I just came out of the field, by the way, in Yemen. Yemen is a disaster. We could spend hours on the humanitarian disaster there and what needs to be done.
As for the Rohingya, I was just in Cox's Bazar about five weeks ago. We went from a small number of people to a million people in just a few months. While we're not in charge of the camps, we have the engineering. Not many people realize how much the World Food Programme does. We're a logistics hub for the United Nations and for the engineering that takes place for bridges, airplanes, trucks, ships and everything, because we're carrying the supplies in for everybody, pretty much.
The camp in Cox's Bazar was just.... You know the situation. It's pretty bad. If you have ever been there or seen the pictures, we were concerned for several hundred thousand people whose lives were at risk just from the rainy season coming. We came in and did everything we possibly could to secure up land sites and do some piping, bridging and things of that nature. We made a lot of progress and a lot of headway.
Quite frankly, everybody talked about going back. If I can just speak frankly, I can't imagine people going back. What I heard, I mean, from mother to mother to mother and from some fathers who survived and weren't killed, were stories of how their children were killed right before their very own eyes, of women being raped, and of people being burned alive. Would you go back to that? I just don't see it. There'll be some going back. There'll be certain promises made, but I don't see it. I hope that one day they can go back.
What we've done is worked on digitizing every single Rohingya so that they'll have identification digitized with biometrics and identification that gives them some sense of identity for the first time in their lives. We are working with all the different UN and international organizations to do what we can to stabilize the environment there.
Of course, the Bangladesh military pretty much oversees the operations there. I've been meeting with, of course, the prime minister. He has elections coming up, and that creates dynamics in this situation, not to get into too much of that right here, because they are a host country. What we're trying to do is minimize the negative consequences on the local community, because this is an issue in itself.
The environmental impact is a whole different discussion, but you can imagine a country that's made a lot of headway in the last 25 years. There are not many jobs. You can obviously understand the politics about not allowing Rohingya to come into the communities and have jobs. We're working through a lot of these issues, but it's a sad, sad state of affairs.