A woman and her son are passengers in a pedicab coming into the camps.
A man and his son in their fields near one of the camps.
Tents in an IDP camp.
Women gather around one of the community wells to draw water.
A child plays with an old bicycle tire.
Moreyam, 65, a Rohingya Muslim women, in the doorway of her room in a Rohingya IDP camp.
A laborer carries a 50 kilo bag of rice away from a NGO rice warehouse.
Zaw Zaw Hlaing, 27, and his daughter, However, 6 months, play near their hut in a camp.
A rice field near an IDP camp.
A classroom, without desks or chairs in an IDP camp. The children sit on the floor.
Men in a tea shop. Most of these men were shopkeepers in Sittwe before the violence and now have no jobs.
Subsistence farming in a camp.
Noor Ar Jun, 16, feeds her brother, Mohammed Noor, 12, in a private clinic in a Rohingya Muslim IDP camp near Sittwe. The boy has malaria. His parents can't look after him because they are looking for work and food so his oldest sister, Noor, takes care of him.
A man performs ablutions before going into a mosque for prayers.
Men at Friday prayers in a mosque.
Men study the Koran in a hut in one of the camps.
Threshing rice in a camp.
A NGO built latrines on the edge of a camp.
Teenagers play soccer on a dirt pitch in a camp.
A man bathes at a communal well in a camp. None of the huts have running water or electricity.
A Rohingya boatman shuttles passengers between fishing boats in the camp.
Sata Ra, 25, in the doorway of her hut.
May Raley, and one of his children, Noor Rakess,18 months, in their hut in a Rohingya IDP camp near Sittwe. Noor was born in the camp.
A man makes cooking fuel by coating bamboo stakes with cow dung. The dung burns when it's dry.
A 12 year old girl in front of her hut. The walls are made from plastic sheeting given to the people by the UNHCR.
A man repairs his hut in a camp.
A Rohingya blind beggar sits on the train tracks in an IDP camp for Rohingya Muslims near Sittwe. Since 2012 there has been no train service into the camps, the beggar sits there every day from early morning until mid afternoon soliciting from people who use the road.
A Rohingya woman on a rickshaw taxi passes a blind beggar on train tracks in an IDP camp.
Storm water flows through a small ditch between huts in a camp.
A man looks out a "window" in his hut.
Rohingya people use internet telephony services to talk to relatives who have escaped the camps and moved to Malaysia.
A baby's haircut.
A woman walks past fishing boats moored in a creek at the entrance to the camps.
Rohingya men work in a blacksmith shop in the camps. They were making scythes.
A Rohingya mosque in Sittwe. It was destroyed by Buddhist mobs during sectarian violence in 2012.
SITTWE, MYANMAR - The scars of sectarian violence that tore through Sittwe, a fishing port of about 200,000 on the Bay of Bengal, in 2012 have not healed.
Hundreds of Rohingya Muslims, an ethnic minority that has lived in Myanmar for generations, were killed, their homes and mosques destroyed, when Buddhist led mobs rampaged through this town in western Myanmar (formerly Burma). The mobs were fueled by rumors that Muslim men raped a Buddhist woman.
Some of the mobs were allegedly led by state security officers, who did little to stop the violence.
After the violence abated, the Myanmar government rounded up the Rohingya and forced them into Internal Displaced Persons (IDP) camps a few kilometers west of downtown Sittwe.
More than two years later, they still languish in the camps. More than 140,000 people, mostly Rohingya Muslims, live in the squalid camps.
The camps lack access to electricity, there is no running water, they rely on water from communal wells, latrines line the edges of the camps and open ditches carry away rain and waste water.
Some food staples like rice and chickpeas are provided by international Non Governmental Organizations (NGO). NGOs also provide some educational opportunities for the children.
The NGOs are limited in what they can do though.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) shut down their Sittwe operations earlier this year because of pressure from government officials and Buddhist mobs in Sittwe that threatened to burn their offices. Some MSF teams from Thailand still work surreptitiously in the camps but most medical care is provided by private clinics and practitioners with no real medical training.
There are no real jobs in the camps. Some families have set up shops and the fishermen who used to sail out of Sittwe and neighboring communities now sail from the camp.
But the shopkeepers aren't allowed to travel into Sittwe to buy new inventory and the fisherman aren't allowed to sell their catch outside of the camps. Instead they rely on Buddhist middlemen who are willing to do business with the Rohingya.
