Camp residents ponder their circumstances and options with growing hopelessness Interviewees expressed their sense of confusion and frustration as they ponder whether they will be able to repatriate. A 33-year-old father of two explained, “The conditions here make me want to go back right away. But then, when I think about how I lost everything and all the reasons I left…I am remembering everything that was denied to us. I think I would need Myanmar citizenship to actually be able to go back safely. I am so confused. Not only me, thousands of others also.” A woman whose parents still live in Myanmar described her family’s confusion about how to reunite. “We are thinking of going back there, while they are thinking that they should come here. My parents are telling me, hopefully you will come home. I cry when I talk to them. They tell me to be patient, to wait for repatriation.” For a community seeking a ray of hope, the ICJ provisional measures ruling announced in January 2020 was cause for cautious optimism, though a 47-year-old father of seven wondered how long it would take to go home. “I cannot predict the future. It’s not possible. We are guessing that after getting justice we will be able to go home. I think it will take at least five years, because our crisis is now being dealt with at the international level. The ICJ process will take at least two or three years to reach a final decision, and other mechanisms will take time as well.” A woman who has lived in Bangladesh since 2006 said, “I want to go back to Myanmar, in theory. I have two aunts there. But my children grew up in Bangladesh. I have nothing left in Myanmar. Only if the Myanmar government were willing to accommodate the repatriation and rights of all Rohingya—then I would go.” A young man said that because survival is so difficult, “People are always thinking about sending their children out of the camp.” He described his uncertainty about whether repatriation would be possible, but he felt that it would be impossible to sustain life in the camps given the present conditions. He estimated that many camp families were “working to send their children abroad because they cannot see any other way to invest in their futures.” Another young man described his family’s overall sense that there is “no hope” for repatriation. Their vague plan is to “try hard to get citizenship somewhere, anywhere” in order to pursue a better future. The man said he was overwhelmed by the uncertainty of the future. “Sometimes I try to focus and think about what to do, but my mind gets too overwhelmed. I’m a human like everyone.” SUMMARY OF FINDINGS ON ASSETS, LIVELIHOODS, AND HARDSHIP parents, which, again, often force families to turn to traffickers for a way out. Camp residents confront complex and intersecting financial pressures despite the efforts of the government of Bangladesh and humanitarian agencies to provide for their basic survival needs. Many interviewees gave detailed accounts describing how the lack of options for overcoming these pressures leaves them with little recourse but to turn to negative coping mechanisms. This situation creates an atmosphere in which families’ hopelessness and worry precipitate risk-taking and endangerment. But the decision to flee the camps is affected by more than these immediate financial pressures. Nearly all households state that they live in fear of forced repatriation, and their lack of access to news and information via internet allows rumors and fears to spread. These existential fears combine with concerns about lack of education and livelihoods shared by nearly all households, and people decide that the camp situation is untenable. These findings should be of great concern to decisionmakers, who have a duty to work for repatriation and a responsibility to maintain the camps as places of refuge and safety in the meantime. If the camp environment is not stabilized through expanded access to livelihoods, there is every reason to expect that families will become even more fractured, as people continue to take risks to achieve mobility. This is likely to occur in ways that damage regional security and may diminish the possibility of sustainable solutions to the Rohingya crisis in the future. Households are trapped in a cycle of hardship, poverty, and indebtedness that impairs their ability to be resilient and overcome challenges. With so many households having no income or safety net, camp residents unsurprisingly turn to lenders and smugglers instead. This study establishes the direct link between poverty and indebtedness and the decision to flee the camps by engaging with traffickers. The lack of livelihood options also exacerbates the pressures of marriage and dowry faced by young women and their 40