In mid-March, Sadeka Bibi leaves with a small bundle of belongings for an unmarked spot along the road in southeastern Bangladesh, immediately filled with hope and fear.
A truck would meet her there, drive to a place near the shore about an hour south, and she would board a boat that would transport her illegally to Malaysia, where a man she had never met was waiting. did not marry her.
She knew it was dangerous. The boat can capsize. She can be beaten, trafficked or blackmailed by human traffickers. She could die. Or, like the ten previous attempts she made to get over it, her escape could be thwarted by turbulent seas or border authorities. Yet, after Sadeka, a 21-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, the journey seemed the only way for a fresh start.
It was as if she had disappeared behind the barbed wire, possibly for the rest of her life, into the world’s largest refugee camp, spreading her immediate family across three countries.
Sadeka’s story is the Rohingyas in microcosm. Driven to the brink of destruction by rioting soldiers, traffickers and hostile governments, a community that once believed to have numbered more than a million in Myanmar was not separated by a single action, but by a series of blows. people with no place to call home.