Rohingya Toy Story: What Rohingya children teach us about their right to play

Photography by Anuwar Sadek, Ayub Khan Dkl, Barek Hossain, Edris Bin Nur, Ishrat Bibi, Mijanur Rahman, Md Asom, Md Hossain, Md Reaj Uddin, Mohammed Junaid, Mohammed Yakub, Pan Thar, Ro Arfat Khan, Ro Harez Khan, Sahat Zia Hero and Saiful Hoque. Curated by Ayub Khan Dkl and David Palazón.

Tarek Jamil, 8, holds his handmade kite. © Ayub Khan Dkl.

Play is fun but it is so much more. It is foundational for children's learning, development and social skills. Every child has a right to play that is recognised and protected in Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, where mobility is restricted, schooling has been cut, and safe public space is scarce, play becomes one of the few remaining domains where a child can explore, create, and assert a sense of self. It is not an afterthought to survival. It is part of survival.

For Reyas, 8, a fruit shell becomes a helmet, and the alley becomes his stage. © Ro Arfat Khan.

For displaced children living with uncertainty, play functions as a stabilising force. Neuroscience shows that play regulates stress, builds emotional resilience, and safeguards mental health. In the camps, these functions are not abstract theory, they are visible in the way children gravitate to open ground, rooftops, mud, sticks, wheels, and scraps. When formal learning collapses, the body and mind find other ways. Play becomes a form of quiet self-preservation.

Sufait, aged 11, creates the steering wheel for his toy car. © Md Hossain.

Three boys show off their handmade merda gari, rolling toys crafted from scraps and plenty of ingenuity. © Md Hossain.

The photographs in this photo-essay reveal something deeper than the objects themselves. They show a curriculum children design for themselves: physics through carts, aerodynamics through kites, architecture through shelters, social negotiation through games, sensory learning through sand and mud, emotional regulation through symbolic play. These are the foundations of cognitive and social development delivered not through formal instruction but through a child’s own creative impulse.

“Ze gasoror hae gula” is a Rohingya proverb meaning “Like tree, like fruit.” It fits these three boys perfectly: when their handmade cart broke, they didn’t run back to the elder who built it; they set about repairing it themselves. In the camp, children inherit skills the way they inherit stories by watching, trying, and doing. © Mohammed Yakub.

Much of this creativity reflects what pedagogues call loose-parts play, a term coined by Simon Nicholson, rooted in Reggio Emilia and Montessori traditions, where children learn by repurposing whatever the environment offers. In the camps, loose parts are everywhere — discarded tyres, plastic, sticks, tin cans, rope, bamboo offcuts. What matters is not scarcity but possibility. Children do not ask permission from the material world. They transform it.

A Rohingya boy builds a miniature house from sticks tied with red string, each post set in its own cement foundation, a child’s game with the logic of an architect. © Md Asom.

A boy walks down a narrow path pulling a handmade wooden car. A small invention that carries a quiet sense of pride and purpose. © Barek Hossain.

So many of the toys are vehicles: carts, sleds, makeshift cars, pull-toys with wheels made from bottle caps or melted plastic. In a place where physical mobility is heavily restricted, children create their own means of movement. These objects are not just toys; they are propositions. They express the basic human desire to travel, to steer something, to feel momentum and direction, even if along a short alleyway.

A series of handmade wooden cars crafted by young Rohingya inventors. © Photos (from left to right): 1. Sahat Zia Hero, 2. Mohammed Junaid, 3. Md Asom, 4. Mijanur Rahman, 5. Md Hossain, 6. & 7. Md Asom, 8. Barek Hossain, 9. Md Hossain, 10. Ro Arfat Khan, and 11. Ayub Khan.

Thirteen-year-old Nur Hafiz holds a handmade boat crafted from tin. His creation reflects memories shared in the camps about dangerous crossings on the Naf River and the wish that he could have helped. © Pan Thar.

“I heard stories of drone attacks and boats capsizing in the Naf River during the second wave of genocide against the Rohingya in Arakan. Creating this handmade boat with tin, I imagine—if I were a boatman, maybe I could have saved lives that day.” Nur explained.

Two friends built this tiny shelter in Camp 13, a place to play and to rest from the sun. One boy proudly sits inside while the other, too shy for the camera, waits just out of frame. © Md Asom.

Joy after successfully building a house structure using recycled ice-cream spoons and rubber bands. © Mohamed Yakub.

