Alex Dattani, 31, of Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, was a coronavirus while in the Rohingya refugee camp in southern Bangladesh.
Nearly one million more people live in the camps of Cox’s Bazar, one of the most densely populated places in the world, where social estrangement is very difficult.
Alex is an aid to the United Nations World Food Programme.
“It’s hard to impose social estrangement and it’s a strange concept for refugees who have never had to deal with this before,” he said.
“With the World Food Programme, we supply food to each and every refugee in the camp. It’s a huge challenge but an exclusive opportunity to succeed in each and every household.
“A user for each family comes to our site to collect their food and we also receive smart messages about how other people can prevent them from spreading coronavirus and how they can stay in their communities.”
The cash operations manager said the staff also had to deal with the monsoon season and was in a domain that could be hit by cyclones.
“The same procedure would always be for other people to evacuate and move to a cyclone center, but that’s not an option for refugees,” he said.
“And in the most sensible of that, we also face the covid reaction that put engineering projects on hold because it means running around, which cannot happen.
“But these projects are mandatory to minimize the effect that monsoon season usually has. So we have to deal with a lot of quick responses with landslides and razed houses.”
Humanitarian agencies have been cautious for weeks about the possibility of the virus having an effect on Rohingya refugees living in overcrowded and congestion situations and have limited access to safe drinking water.
The virus entered the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp in May, and the first death occurred at the end of the month.
“At the moment, the number of cases shown with coronavirus is very low, it is about 75 with deaths,” Alex said.
“The effect it has had on us as humanitarians means that our movements around the camps have been very limited. Restrictions, while they have managed to cut off the spread, pose situations of greater demand for us.
“We have implemented the things you will see in your supermarkets in Wales with social estrangement and hand disinfection.
“People are forced to wash their hands and control their temperature before entering the distribution center and anyone with temperature will have to go through the house and some other member of the family circle will have to come and refuel.”
The Rohingya, who totaled about one million in Myanmar, known as Burma 3 years ago, are one of the many ethnic minorities in the country and have been persecuted for generations.
The most recent Exodus of Rohingya fleeing Bangladesh began in August 2017 after militants from a Rohingya rebel organization introduced fatal attacks in Myanmar, prompting one of the largest movements of others in recent history.
More than 700,000 more people fled to neighbouring Bangladesh in the following months, wasting everything.
Alex said: “The first time you make a stopover at the camp, it’s absolutely overwhelming, but very temporarily you’re engrossed in your paintings and you’re absolutely normalized to the paintings at the biggest refugee camp every day.
“You see things you wouldn’t see if I had to stay in Wales, but the paintings are incredibly rewarding.
“Even though about a million other people live in this space, they are incredibly resilient.
“They are strangely satisfied and you find very warm and moving scenes that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in a refugee camp.”