Six-year-old twins Noor and Aziz live in the largest refugee camp in the world. They are Rohingya Muslims who escaped ethnic cleansing in their native Myanmar for refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh.
They are also Muppets. On Thursday, Sesame Workshop, the non-profit that runs the early education TV show Sesame Street and operates in more than 150 countries, unveiled Aziz and Noor as the latest Muppets in their cast of characters.
The twins will appear with Elmo and other famous Muppets in educational programming about maths, science, health and other topics that will be shown in the camps.
They will speak Rohingya, the language of a group of people that the Myanmar authorities have refused to recognise as a legitimate ethnicity. Elements of Sesame Workshop’s curriculum will be dubbed into Rohingya.
"They are among the most marginalised children on Earth," said Sherrie Weston, president of social impact for the Sesame Workshop, who travelled to the Rohingya refugee camps several times to help formulate the Muppet twins' characters and story lines. "For most Rohingya children, this will be the very first time that characters in media have looked like them, have sounded like them, and really reflect their rich culture."
More than half the residents of the Rohingya refugee settlements in Bangladesh are children. Many suffered trauma after security forces in Myanmar forced them out of their villages, murdering some of their fathers and raping their mothers.
A survey by Médecines San Frontières, released in the wake of a brutal campaign in 2017 that compelled more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee the country in the span of a few months, found that at least 730 children younger than five were killed from late August to late September of that year.
The legacy of violence lingers in Bangladesh and has been incorporated into the Muppets’ histories. Noor, one of the Muppet twins, is scared of loud noises, just as many Rohingya children are today, as gunfire resounds in their memories.
Diversity
Sesame Workshop has long sought to champion diversity and social justice. Muppets and their young playmates on Sesame Street have had autism, HIV and Down syndrome. They have been homeless and struggled with the stigma of having an incarcerated parent. An Afghan Muppet exemplified the importance of educating girls.
Noor and Aziz, as conceptualised by Sesame Workshop, are playful and get along well. Aziz, a boy, helps the family with household chores and is steeped in the Rohingya tradition of storytelling. Noor, a girl, is confident and loves learning. The programming chose to depict them specifically as twins so that they would able to play together as a girl and a boy in a way that other siblings in this traditional Muslim community might not be able to as easily.
“By modelling girls and boys being equal, by having characters that love to learn, it is important that we’re not only inspiring young girls, giving them a sense of possibility that they may not have had, but that we’re showing little boys that girls can have equal roles and responsibilities,” Weston said.
The programming depicts the Rohingya Muppets as living in a vast warren of tent shelters where more than a million mostly stateless people have been crammed with little hope of returning to Myanmar. United Nations officials have suggested that their exodus bears the hallmarks of genocide.
Life in the Rohingya refugee camps can be far harsher than what Noor and Aziz’s back stories suggest. Girls, who are often kept from school, tend to get married before they reach adulthood to ease the financial burden on their families.
This year, hundreds of Rohingya girls spent months at sea in overloaded fishing vessels trying to get to Malaysia, where they had been promised as child brides to Rohingya men labouring as undocumented workers. Dozens died during the journey.
On Friday, in Kutupalong, the biggest of the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, eight-year-old Ajmat Ara shook her head when asked whether she knew of a furry collection of characters called the Muppets. Unlike many girls, she is lucky and goes to a school run by an educational charity.
“We’re learning English and Burmese in school,” she said, before running off to play. – New York Times
