The Bone Sparrow by Zana Fraillon

A touching, relevent and educational text on refugees

I admit that I had to look up exactly what the word Rohingya meant when I started to read this striking play, in order to learn more about the story of their people. This group of people are refugees with a complicated history. Not that any refugees have a simple history, but the Rohingya live in a land of limbo, unable to move on and unable to go back. Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic group from Myanmar – although the country's government refuses to recognise them as an ethnic group at all.

Myanmar and its army burned their houses to the ground, stopped people from going to work and to school and forced them to flee. Thousands ended up in different parts of the world and when they arrived, they went into large refugee camps, where they were not only not welcomed, but they were treated like criminals. Some governments even tried to pay them to go back to genocide in a country where they were sure to be killed, rather than give them refuge.