At the root of the crisis is the status of the Rohingya.
The government of Myanmar insists that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, just west of Sittwe. The government of Bangladesh insists the Rohingya are Burmese citizens and is unwilling to take them in. The Rohingya say they are Rohingya but that they have lived in Myanmar for centuries and are Burmese citizens.
The situation shows no signs of improving.
Mohammed Farouk, 44, is a headman in one of the camps. The former businessman now spends his days sitting under a thatched roof listening to people's complaints, knowing there is nothing he can do to help.
Speaking through a translator, he said, "How long can we stay here? We have nothing." Grabbing his own shirt he continued, "We were not allowed to bring anything, only what we were wearing, when they (the government) brought us here. We had to give everything to the Rakhanese (the Buddhist majority ethnic group). They were killing us, and then we had to pay them to let us live."
The men sitting with him nodded in agreement. One said, in English, "We are all jobless now. With no hope."
What few jobs there are menial: selling candies and betel or running small rice stalls. A few lucky people get work with a NGO, but those jobs are very hard to come by.
The lack of medical care is obvious in a small shack that serves as a clinic on the edge of a camp.
Noor Ar Jun, 16, coos quietly while she tries to feed her brother, Mohhammed Noor, a 12 year old the size of an American 8 year old. Mohhammed has malaria and is too weak to stand or feed himself.
Noor is trying to feed and comfort him while mosquitos and flies buzz around.
Noor said her parents were trying to find food and couldn't care for Mohhammed that day. Her mother was looking for something in the market, her father at the fishing dock.
In another camp, about two kilometers away, Mostoba Hatu, 60 years old but looks 80, sits in a heap clutching a tent pole.
The frail woman collapsed on the way back to her hut. A crowd gathered around and some muttered "TB, TB."
Her daughter came out and said "not TB" then louder, "NOT TB." She said her mother had fevers and could no longer eat and that she would sit in the shade under a NGO office, the only building in the area on stilts, to escape the heat. But without medical care it's impossible to know what exactly was ailing Mostoba.
The heat that drove Mostoba from her hut is one of the defining characteristics of the camps.
The huts are built on the ground next to each other. None have electricity, so fans are impossible, some don't even have windows. This part of Myanmar is always hot and the camps, crowded and dusty, are unbearably hot. The huts' corrugated metal roofs compound the misery, turning the huts into ovens.
The huts are nothing like the Rohingya's traditional homes, which are built out of thatch and on stilts with large windows. They are designed to stay cool, or at least bearable, in the stultifying Burmese summer.
Further into the camp, a group of men in their 60s and 70s stay cool in the "temporary" community mosque. Built out of thatch, on the ground just off the beach, it has large windows and is less oppressively hot than the huts.
The men, all former fishermen, pass the time talking about their lives before the violence that drove them here in 2012.
To the Rohingya, the 2012 violence is a genocide, an existential threat.
Tens of thousands of Rohingya have fled Myanmar on rickety boats made in small factories and shipyards along the coast of the IDP camps.
Making the boats has become one of the few real jobs in the camps.
At a small lagoon next to a camp workers toil on deck when the tide is in but when the tide goes out the lagoon becomes a mud flat and the real work begins.
An army of men slog through the polluted muck, a vile mixture of dead fish, fecal matter, diesel, motor oil and stagnant water, to work on the hulls of the wooden boats.
They melt tar and pitch to waterproof them, jam cotton strings into the cracks between planks in the hull in an effort to further seal the hull.
The boats were once used mostly for fishing but more and more they're being used to haul people from a hopeless life in the camps to Malaysia and the potential for a new life.
Most of the Rohingya who flee on the boats want to make landfall in Malaysia. Malaysian authorities usually give them refugee status and help them relocate to other nations.
But it's a dangerous journey. Boats go off course and end up in Thailand or Bangladesh and neither country is willing to accept the Rohingya. There are storms and pirates prey on the Rohingya. The Thais have been known tow them back out to sea. The Bangladeshis return them to Myanmar.
It's a testimony to the hopelessness of the Rohingya situation that they will risk death making the dangerous sea crossing rather than stay in the camps.
As the sun beats down on the Rohingya in the camps their future is uncertain.
The government of Myanmar shows no interest in letting the Rohingya stay in the only home they've known and officials in neighboring countries are unwilling to take them in.
Myanmar has made tremendous progress on its path to democratization in the last three years but the status of the Rohingya remain an ink blot on that path.
