Cox's Bazar Has Room for the UN, Not for Its Own Children

Cox's Bazar is a hub for human rights conversations in this region, from the sprawling refugee crisis on its northern edge to a quieter, less-discussed failure closer to its beaches: the basic rights denied to the children who live along its coastline. Everyone talks about the Rohingya camps. Almost no one talks about the Bangladeshi children selling seashells by the water, an hour's walk from the same aid offices meant to protect them.

Last year, I went to Cox's Bazar to see this for myself. Near Marine Drive Road, while a few of us were taking in the view, three children (female) approached us with handfuls of seashells. They said the shells were free. They were not, not really, not in the way the word usually means. I could see it in their eyes: they were hoping for money, the way children learn to hope when hoping is a job. Ordinary tourists walk past kids like this every day and buy nothing, because the shells are everywhere, free for the taking. So the children have found another way in: give first, then wait.

We accepted the shells. They ran off and came back with more, this time a special collection, tucked away in their clothes, the prettier ones saved for exactly this moment. A little girl handed me hers. We gave them a bit of money, took a few photos with them, and the joy on their faces was real, not performed.

Afterward, we sat with them by the shore and talked. I asked what they studied, where they went to school. They didn't. Their financial situation didn't allow it. Their fathers work the sea as fishermen; their mothers collect bottles and other debris that wash up on the beach. Selling shells to tourists is, for these children, a full workday — morning until evening and one of the only sources of extra income their families have.

That's what stayed with me. Cox's Bazar hosts the offices of the UN, UNHRC, WHO, IOM, and a long list of international human rights organizations. Tourists move through it by the hundreds of thousands every year. And a short walk from all of that, in the settlements just outside the main town, children spend their childhood working the beach instead of sitting in a classroom, because no one has made it possible for them to do both, or to do the latter at all.

This isn't a call for pity. It's a question: why does a district this saturated with human rights infrastructure still have children who have never seen the inside of a school? The organizations are here. The money moves through here. What's missing is attention, the kind that turns into a program, a scholarship, an outreach effort that reaches past the camps and into the fishing villages next door.

I don't have a policy fix to offer in a few hundred words. What I have is a handful of seashells, a few photographs, and the faces of children who gave us something for free and quietly hoped we'd notice they needed something back. We should notice. We should do more than notice.