Written Stories
From The Moment I Was Born
By Ayat Ullah
"I got on the boat. We are leaving now."
That was January 2023. We have not heard from her since.
My name is Ayat Ullah. I am 20 years old, a Rohingya refugee living in Indonesia, born in a small village called Kyauk Pan Dhu — Shitapurikka — in Myanmar. My life has been shaped by disappearances, dangerous crossings, and a family pulled apart across countries and years. But it has also been shaped by something I chose: to stay, to help, and to make sure that other people's suffering did not go unseen.
This is my story.
Growing up Rohingya meant growing up inside a quiet, persistent fear. Our village was peaceful in many ways. I have good memories of it, of the people, of the way community felt like something real and alive. But we were never treated equally. We could not move freely. We could not access proper education. We could not live with the same dignity as others in the country where we were born. Even as a child, I understood that our identity alone was enough to make us unwanted.
Still, it was home. It was where I spent my childhood with my family. Where I first learned what resilience looked like, through the people around me who did it every day just to survive.
Then conflict began pulling my family apart, long before I ever became a refugee myself.
The day my father left, my elder sister and I walked with him to the beach. Just before it was time to board, he sent the two of us back home for a fan, one of the handmade ones we used before we had electricity. The boat was crowded, he said, and it would be hot at sea, and he wanted something to cool himself with. So we ran home to get it for him.
By the time we came back, he was already gone.
He told us afterward that he couldn't bear to let us watch him leave. So he tricked his own children into looking away, just for a few minutes, so that his last sight of us wouldn't be our faces at the moment he stepped onto that boat.
In 2012, violence forced my father to flee Myanmar. He was one of around 275 people trying to reach Malaysia by sea, searching for safety. From the moment he left, we had no way to reach him. There were no phones for us in Myanmar, and none for him or the others on the boat.
Six days into the journey, the boat sank. Many people died. A passing shipping vessel rescued around 40 survivors, and my father was among them.
But we didn't know any of that. For one year, my family did not know whether he was alive or dead.
Every evening after Maghrib prayer, my sisters, my mother, and I would sit together and make dua for him, asking God to keep him safe if he was still alive, to take care of him wherever he was. When we went outside, our neighbors would ask, gently but constantly: Have you heard anything about your father? Any news at all? We never had an answer to give them.
For that whole year, we felt like orphans, even though we didn't know if we actually were. It was hard to describe what that felt like, grieving someone you didn't know was gone. We were helpless, and hopeless, and we cried more than I can put into words.
Eventually, we learned he had survived and had been detained for that entire year. After his release, he stayed in Malaysia and worked to send money back to us, first in Myanmar, then later in Bangladesh.
Then 2017 arrived, and everything changed again.
More than one million Rohingya were driven from Myanmar. My family and I were among them. We crossed into Bangladesh carrying fear, trauma, and almost nothing else, leaving behind our homes, our memories, and the only life we had known.
Life in the refugee camps was hard in ways that are difficult to describe. But I refused to stop learning. I continued my education from Class 5 through Class 10 inside the camp. Education became the one thing that still felt like it belonged to me, a source of hope when everything else felt uncertain. But after finishing high school, I hit a wall. There was almost nothing beyond it. No real pathway to higher education, no clear future. Like many young refugees around me, I felt suspended between what I dreamed of and what was actually possible.
Then came the hardest loss.
In early 2023, my older sister decided she could no longer stay in the camp. She was determined. She had always been that way. She said she didn't want to spend her life trapped inside those boundaries, forced into a future she had no part in choosing. She would rather risk everything trying than remain there with no hope at all. Her plan was to reach Malaysia, to find our father, to finally begin a life.
On 30 December 2022, she quietly left the camp and traveled to a village in Myanmar. On 16 January 2023, she boarded a boat with 128 other people headed for Malaysia.
Before they departed, she called my mother.
"I got on the boat," she said. "We are leaving now."
That was the last time we ever heard her voice.
At first, we weren't afraid. We thought we'd hear from her again in a day or two, once the boat reached shore. That is how it usually happens. We waited for a phone call telling us she had arrived safely.