Miniature houses, bamboo structures, mud kitchens, imaginary compounds. This is not random play but architectural rehearsal. Children construct small-scale versions of the environments they wish to inhabit: stable, enclosed, designed by their own hands. In contexts where housing is fragile and temporary, the act of building becomes a way to express their dreams.

Nur Asma, 10, shapes small plants bottle-top “trees,” a quiet form of play that mirrors her hope for a greener camp after recent fires destroyed much of the surrounding vegetation. Inspired by her grandmother’s planting, she tends to these tiny seedlings with the same patience. First published in The Guardian, 25 August 2022. © Ishrat Bibi

Kites appear across the camps with striking frequency. Light, cheap, aerodynamic, and full of invention. The sky is the only space without fences, checkpoints, or ownership, and children claim it with absolute confidence. A kite is a declaration: even if the ground is limited, the horizon is still negotiable.

Abdu Hafez (14) with Nuraya (9) hold the large kites they built from bamboo sticks and scrap plastic. © Ayub Khan Dkl.

“When our kites rise into the sky, it feels like we’re free for a moment, like we are flying back home.” Abdu Hafez said.

Children in the camps design and fly their own kites using bamboo sticks and discarded plastic, learning balance, tension, and aerodynamics through play. © Photos (from left to right): 1. Edris Bin Nur, 2. Mijanur Rahman, 3. Edris Bin Nur, and 4. Saiful Hoque.

A Rohingya boy in Bhasan Char stacks empty relief cans into a target, preparing to knock them down with a thrown ball. © Mijanur Rahman.

Between the shelters, Rohingya children turn sandals into a game. © Saiful Hoque.

Badminton with sandals: Rohingya boys remake the game their own way. © Md Hossain.

Group games: cricket, jumping games, shared carts, competitive balancing, are not merely recreational. They are training grounds for cooperation, turn-taking, conflict resolution, and social belonging. In a crowded environment, children carve out micro-societies governed by rules they create and enforce themselves. These are their first civic spaces.

Rohingya children stand together with the toy guns they crafted from sticks and scrap materials. A mix of play, skill, and the small freedoms they carve out in camp life. © Ro Harez Khan.

Some toys imitate tools, weapons, or adult roles. This is not a sign of danger or aggression but a universal feature of childhood: symbolic play allows children to test power, responsibility, bravery, and consequence. In the camps, where adults must constantly navigate risk, symbolic play becomes a rehearsal for agency, a rare domain where children get to feel in control.

A Rohingya boy stands beneath a tree behind the camp’s barbed-wire fencing, holding a homemade slingshot as he looks for birds. © Md Reaj Uddin.

Two Rohingya girls shape clay into bowls, utensils, and tiny objects, turning a patch of ground into their first workshop. © Saiful Hoque.

Clay dishes, mud pots, leaf gardens, pretend cooking, miniature boats. These acts preserve cultural memory in environments where displacement threatens to erase it. Children repeat the gestures they see at home: grinding, shaping, cooking, sweeping, not as labour, but as play. In doing so, they keep social rituals alive.

Taro leaves, plastic bottles, and sticks become the materials of play when toys are out of reach. As the children arranged and balanced what they found, a simple measuring scale emerged almost without intention. © Mohammed Yakub.

Play is deeply sensory: mud squeezed into shape, wheels pushed across sand, wind caught in plastic, bamboo carved into form. Hands are the first teachers. Through tactile exploration, children develop fine motor skills, spatial reasoning, and practical intelligence. This type of learning is fundamental, and impossible to replicate through screens or worksheets.

A Rohingya boy shapes wet sand into a small fortress. © Edris Bin Nur.

A boy sits with his legs buried in sand, shaping a small mound in front of him. A quiet game of make-believe on an open field. © Md Reaj Uddin.

What runs through this collection is not resilience — a word often misused — but competence. These children are not passively “coping”; they are actively constructing the conditions of their own development. They are learning, testing, building, negotiating, imagining. They are practising life. And they do so with seriousness, creativity, and intent.

A Rohingya child built this small solar-powered fan from a sand-filled plastic bottle and a salvaged motor, a simple invention to help him cope with the extreme heat. © Md Reaj Uddin.

The right to play includes the right to time, space, and safe materials. None of these are guaranteed in the camps, especially as learning centres close due to funding cuts. Yet children continue to create. What they need is not complex infrastructure but environments that are safe, predictable, and not hostile to childhood.

