of 15 children each, six days a week,” she says. “Every time I showed up, kids would be waiting there. They’d never had anyone show up for them. “It was very expensive to get there and was super-hard work, but so worth it, if nothing more than to give them a reference point in their lives of what it feels like to be free.” McKissick got connected to the camp by her brother, who works for the United Nations Commission for Refugees in Bangladesh. She has been to the camp twice, and Save the Children, a London-based non-governmental organization (NGO) operating in undeveloped countries, wants her to come back. What’s the point of it? “We hope there’s some remote possibility they will be free … I said to them they will be stronger and will know how to be in the world — and know kindness, cooperation and the use of imagination. A government official in charge of the camp was her bodyguard. The man forbade journalists from shooting videos and made them delete their shots. However, McKissick kept hers, possibly for a later documentary. “I was definitely in danger and I knew it. They (soldiers) were always bracing for an uprising of these desperate people living at a subsistence level. The camps are always guarded. They are protecting the Rohingya, but also protecting against them.” McKissick says she would go back “if someone gave me $10,000. It’s a super-happy story, really.” — John Darling is an Ashland freelance writer. Reach him at [email protected].