“Oin doije!” the girls shout. “Fire! Fire!” Giggling, the girls shake their friends lying on the floor, pretending to be asleep, and mime creeping out of a burning building together.
The audience, mostly mothers and workers in the girl-friendly centre, clap politely before the performers tire of the pretend-fire-alarm skit and break out skipping ropes, taking it in turns to leap in between two whirring cables, screaming deafeningly.
“They have no idea this is their last chance to be children,” one worker says.
This hut in the sprawling Cox’s Bazar camp is up a steep flight of doughy clay steps, wet from a recent blast of monsoon rain, and only accessible from the main road after a hike up sandbags and across bamboo bridges.
It is fortified by a concrete wall perimeter and even has a woman casing the exterior of the joint, making sure the girls inside have total privacy to be as silly and goofy as they like without the threat of men seeing.
It’s also one of the only places you are likely to see girls aged 12 and up at all in Cox’s Bazar – Rohingya girls are normally hidden from sight, secreted away in the hundreds of thousands of huts across the camp.
Childhood for Rohingya girls does not last long. Girls in the camp are able to be married off from the day they start their period, and people here talk casually of brides being as young as 12. As unthinkably awful a fate as this may be, the alternative is not necessarily that much better.
From the day girls in the camp begin to menstruate until the day they get married, they are no longer allowed to leave their hut. This is standard practice for Rohingyas, and is the product of a mixture of religious belief in the importance of female modesty and cultural norms from their communities in Myanmar.
While girls back across the border would are at least able to walk around their gardens and paddy fields, or among families they knew, they are now no longer allowed outside their front door unless it’s an emergency and they’re wearing a burqa.
The huts can be very small, some the size of a disabled toilet cubicle, and they are achingly hot in the summer. Once or twice a day, the girls are allowed to cover themselves up and go to the toilet, collect water, and perhaps wash themselves.
But even before they hit puberty, it’s a challenge to help girls be allowed out of their homes.
“At first some girls’ mothers said they were not allowed to come here,” says the woman who oversees the centre, which is run by Save the Children, who declines to be named. After seeing the sort of activities they would do, eventually some parents agreed to let their children come.
“The older girls come in the morning and at 11.30am they go back to their homes to help the mothers cook and clean.” At other similar centres across the camp, workers successfully lobbied husbands to let their child brides come to some of the sessions, but not everybody is so easy with the centres.
“We are facing many problems here. When we opened, the religious leader at the local mosque issued a fatwa against Ludo – they told the parents: ‘oh no no Ludo is prohibited in Islam, it’s gambling.’”
Ludo is by some distance the most popular game with the girls, and it’s possible the fatwa was issued because it was seen as a threat to Islamic learning. The people from this centre went to the mosque to explain their position, and managed to have the fatwa overturned after agreeing a schedule with the mosque, where the girls would go to recite Koran in the morning and then come and play afterwards.
Romanah is 12. She’s a regular at the centre, and – like all the other girls – a Ludo enthusiast but, she adds, she also likes skipping.
“I made so many friends here,” she says. “I like to play with them and make things with them, and I like to learn things together and I like to walk outside with them. I want to be an educated girl.”
She has been coming here for two months. “Before, I was worrying a lot about what happened in Myanmar, the cutting people, the killing people, and when the military were setting fire to people. But by coming here, I forgot everything. When I play with my friends I can be released from remembering this kind of thing. I can get some happiness.”
Being cooped up indoors all day was terrible for Romanah, says her mother, Amina. “She wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even her siblings,” she says. “She wouldn’t say one word. The first time we came here, she was quite nervous because it was a totally new place for her, but after two weeks she became normal and she was talking with everyone.”
There was initially a very high uptake of parents signing their girls up for the centre, but around 35 girls attend every day, suggesting there are many more who are not allowed out.
The lot of a Rohingya girl is unenviable by almost any standard. The NGO Plan International found that 21 per cent of girls aged 15-19 it surveyed had been – or were – married, 16 per cent had been or were pregnant and 76 per cent of 300 girls it asked said they were never able to make decisions about their lives.
Games like pretending to wake up a room full of people during a house fire, or choosing which vegetables to buy in the market aren’t just for fun, they’re vital to show girls how to make rudimentary decisions. NGOs spread the message about child marriage being unhealthy for girls because giving birth before their bodies are ready is bad. Many parents are receptive to the message, but many mothers were married when they were 12 or 13, and don’t see why it should be different for their daughters.
“The reality for women and girls in the Rohingya refugee camps is beyond imaginable," says Mike Noyes, deputy director at ActionAid UK. "They have suffered a nightmarish ordeal, with many experiencing abhorrent sexual and other violence. Mothers saw their own babies burnt alive, and their homes razed to the ground.
