Meet Sesame Street’s new Muppets, on screens now thanks to Milwaukee’s Rohingya community
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Sobia Anwar, 10, gathered with other Rohingya children in a converted church on Milwaukee’s south side Saturday and fixed her eyes on a projector screen for the public debut of a show that, for the first time she could remember, featured Rohingya characters.
Even more special — she and some of the other children in the room had given feedback to shape the show, designed to help children halfway around the world.
On the screen were Noor and Aziz, two new Muppets from Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street. The characters lead a new series of educational videos designed primarily for Rohingya children living in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
“It’s cool because not a lot of kids get to have this,” Sobia said. “They live in bad conditions, and I just feel so bad for them. I think this will help.”
Sesame Workshop has similarly produced Muppets and programming specifically for refugee populations around the world. Cox’s Bazar is home to close to 1 million Rohingya refugees, most of them displaced in 2017 when Myanmar's military escalated violence against the Muslim, ethnic minority group, in what the U.S. has called a genocide.
Thanks to Milwaukee Rohingya families providing feedback, Sesame has rolled out a series of Noor and Aziz videos on YouTube primarily for families at Cox's Bazar, but with plots and lessons that could reach families anywhere.
"This is, as far as we know, the only media content specifically for kids that's in Rohingya," said Daniel LaPook, a Sesame producer. "That's one of the reasons why we've put such a priority on this work, is that we really haven't seen any other media content like this."
Sesame producers visited the new community center of the nonprofit Burmese Rohingya Community of Wisconsin on Saturday to share the results with hundreds of Rohingya Milwaukeeans.
From refugee camps to Milwaukee
When Sesame set out in 2018 to produce videos about Noor and Aziz, fictional 6-year-old twins who live in Cox’s Bazar, they began by working with families in the camps to test and fine-tune the production.
The pandemic soon derailed that research, and producers had to look elsewhere for input from Rohingya children. That led them to Milwaukee, the home of the largest Rohingya population they could find in the U.S.
Working with the co-founders of the Burmese Rohingya Community of Wisconsin, including Sobia's father, Mohamed Anwar, Sesame sought feedback from Milwaukee families on the appeal, comprehension and relevance of the characters and videos.
During the summer of 2020, Mohamed Anwar and co-founder Andrew Trumbull visited 37 adults and 47 children in their homes, shared the videos, asked questions from the Sesame research team, and transmitted the answers back to Sesame.
"They gave us really informative data, and that participation was critical in informing what ultimately became the final episodes," LaPook said.
While the videos were made primarily for children in Cox's Bazar, Sesame Workshop producers said working with the Milwaukee families has shown the videos can resonate across the Rohingya diaspora.
Rohingya families have fled violence in Myanmar for decades. Sobia’s family settled in Milwaukee in 2015 after spending about a decade as refugees in Malaysia, where Sobia was born.
For Sobia, the videos are a chance to practice a language she hears every day at home but doesn't speak as well as she speaks English.
"In my house I have aunties and uncles and they speak Rohingya and I can’t understand what they’re saying sometimes," she said. "I really do want to learn more."
Mohamed Anwar and Trumbull said they were excited to see videos that used both Rohingya and English.
“It was pretty exciting, pretty good news for the people over there (in Bangladesh)," Anwar said. "But at the same time, kids who are living abroad … who are struggling with their language, it is also good for them here.”
LaPook said the team heard similar feedback from many families who liked that the videos were available in both English and Rohingya.
"Parents and children can engage with the content in English, which they've been working on over the last few years, but also in Rohingya to preserve that aspect of Rohingya culture," LaPook said.
Noor and Aziz join Sesame
The resulting characters of Noor and Aziz demonstrate traits that families involved in the research identified as important, producers said.
Noor Yasmin is confident, curious about the world, learns through play and loves solving problems. Her brother, Aziz, is an imaginative performer and storyteller, and enjoys helping out family and friends.
The setting behind Noor and Aziz is modeled after Humanitarian Play Labs in Cox's Bazar. In the new video series, Noor and Aziz learn about different emotions that arise during play, like anger, frustration and jealousy.
There are 26 videos online now, and more will be added in the coming months for a total of 140, according to Sesame Workshop.
On Saturday, Sesame producers played a video where Noor and Aziz learn how to take deep "belly breaths" to calm down when they feel angry.
Children in the audience practiced along with the Muppets, then spread out in the community center to draw pictures of Sesame characters and take pictures with the Noor and Aziz puppets.
Sobia was happy with how it turned out.
"I took more than 10 photos," she said.
The video series, "Playtime with Noor and Aziz," can be found on the Sesame Street International Social Impact YouTube channel, bit.ly/noorandaziz.
Contact Rory Linnane at rory.linnane@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @RoryLinnane.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee Rohingya help Sesame Workshop make new Muppets Noor and Aziz
