Hire a Refugee (and Pay in Cryptocurrency). What Could Go Wrong?

Since Mohammad Shafi was five years old, he’s ricocheted in and out of Bangladeshi refugee camps. A Rohingya Muslim, Shafi fled his home country of Myanmar with his family in 1992, landing first at the Balukhali camp, then the Nayapara camp in 1994, then the Kutupalong camp in 2009. Brief hopes for resettlement in New Zealand came and went in 2010, after a criminal case involving his brother got complicated. Instead, he moved again.

Now Shafi is 31 and back in the unofficial Kutupalong Rohingya Refugee Camp, along with hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who have fled Myanmar since 2015, when a new policy of ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Burmese military began. Shafi met his wife in the camp. They now have two children, Shahan and Rihan; Kutupalong is the only home they know.