KUALA LUMPUR: After looking elegant and chic while attending the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle last week, Indian actress Priyanka Chopra next trained her focus on the plight of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
The star of Hollywood TV series Quantico posted a series of photos and video clips on her Instagram account recently and shared her heart-warming and moving experiences during her field visit there.
The 36-year-old New York-based Unicef Goodwill Ambassador urged people to lend their support via www.supportunicef.org while talking about the harrowing stories of the young girls, babies and women who had to endure traumatic experiences due to ongoing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar before arriving at the refugee camps.
Priyanka wrote: “Their trip here was filled with many hardships and tremendous danger. Many of them made their journey on foot, walking for days through the hills, then floating across the Naf River or the Bay of Bengal on make shift boats...many of them injured, pregnant, elderly, etc. Their ordeal didn’t end here... after entering Bangladesh, they would often have to wait for days, sleeping in the open fields with no food or water, for aid workers to reach them. For a lot of the Rohingya children, this ordeal will leave them scarred, physically and emotionally, for the rest of their lives.”
She added that the overcrowded camps housed over 300,000 children and more than 60,000 babies that have been born there over the past eight months.
It wasn’t all bleak though for the winner of the Miss World 2000 pageant when she met the gutsy children. She wrote: “I was quite literally knocked off my feet. A spontaneous, unfiltered moment with these amazing kids, who I spent a couple of hours with laughing and learning. These Child Friendly Spaces created by @unicef give kids access to art, music, dance, sport, and counselling etc. The space has often proved to be very therapeutic, helping these kids deal with the horrific situations they faced.”
She added: “While their lives are safer now, they are all still struggling. The world needs to care. We need to care.”