A Rohingya boy carefully shapes a handmade trophy from scraps of foil, tape, and wood. In the camp, even victory must be built by hand. © Barek Hossain.

Md Anus is a Barcelona F.C. fan. He proudly displays the trophy he crafted for his friends football tournament. This is proof that celebration, like play itself, survives on imagination alone. © Barek Hossain.

These photographs dismantle the idea that play is trivial. They show play as learning, healing, cultural continuity, autonomy, social practice and personal expression. They show children who refuse to let their development be interrupted simply because the world has interrupted everything else.

Nosur, 14, holds a ball long past its lifespan, torn, repaired, but still in play. © Anuwar Sadek.

“Even though the field is small and the ball is torn. When I play football together with friends, it feels like the world belongs to me. My dream is to be the best player in the world.” Nosur said.

If we want these children to have futures, we must defend their right to play. Not as charity, but as the core of development itself. When institutional support collapses, children do not stop learning; they simply build their own systems. What we owe them is simple: protection, education, recognition, and the conditions in which imagination can flourish. As Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Nothing captures this spirit more clearly than the work of Mohammed Toyub, known in his block as Engineer Toyub. His instinct for making things began long before displacement, in Bardoga village in Buthidaung, where he floated boats made from taro leaves and built small houses from bamboo.

“It was play, but it was also the beginning of everything.” Toyoub said.

After fleeing to Bangladesh in 2017, life in the camp muted that early passion until he saw an excavator at work. “It reminded me of what I once dreamed to make,” he said. Using whatever he could find, he began building again. His life-sized robot, assembled from old motors, wires and discarded materials, moves and speaks in Rohingya. It is fragile but extraordinary for where and how it was made, and it has already drawn attention — his work has been featured on Zita TV and in the Dhaka Tribune.

“I wanted to build something my community had never seen. Even if I fail, I try again until it stands.” Toyoub mentioned.

Toyub stopped creating for two years to support his family. “I am the eldest. I had to take care of everyone,” he explained. When he returned to his craft, a small donation from a well-wisher abroad helped him restart. His inventions began circulating online and his confidence grew.

He now dreams of studying engineering properly. “There are many talented youths in the camp but not enough opportunities for us. I want to study abroad but I do not get such chances,” he said. Even so, he continues. His current project is a homemade drone. “I will update soon. I only need a little more support.” Toyoub said.

Toyoub’s robot stands in the middle of his shelter, a handmade testament to what determination can build. © Mohammed Toyoub. Collected by Ayub Khan.

In the camps, where formal education is fragile and resources scarce, imagination becomes the first and most reliable teacher. Long before textbooks arrive, a child is already experimenting, constructing, testing, and transforming the world with whatever is at hand. These photographs show that learning does not wait for institutions; it begins the moment a child is free to imagine.

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Further reading

Save the Children (n.d.). Children’s Right to Play.

International Play Association (2017). Access to Play for Children in Situations of Crisis: Toolkit. 

International Play Association (2017). Access to Play in Crisis: Toolkit.

Berk, L. (n.d.). Understanding the Role of Toys in Child Development: Special Issue. 

Bernard van Leer Foundation (2021). Nurturing Care in Humanitarian Settings. 

Bernard van Leer Foundation (2017). The Power of Play.

Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The Ambiguity of Play. Harvard University Press.

Dodd, H., Kingsley, J. et al. (Various). Research on Play and Emotional Regulation. University of Exeter.

El Gemayel, S. (2020). Working with Children Affected by Displacement. UCL / DeCID.

Güven, G. (2025). Educational and Cultural Values of Ancient Toys. 

Lancy, D. (2014). The Anthropology of Childhood. Cambridge University Press.

Moving Minds Alliance (2020). Early Childhood Services in Crisis Contexts.

Page, T., & Thorsteinsson, G. (2017). Designing Toys to Support Children’s Development. 

Plan International (2024). Learning Toys Production Guide for Early Childhood Care and Education.

UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (2013). General Comment No. 17 on Article 31: The Right to Play.

UNHCR & Save the Children (2016). Solving the Education Crisis for Displaced Children. 

UNICEF (2018–2020). Learning Through Play.

UNICEF (2022). Childcare in Humanitarian Crises. 

United Nations (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 31).