It never came.
We have never received any information about the boat, or the people on it. We do not know whether they are alive, detained somewhere, or gone. My sister is still missing. It has been almost four years now. My mother has prayed for her every day since that phone call, and to this day, if anyone so much as mentions my sister in front of her, she cannot hold back her tears.
Losing someone without knowing their fate is its own particular kind of grief. There is no closure. Just an open wound that doesn't heal, and waiting that never ends.
Three months after my sister disappeared, I made my own decision.
I know how it sounds. I had already lived through a year of not knowing if my father was alive, after his boat went down. I had just lived through my sister vanishing on that same kind of journey. And still I chose to go.
But this is the reality that refugees live inside: there are no passports, no legal pathways, no simple options. In Myanmar, we were denied citizenship. In the camps, there was no real future. For many of us, a dangerous sea journey is not a choice we want to make; it is the only choice left.
I was the only son in my family. My family was terrified of losing me too. But they also loved me enough to let me go. They didn't want my future to disappear inside that camp.
When I stepped onto that boat, knowing what had already happened to my father and my sister, the feeling was almost impossible to describe. I told myself: it is God who can save me now. If it is written in my fate, on my forehead, that I will live, then I will land safely on some shore. And if it is written that I will die, the way my father nearly did, the way my sister may have, then at least I will be with them again.
I had no other choice but to risk it. Life in the camp in Bangladesh was its own kind of cage. No access to education. No future. No freedom of movement. No safety. We lived in constant fear, of landslides, of being kidnapped or attacked by armed groups, of being arrested by police on false charges and having to pay a bribe just to be released. That fear never left, no matter what we did. So even knowing what the sea had already taken from my family, I chose it, because staying meant no life at all.
I boarded a boat with 184 people. We spent around 15 days at sea. Every day carried fear, real physical fear, along with exhaustion and the awareness that we might not survive. But after 15 days, we arrived in Aceh, Indonesia.
After eight days in a transit camp, I was transferred by IOM to Pekanbaru, in Riau Province.
Pekanbaru was where I started to discover who I actually wanted to be.
I began teaching members of my community. I worked on my English. I started volunteering as an interpreter for Rohingya refugees who couldn't communicate with organizations or local authorities, people who were lost in systems that didn't speak their language, navigating situations they didn't fully understand. I participated in trainings and workshops focused on leadership, communication, and advocacy.
Slowly, helping others stopped feeling like something I did in my spare time. It became a responsibility, the reason I was there.
In March 2024, I found myself at the centre of something I never expected.
Fifty-nine Rohingya refugees had arrived in Pekanbaru after an extremely dangerous journey. They were trying to reach safety. Instead, they fell into the hands of smugglers. Their families had already paid large sums of money, but the smugglers refused to release them and were demanding even more. The refugees were trapped: frightened, exhausted, powerless, held against their will.
My own mother and two of my sisters were among them.
I was terrified. But I needed to think clearly. During a WhatsApp video call, I carefully guided one of my sisters, quietly, so the smugglers wouldn't notice, on how to secretly share her live location with me. Despite the fear and pressure, she was under, she managed to send it.
The moment I received that location, I started making calls. Police. Immigration. IOM. UNHCR. I kept calling, kept asking, kept pushing until one police station agreed to act. Officers came with me to the location where the refugees were being held.
When we arrived, we found dozens of Rohingya men, women, and children living in conditions that broke my heart. They were exhausted and traumatized in ways I recognized, because I had felt versions of it myself.
And then I saw my mother. My sisters. After one year apart.
I don't have the words for what that moment felt like: relief, joy, grief, and gratitude, all crashing into me at once. Seeing them alive in front of me was something I had not allowed myself to fully hope for.
We rescued all 59 people. Three smugglers were arrested.
I felt proud. Not only because I had gotten my own mother and sisters out, but because everyone else trapped there was in the exact same situation my family had been in. Some of them had already paid the smugglers everything they'd asked, and were still being held. The smugglers were demanding double, the same thing they had tried to do to us. Getting all 59 people out, with help from the officials and two friends who came with me to the house, felt like more than a rescue. It felt like proof that the smugglers couldn't keep doing this to people and walk away clean.
