In mid-March, Sadeka Bibi left with a small bundle of her belongings for an unmarked spot on the side of a road in southeastern Bangladesh that was immediately filled with hope and fear.
A truck would meet her there, take her to a place on the coast about an hour south, and she would get on a boat that would take her illegally to Malaysia, where a man she had never met was waiting to to marry her.
She knew it was dangerous. The boat could capsize. She could be beaten, starved, or extorted by human traffickers. She could die. Or, like the 10 previous attempts she had made to cross, her escape could be thwarted by rough seas or border authorities. Yet Sadeka, a 21-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, seemed like the only way to make a fresh start.
It was either that or languished behind barbed wire, possibly for the rest of her life, in the world’s largest refugee camp, her immediate family spread across three countries.
Sadeka’s story is the Rohingya in the microcosm. Driven to the brink of destruction by ferocious soldiers, human traffickers and hostile governments, a community once believed to have numbered more than a million in Myanmar is left not by a single action but by a series of blows. a people with no place to call home.