“Now, women and girls who fled their homes, holding the physical and mental injuries of trauma, have settled in camps in desperate search of safety – only to find they bear the brunt of the ongoing crisis. Intimate partner violence is common, with frustrations taken out on wives – and, outside the home, women and girls fear attacks whilst visiting the toilet. Desperate families are coming under pressure to ‘marry off’ their daughters, and young girls are especially vulnerable to being forced into sex trafficking.”
For parents of adolescent girls, the situation in the camp feels hopeless. Halima has four adolescent daughters and one son. Inside their hut, it’s stiflingly hot and completely devoid of any entertainment or electricity. The only book they own is the Koran, which the girls are not allowed to read when they have their period. They spend all day every day sitting on the concrete floor, while their brother is at liberty to walk around the camp, and Halima is at her wits’ end.
“We have been here for nine months. They just live in the house, they don’t go outside. None of them. They stay at home all the time.” The girls nod. To pass the time they embroider decorative hand fans, but material can be hard to come by, so they can’t do it all the time.
“They go to the toilet wearing a burqa but otherwise they don’t,” says Halima, referring to a garment classified as a niqab by most other people - a loose robe with a headscarf leaving a gap for the girl's eyes. “We only have two burqas so they have to share them, and I have to beg people for fabric so in the future they can have one each.”
The demand for the cover-ups is so high that sewing workshops run by NGOs are considering adding them to the roster of garments they teach girls and women to make.
Keeping the girls in burqas and trapped in their homes is supposed to guard against the constant threat of sexual harassment and trafficking. Girls are unlikely to admit they have ever been harassed or even looked at in a way they find threatening as it’s seen as so shameful.
Walking around the camp, men are everywhere – carrying huge bamboo sticks, sitting at stalls, soaping their bodies by water pumps and walking around topless, while girls have to walk for miles and stand in queues in the sun and rain in order to wash in private and hurry back home. They wash with their clothes on, because the fear that men will break into the washrooms to look at them is so great.
One time girls are particularly vulnerable is when they have their period. NGOs give out reusable sanitary towels and soap to girls, but washing the pads can be difficult, as most of them have to leave their homes to wash things, and then have to do it in full view of other people.
For most of the girls, it means walking as far away from crowds as possible on their rare trips out of their homes, and carrying the washed rags back to their hut and trying to tuck them up in a bamboo rafter where they won’t easily be seen. It can be a struggle to get their sanitary towels dry for the next day. They are not allowed to be in front of their father when they have their period, or eat with the rest of the family.
Romjan, 17, and Nosimara, 16, are best friends, and have lived in the camp for eight months. Adjusting to the new system hasn’t been easy, and they both feel embarrassed to carry their used sanitary ware around or just generally to be seen out and about. “It makes us feel sad and disgusting,” Nosimara says.
“I was very sad when I started my period,” says Romjan. “I knew I would not be able to go outside anymore.”
Despite the fact her daughter rarely ventures beyond their hut, Romjan’s mother is still terrified. “We are very conservative,” she says. “I think that if my daughter goes outside people will gossip about her, which is why I feel afraid. I’m very ashamed when they go outside.”
“In Myanmar we were frightened of military but in Bangladesh now say: ‘the kidnappers are coming’ so we are frightened of kidnappers instead,” says Romjan. “Sometimes I feel jealous of boys.” She smiles nervously.
Nosimara agrees. “Sometimes I think to myself ‘I wish I was allowed to go outside without a burqa’.”
Conversation turns to life in Myanmar. “I miss nothing about home,” says Romjan, “but I miss my clothes. Because you know girls love clothes! We only have three sets each and we have to sleep in the same clothes too. I had a coffee-coloured dress and the skirt was embroidered with stones – it was very gorgeous. I miss this dress very much.”
Nosimara nods enthusiastically. “I had a red dress with stones, it was very expensive – 50,000 Myanmar taka (£27), and I miss this. I used to wear it for Eid.”
They talk for a while about clothes and special occasions they have left behind, forgetting for a while what lies ahead.
Orla Murphy, Plan International’s Country Director in Bangladesh, said: “Rohingya girls are being condemned to a prison-like existence.
“Tight restrictions imposed on them by their communities mean they are trapped in their stifling tents for almost 24 hours a day and isolated from society, most are not able to access schools and engage in other social activism that are so important for young girls’ development.
“Culturally, adolescent girls don’t leave their houses uncovered. But with many girls not owning a burqa and with no means of buying one, it makes it incredibly difficult for them to have any freedom within the camp.”