But the consequences came quickly.
The smugglers were furious. They believed they had lost a significant amount of money because of the rescue and the arrests, and they blamed me directly. The threats started soon after: constant and unmistakable. Some threatened to kill me.
I understood exactly what that meant. If they killed me, it would be over. But if they kidnapped me instead, they would demand a ransom, and I had nothing to give them. My father had spent almost eleven years as a construction worker in Malaysia, sweating through the heat, just to save enough for what we'd already paid smugglers to get this far. There was nothing left. I had no income of my own, and no legal way to earn one.
My life contracted overnight. I stopped going to school. I barely left my room. I lived inside a fear I still can't fully put into words: knowing that people were searching for me, not knowing when or how they might find me.
Eventually, with help from the Indonesian government, IOM, and UNHCR, my family and I were transferred from Pekanbaru to Jakarta in May 2024. The smugglers knew the faces of the two friends who had helped me that day too, so I asked officials to move them along with us, since they carried the same risk, I did. They agreed.
Even now, three years later, that risk hasn't disappeared. The smugglers have long reach, connections with officials and with people in local communities, and money that lets them do almost anything. If they ever found me, I still wouldn't have a way to pay them off. I can't legally work here. My father is older now, and too sick to work himself. The fear stays, quieter than it once was, but never fully gone.
I don't regret what I did. I would do it again. Those 59 people were human beings searching for safety and dignity. So was I, once. So is everyone on those boats.
Later in 2024, my father came home to us — something I had almost stopped believing could happen.
After nearly 12 years of separation, across different countries, different detention centres, refugee camps, and dangerous sea crossings, my father was reunited with my mother, my sisters, and me.
Seeing my father again after all of those time was beyond words. It was like watching a part of our family be put back together. But we all felt it: the empty space. The missing piece. My sister, still out there somewhere, or not. Still unknown.
My mother still prays for her every day.
I am 20 years old and I have lived more than most people carry in a lifetime. This journey has taught me things that no classroom could: about what it means to stand beside vulnerable people when it is dangerous and inconvenient to do so. About what leadership actually is: not a title or a position, but a decision to take responsibility when someone has no one else. Sometimes it means speaking up when you're afraid. Sometimes it means protecting others when your own safety is at risk.
Today, I continue serving my community in multiple roles. Over the years I have worked as a healthcare community interpreter, refugee representative, and community volunteer, supporting Rohingya refugees through communication, advocacy, and direct assistance. Currently, I work as an official interpreter and outreach volunteer with Yayasan Cita Wadah Swadaya (YCWS), an Indonesian faith-based humanitarian organization working in refugee protection, disaster response, and food security, serving as a language bridge between refugees and organizations including UNHCR. Through this role, I help refugees understand important information, communicate their concerns, and access the support and services they need. I also assist with outreach and community communication, working to ensure that vulnerable refugees are not left unheard or isolated simply because of a language barrier. Alongside this, I continue supporting refugee-led advocacy, research, and volunteer initiatives aimed at empowering Rohingya refugees and raising awareness about the realities displaced communities face every day. I want the world to understand something simple: refugees are not a category. They are not a crisis, a statistic, or a headline. Behind every story is a person, with dreams, fears, and people they love and have lost. That is why I tell this story now — not because it is easy, but because silence has never protected anyone in my family. Telling the truth, carefully and honestly, is the only tool I have ever had.
My dream is to keep building something: for refugee youth, for my community, for a future where Rohingya people can live safely, access education, and rebuild their lives with their dignity intact.
To refugee youth who might read this: after all the pain, the loss, the separation, the displacement, I still believe hope survives. I have seen it survive in my own family. Our stories matter, even the unfinished ones. We are not just our suffering. We are survivors and leaders, and we deserve the chance to become who we were always meant to be.
My sister's name, Rofika, deserves to be remembered as well. Maybe one day she hears it.
