MOST Rohingya fleeing Myanmar for Bangladesh bring more than just the clothes on their back, if any. 

They bring trauma, visible and invisible to the human eye. There is the list of illnesses that ail refugees – diarrhoea, gastritis, influenza, skin diseases and malnourishment.

In the first week of getting out of open skies and into shelters and basic food supplies, those with urgent medical needs such as gunshot wounds and major illnesses will seek and get treatment.

Beyond that, civil society, medical relief and first response groups shoulder the burden of providing primary health care to the estimated 800,000 refugees in the Kutupalong and Balukhali camps in Cox’s Bazar, near the border to Myanmar.

One of the first to respond to the human crisis still unfolding in Cox’s Bazar is Mercy Malaysia which sent its first team there on September 9, two weeks after violence broke out in Myanmar and pushed the latest waves of Rohingya to Bangladesh.

Since then, regular teams of doctors under Mercy Malaysia have arrived to provide primary health care to the refugees in three clinics, one in Kutupalong and two in Balukhali. 

The teams are based in Cox’s Bazar and make the daily 25km commute through narrow and bumpy roads and alleys in 90 minutes, a record considering aid and refugees crowd the same road for the purpose of getting and giving aid.

In Balukhali, the Mercy Malaysia clinics are in two small and cramped sheds – one near the main entrance and market in the camp and the other slightly deeper inside to cater to the community that have turned forests and paddy fields into terraces for makeshift huts of mud, bamboo and tarpaulin.

In Kutupalong, the clinic is in a madrasah or religious school that only operates in the morning. It is a bigger space but the crowd is also bigger than in Balukhali.

The volunteer doctors don’t just work in the clinics. Their day starts the night before, sorting and packing the medicines, vitamins, dressings and everything else needed for a field primary health clinic.

There is a debriefing and a short sleep before dawn breaks and the long day starts with loading the supplies into rented vans out of the local partner – Coast Bangladesh. 

In retrospect, the journey to the camps is probably the shortest part of the day. The clinics are packed, especially the sheds that Mercy Malaysia uses as space is a premium in the camps.

There are more established aid missions but few match Mercy Malaysia in going in further to provide health care to the refugees.

The volunteer doctors work through the day, only stopping for a drink of water due to the extreme heat in tiny sheds packed with refugees seeking cures for their ailments.

Few cases have to be referred but most are dealt with within the clinic as the doctors and locals work to make them healthy and move on beyond being just refugees.

It would be quite fair to say very few would get out of their comfort zone to go all the way to Bangladesh to help the Rohingya. 

But the doctors and medical personnel do, even if it’s just primary health care in a country where natural disasters strike and people worse off than them turn up for help. 

Their two weeks stints are intense and at times emotionally draining if not physically exhausting. 

They meet patients, diagnose ailments and dispense medicines in larger numbers than in Malaysia. 

They deal with people in a language most Malaysians in don’t know with regional dialects that are even more obscure.

Thirty minutes in the shed clinics will make a sane person go mad from the cacophony, cries and shouts. But Mercy Malaysia doctors persevere.

They endure the discomfort in an alien land to provide health and hope to those who need it most – the world’s most unwanted people aka the Rohingya.

It’s a job, it’s a duty and it’s at the end of it all, a tender mercy to help those who need help – the Rohingya. – November 4, 2017.

* Jahabar Sadiq was embedded with a Mercy Malaysia medical team to Cox’s Bazar in October 2017.  He runs The Malaysian Insight.