Our Rohingya Adventures, produced by IOM’s Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) in collaboration with Books Unbound, is a first-of-its-kind Rohingya-language animation series. Each episode explores Rohingya traditions, proverbs, songs, folktales and more through appealing characters, relatable scenarios, and visual storytelling.

Through teachable moments and adventures with friends and elders, Rohingya siblings Hazara and Rafique discover myriad new dimensions of the Rohingya experience. In The Fisherman Who Never Caught a Fish, Hazara learns a lesson about not giving up in a story about a Rohingya fisherman determined to help his community. In episode 2, Hazara and Rafique discover that Music is Magic and that art has the power to bring dreams to life. In episode 3, The Beauty of Diversity, Hazara learns to appreciate the richness of her cultural heritage, including traditional food, fashion, henna painting, and the age-old ritual of sighting the new Eid moon. In episode 4, Hazara is initiated into The Secret Ingredient of her mother’s famous Mohinga soup, passed down by her grandmother in Arakan.

The episodes were recorded entirely in the Kutupalong-Balukhali megacamp with amateur Rohingya voice actors. Over a two-week period, an RCMC technical team worked with a group of ten Rohingya children, youth, and elders to train them in voice acting and dubbing. None had ever done theatre or voice acting before, but all enthusiastically embraced the project. Several of the community actors were born in camps and were thus unfamiliar with some of the Rohingya words and objects in the script; through recording the animations, they connected for the first time with traditions from their homeland.

The stories and production process of Our Rohingya Adventures are a testament to Rohingya resilience and cultural richness. Most of all, they powerfully represent the Rohingya spirit of community collaboration and commitment to helping each other through adversity.   

WATCH THE EPISODES ON YOUTUBE
The Fisherman Who Never Caught a Fish, Episode 1
Music is Magic, Episode 2
The Beauty of Diversity, Episode 3
The Secret Ingredient, Episode 4