Rohingya Son Who Carried His Mother Across the Border — and a Later Basket-Pole Account

When villages in Rakhine State, Myanmar, emptied in 2017, many Rohingya families fled toward Bangladesh. People who could not walk were carried.

One documented case is 30-year-old Zafor Alam, who walked about 65 kilometres over five days with his ailing mother, Achhia Khatun, on his back. They reached Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar. He told the Dhaka Tribune he had no other choice: those who were strong walked; she could not.

A later narrative, published as “The Weight of Their World,” describes a Rohingya son — given the name Nezamuddin in that telling — who cut bamboo, hung two wicker baskets on a pole and placed both frail parents in them. That version speaks of a 160-kilometre march to Cox’s Bazar, bruised shoulders and arrival at a camp registration line. It is written as piety and endurance, not as a contemporaneous 2017 wire story with the exact ages 96 and 87 or a measured 39 kilometres.

Carrying elderly relatives on the back or in a yoke was reported more than once during that exodus. The 39-kilometre figure and the paired ages in the prompt do not match the contemporaneous Dhaka Tribune report (65 km, mother only) or the later 160 km basket essay. The verified core is the same: a son who would not leave a parent who could not walk, and who reached a refugee camp on the Bangladesh side.

Source: Dhaka Tribune, “Rohingya man carries mother for 65km” (Zafor Alam and Achhia Khatun, September 2017); Radiance News essay “The Weight of Their World” (bamboo-pole / dual-basket account, longer distance).