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Rojia Begum spent four months at sea with her six-year-old daughter and a 14-month-old son before arriving at the Bayeun camp for boat people in Indonesia. The intravenous drip was to help with diarrhea-induced dehydration.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail

Rojia Begum had sold her jewellery and made ready to flee her Myanmar home on a boat. But she faced an excruciating decision. She was not certain she could care for all of her children on what she was told would be a seven-day journey to Malaysia.

"I was thinking, 'how will I manage three kids?' " she said. "When it was time to leave, my four-year-old was sleeping. So I left him there."

With that, the 27-year-old woman took her six-year-old daughter and 14-month-old son and stepped onto a boat that would place her and many others at the centre of an international crisis. It took four months at sea for her to arrive in Indonesia.

She is among 1,822 refugees from Myanmar and Bangladesh now being kept in six separate Indonesian camps, places where even the children remain quiet after their terrifying time on the water, and the few rags migrants have left dry in the breeze as they prostrate themselves for afternoon prayers. Officials believe thousands more remain stranded at sea. Like Malaysia, Indonesia has said it will accept boat people for up to a year, but it's struggling to accommodate them.

On Friday, workers were still trying to nail together latrines and showers for the 433 people at the Bayeun camp where Ms. Begum is staying. They all arrived on the same boat early Wednesday. Among them are 72 minors, including Sha Hanu, a 13-year-old girl seized by traffickers from her Myanmar home. "They just pushed me onto the ship," she said, leaving her to fend for herself, without any family, until she finally made it to the Bayeun camp four months later.

Like most of the migrants here, Sha and Ms. Begum are ethnic Rohingya, a Muslim minority persecuted in Myanmar. Ms. Begum left after her husband was accused of stealing wood – falsely, she says.

Local authorities beat him and told him he would no longer be able to work. So he went to Malaysia 18 months ago; she was hoping to join him.

But if desperation drove her from home, and to leave behind a child she cannot stop thinking about, what she found at sea was worse. Her forehead remains scabbed from a scuffle where grown men and women fought her for her children's last tin of biscuits. "Those with strength stole from the others," she said. "I was so afraid. I thought I would die."

The trip was a slow spiral into horror. Passengers ate two plates of rice and vegetables per day for the first two months. When food ran low, they were restricted to one plate a day – and for much of the last month they had nothing at all. "The children could not stop crying for food," Ms. Begum said.

Some took to drinking seawater. When the boat was finally towed in by Indonesian fishermen, she stepped on solid ground in amazement.

"We were so happy. I touched my forehead to the soil," she said.

She cannot explain how she cared for two children, one still breastfeeding, for months on a ship where there was barely room to sit. "I managed somehow," she said. As she spoke, her son lay nearby on his back, motionless, as if he had not yet rediscovered the ability to move. Her daughter, meanwhile, suffers a leg numbness that Ms. Begum compared to paralysis. "She is not strong like before," Ms. Begum said.

Aid workers understand. The numbness comes from sitting for so long, a common ailment among those who have come to shore, said Hendrik Therik, a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman who was at the Bayeun camp Friday. (UNHCR representatives, along with the International Organization for Migration, various military branches, police and local aid groups are all working in the camps.)

Many "don't have feeling in their feet," he said. "At the moment we're still in the emergency phase. Lots of people still need medical attention." At least one person is being treated for life-threatening dehydration, and some also have eye problems from so much time in the ocean's glare.

Even on land, their accommodations remain rough. The Bayeun camp has been cobbled together on the weed-tangled rubble of an abandoned paper mill that officials selected because it offers enough land to hold them. It's next to a river. In the absence of proper toilet facilities, people walked there to relieve themselves.

"Apparently there's alligators down there," one aid worker said in a worried tone.

The local government has brought in a half-dozen large disaster tents and people nearby have donated mats. But the tents offer only basic protection from the wind and rain that descended Friday evening, and the refugees inside remain in cramped quarters.

Some efforts were being made to bring proper sanitation, with an excavator hauled in to dig a sewage trench. But as darkness fell on the refugees' third night in the camp, the latrines remained incomplete. Immigration officials hunted down foreign journalists, detaining at least one and seizing passports from at least two others who had entered on tourist visas. (A journalist visa can take weeks to secure in Indonesia.) Aid workers said other uniformed officers had demanded payment for "security."

The aid workers did not want to be identified by name because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Local authorities said they were doing their best. "We do hope that we can keep making this place better for them to stay," said Usman Arachman, the East Aceh District official in charge of the camp.

Like many here, he was struck by the suffering that had suddenly descended. "Why do humans do this to each other?" he said, blaming the Myanmar government's treatment of Rohingya.

Thirteen-year-old Sha recoiled at the thought of returning home. "Most of the people are killers," she said.

Senora Beghum, 25, said she left after her Myanmar village was burned down by angry Buddhists. She spent four months on the water with a three-year-old and five-year-old. Her husband had also gone to Malaysia, and she's not sure what she will do if she is sent back home. "How would I survive there? I have kids, and there is no one to support me," she said.

That prospect stood in stark contrast to the reception she and other refugees received from ordinary Indonesians, who donated a bounty of rice, fish, eggs, cookies, sugar, coffee, noodles and clothes. Some brought prayer books, too, as succour to refugees who share a common Muslim faith.

On Thursday afternoon, a truck arrived at the Bayeun camp from Julok, the coastal town where Ms. Begum's boat made landfall. On the truck were Julok residents who wanted to find the exact refugees they had helped to shore.

"It was as if the refugees were all their brothers and sisters," Mr. Arachman said. "They were holding each other and crying."

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