When I arrived at Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar in July, the infamous monsoon was well underway. The rain was intense, roads were muddy, and it was very difficult to move around. Cox’s Bazar—the closest big town to the Rohingya refugee camps—is now the base city for most of the humanitarian agencies working with the refugees. The distance between Cox’s Bazar and Kutupalong Camp—the world’s largest refugee camp—is barely 30 kilometers. However, due to the rain and the area’s hilly terrain, it seemed like it took ages to get there.

Watching the rains, I asked myself how could millions of refugees live in these conditions. As far as I could see, there were paddy fields covered by monsoon water. Hundreds of vehicles were going in the same direction, toward the refugee camps. The sudden increase in traffic must be overwhelming for the local host communities, I realized.

The violence against Rohingyas in Myanmar has been called a textbook example of “ethnic cleansing” by the United Nations Human Rights Council. However, Rohingya migration to Bangladesh is not entirely new. Some sources suggest that Rohingyas began migrating to Bangladesh in the mid-1970s, and that trend increased in the early 1990s when the Myanmar government repealed their citizenship rights. However, the recent large-scale influx of refugees began August 25, 2017, when the Myanmar government launched a military crackdown in response to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s attack on a local military outpost. Today, more than one million Rohingyas are living in a very cramped area in southeast Bangladesh.

Historically, southeast Bangladesh, which is near the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, is less developed, mountainous, and disaster-prone. The region experiences major cyclones once every three years, and regularly sees landslides, flash floods, and heavy monsoons. The region’s people—who were the first responders to the Rohingya crisis and provided the incoming refugees with food and shelter—are largely poor and depend on farming or some forest activities for their livelihoods.  

In the Madhu Chara Bazar in the Kutupalong Camp, people sell produce for household consumption. I found a small girl sitting next to the road selling some of the vegetables. Maybe her parents were nearby, or maybe not. But I clearly saw the uncertainty of the little girl’s situation in her eyes.

Without any doubt, women and children—who comprise almost 70 percent of the incoming refugees in Bangladesh—will carry the largest scars from Rohingya refugee crisis for the longest time. Maybe these women and children were escaping the violence in their home country, but now they are trapped, not only facing an uncertain future, but also natural hazards. The temporary shelters in which they spend the vast majority of their time highly vulnerable to landslides and flash floods. As of August 2018, the Inter Sector Coordination Group (ISCG), which is coordinating efforts to manage this crisis, reported that an estimated 246,600 individuals or 57,424 households are at risk from landslide or flooding. But we don’t know how many are women and children.

However, there were still many signs of hope. I witnessed people using their entrepreneurial capacities with very limited resources and supports, or helping to engage in local humanitarian efforts.

In Kutupalong, we visited a local “child-friendly space” funded by UNICEF. These spaces seek to provide educational experiences—in an entertaining way—for children in various age groups. Children can play or draw in a safe environment, and receive other services, including education and health care. These spaces are designed and operated in a participatory manner, and psychosocial support workers can help children affected by violence in Myanmar recover from their traumatic experiences.

While there is a huge mismatch between the actual needs and available supports, it was very clear that the local host populations, the government and security forces of Bangladesh, and hundreds of national and international humanitarian and development agencies are working with and for the Rohingyas.

But the question remains: With their limited resources, how well are they prepared, and for how long? What will be the future for the Rohingyas, who were profoundly vulnerable to all forms of oppression and atrocities in their homeland?

And what is our future? How we can avoid similar crises in other parts of the world? How should world leaders respond to this humanitarian crisis in future? Genocide in Rwanda, crisis in Darfur, and conflict in Syria: Did we learn from this terrible past? If not, what do we need to learn? How will we share our history with future generations so they don’t make the same mistakes?

We probably have enough knowledge, information, and skills to de-escalate tense situations or crises. What is urgently needed is the willingness to put humanity first. Crises do not occur overnight. World leaders—including the United Nations—should take bold steps to prevent future major humanitarian crises before they start. The Rohingya crisis didn’t begin August 25, 2017, when the mass exodus started. They experienced decades of oppression, marginalization, and injustice. When their citizenship rights were stripped in 1982, we should have seen it as a sign of the crisis to come. If we do not keep our eyes open for these signals, another crisis in another part of the world may be just a few months away.

Maybe our future will be full of rain, floods, cries, sorrows, and losses—or maybe something different. While my plane was taking off from Cox’s Bazar, millions of Rohingyas were in the hands of thousands of dedicated volunteers, workers, and professionals working 24/7 to provide them with a little more comfort and safety. In my search for a different future, these dedicated people give me optimism—even as today’s forecast looks bleak.