Marina Ibrahim did not start teaching Rohingya children because she set out to help refugees. She did it because residents in her own constituency in Skudai were selling their homes and leaving, unable to live comfortably alongside a growing Rohingya population nearby.
Teaching the children, she figured, was the most practical way to ease the friction for everyone living there.
That is the position she writes from, as reported by TRP, and it is also why her account carries weight on both sides of a conversation that rarely allows for middle ground.
What she saw in the classroom
In the lessons themselves, Marina covered the basics, living in a multi-racial society, cleanliness, being a good neighbour.
She also covered sexual health, because the girls in her classes were afraid of being married off young, even as their own parents arranged it. One day, a student simply stopped showing up. Her classmates told Marina the girl’s father had married her off.
Not everything she saw was bleak. Among the photos she shared was one of a 12-year-old named Anas, who had written in Malay that he wanted to become a footballer, to change his own fate and his family’s.
A small football was drawn at the bottom of the page, with his teacher’s red ticks beside it.
The school itself, run under United Arakan Institute Malaysia, functions in an organised way, classrooms, a whiteboard, lessons, despite sitting entirely outside the formal education system.
The numbers nobody has
Marina has said she does not believe the government actually knows how many Rohingya are living in Malaysia.
She raised the question in state assembly sessions and district-level meetings and did not get an answer.
She has pointed to claims of agents facilitating entry through ports and borders, and to a syndicate selling UNHCR cards, some genuine, some fake, that even enforcement officers could not always tell apart.
Layered on top of that is the UNHCR resettlement process itself, which for many can take a decade or longer, with the queue growing as countries tighten their intake .Her own framing of what happens next has stayed with people: some get tired of waiting, have more children, and eventually stop waiting altogether.
A temporary situation becomes a permanent one by the slow accumulation of years with no resolution.
A vacuum that silence has filled
Marina has been clear that she is not calling for mass deportation, nor asking Malaysians to simply accept things as they are.
What she is asking for is more basic: an accurate count, honest answers, and a government willing to put hard questions to UNHCR directly.
Malaysia receives no financial allocation for hosting refugees, a fact that has rarely been part of the public conversation.
In its place, online hate speech targeting the Rohingya has surged in recent weeks, a petition calling for their expulsion has gathered significant support, and human rights groups have warned that the rhetoric is moving in a direction that could turn physical.
Nobody set out for it to get here. The children in the classroom did not choose to be here.
The residents who sold their homes did not choose this either. And a question that has gone unanswered for years has not stayed quiet. It has simply been replaced by louder, angrier voices filling the space where an answer should have been.
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Read also: ‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman – In Real Life
https://inreallife.my/i-gave-up-my-family-to-pursue-my-dreams-shares-34-yo-msian-woman/
‘I gave up my family to pursue my dreams’ Shares 34 YO M’sian woman
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