Meet Noor and Aziz, a pair of six-year-old twins and the latest addition to the world’s favorite fictional neighborhood, Sesame Street. But unlike other beloved characters, the brother and sister live with their family in the world’s largest refugee camp.
There are an estimated one million Rohingya refugees living in cramped, sprawling settlements in southern Bangladesh. More than 740,000 fled there during a bloody 2017 crackdown by the Myanmar military that is now the focus of a genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
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More than half of the refugees are children, whose access to formal education is severely limited.
Introduced as part of the non-profit Sesame Workshop’s Play to Learn program, the twin muppets debuted this month and will appear in Rohingya-language educational segments that discuss topics such as math, health, and safety. Through the Play to Learn program, Sesame Workshop collaborates with organizations like the International Rescue Committee and BRAC to provide Rohingya children with early education.
In a press release, Sherrie Westin, the president of social impact at Sesame Workshop, said that the two new characters are “rooted in the rich Rohingya culture and informed by extensive research and input from Rohingya families” and carry with them the “transformative power of playful learning.”
Sesame Street, the iconic children’s TV program that has aired since 1969, is known for championing diversity and inclusion. But the addition of Noor and Aziz is meaningful on several levels, according to backers of the idea and Rohingya refugee advocates.
According to a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, many Rohingya children have not been able to enroll in local schools and participate in examinations in Bangladesh.
“Our students are not getting any access to a formal educational system,” said Mohammed Nowkhim, a spokesperson for the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights and a refugee himself. He also noted the importance of continuing the education syllabus that students were taught back in Myanmar.
To Nowkhim, the introduction of Noor and Aziz is an important step in addressing the problem.
Besides education, the twin muppets also represent an important validation of the identities and experiences of Rohingya children.
“For most Rohingya children, Noor and Aziz will be the very first characters in media who look and sound like them,” Westin said in the statement.
Noor is described as “a confident girl who believes that there is no problem too big for her to try to solve,” while Aziz is “a natural performer and storyteller.”
The project brings hope to children in the camps, according to John Quinley from the human rights group Fortify Rights, which has worked extensively with Rohingya civil society. It also helps cement Rohingya identity, which authorities back home deny.
“The initiative by [Sesame Workshop] recognizes on a global scale the ethnic identity of the Rohingya people which the Myanmar government is trying to erase,” Quinley told VICE World News.
Myanmar has for decades stripped away the rights of Rohingya while denying them citizenship, proper healthcare and freedom of movement. The former human rights chief at the United Nations described the 2017 campaign against them as a “textbook” case of ethnic cleansing.
