"Ramadan for Chicago's only Rohingya Culture Center is not just a time for prayer, community and service, but also a time for survival. Every year, the centre, located in the heart of the major United States city's bustling South Asian community, hosts nightly iftars for the families it serves, pairing them with fundraising drives through local mosques to support the programming it provides to the city's Rohingya refugees who have settled here. About 12 percent of the centre's programming expenses, and the majority of its zakat fund (the obligatory charity required of all Muslims) for rental assistance and food distribution, comes from donations usually given during Ramadan, according to employees of the centre. More: Praying in time of COVID-19: How world's largest mosques adapted Why is Ramadan so important for Muslims? How do we keep faith under a lockdown? | Start Here But this year, the coronavirus shutdown has shuttered the centre and local mosques. Families who once attended the centre's iftars are holding these meals in their homes instead. And without the annual Ramadan funding drive bringing in donations, the cultural centre's future remains uncertain, at a time when the community needs its services more than ever. The centre was started in 2016 by Nasir Zakaria, a Rohingya man originally from Myanmar, who arrived in Chicago with his wife and baby, a suitcase and not much else three years earlier. Zakaria escaped Myanmar, where the country's Rohingya minority has been persecuted for decades, in 1991, before spending about 20 years working various jobs in Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia before coming to the United States. In 2016, he opened the Rohingya Culture Center..."