How one man hid 162 refugee children from Thai police
When existing is an illicit activity, you have to be creative about how you send your kids to school.
By Ben Wolford
Muhammad Ejaz is in clothing. That is, it’s his job. “I give exhibitions of ladies fashion,” he told me. He’ll buy a bunch of shawls in India or Pakistan, where he’s from, and take them to Thailand or Malaysia to sell.
In 2014, he was in Bangkok on a business trip and met a man who taught children in his small apartment. Despite international standards that protect them, asylum seekers in Thailand (as in the United States, Australia and other countries) are imprisoned if they’re caught. This man couldn’t work and the children couldn’t go to school because they were asylum seekers.
Ejaz was troubled by what he saw: the atrophy of children’s minds, intelligent adults unable to work. It didn’t make sense. He began talking to a business partner and with people in Bangkok’s Pakistani refugee community about starting a school. He rented a small apartment nearby and went to work on this idea full time. It didn’t make a difference to Ejaz, a Muslim, that many of the Pakistani refugees were Christian. “I had some funds with me and wanted to relax and decided to help people,” he said. “That was the change I was looking for. … When you tell people you want to start a learning center and you see the hope and excitement.”
They registered 162 children for school. When their parents brought them to register, Ejaz asked them about their credentials. One woman had a master’s degree and had published research. “This woman was highly educated,” Ejaz said. “More educated than me.” What are you doing? he asked her. “We are doing nothing, actually,” she said. “We are living in one room, the whole family. Parents are discussing problems in front of children, children growing older than their ages.” By the end of registration, Ejaz had a list of over 40 parents with college degrees who volunteered to teach.
But where to put them?
The refugees in Bangkok have been violently threatened by religious fanatics, racists, war and shady governments in Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Vietnam, China and many other countries. Thousands of them live in hiding in the city. To escape death and persecution in their countries, they buy the cheapest plane ticket to the first country that will take them. With its relaxed tourism visa policies and central location, Bangkok has become a hub of these sorts of refugees. They usually go straightaway to the office of the United Nations refugee agency to file an asylum claim and to obtain a voucher identifying them as refugees-in-waiting. It’s supposed to protect them from imprisonment and illegal deportation, but Thailand ignores it.
Bangkok is the kind of city where foreigners stand out. Two hundred Pakistanis roaming the streets in the morning and afternoon each day would get them all thrown into detention. So Ejaz talked to his landlady. They worked out a deal to rent the roof of the building. Half the roof was shaded, and there were three rooms up there. Ejaz sought and received textbook donations and cash donations to cover the rent. The parents developed a curriculum.
Rooftop refugee school was in session.
When I met Muhammad, at a Starbucks in Bangkok, near the end of 2014, he was exuberant. He was convinced he was on to something. If his idea of a self-sufficient refugee community worked, then he could take the model and replicate it in cities around the world where asylum seekers are forced to live in the shadows. He called his organization Refugee Help Refugee. It’s still chugging ahead in Bangkok.
But the school didn’t last. By the end of the year, the people sponsoring their rent couldn’t afford to keep giving, and the landlady couldn’t let them use it for free. The asylum seekers’ resources wore thinner and thinner until they were fighting over food donations. Vestiges of Ejaz’s organization remain, but Ejaz has returned to Pakistan, where he’s trying to think of another way around the problem.
If countries continue to deny asylum seekers the right to work, and violate international laws by criminalizing their existence, then any improvement to their lives will have to form underground, through secretive channels, on anxious alert for law enforcement raids. “We wanted to bring dignity to refugees,” Ejaz told me. It’s going to take a groundswell, and policy change, to confer the kind of dignity these thousands of people deserve.
But for some random ladies fashion exhibitor from Pakistan, it was one hell of an effort.
