In mid-March, Sadeka Bibi left with a small package of her belongings to an unmarked spot on the side of a road in southeastern Bangladesh, full of hope and fear.
A truck would meet her there, take her somewhere near the coast about an hour south, and she would take a boat that would take her illegally to Malaysia, where a man she never met was waiting to marry her.
She knew it was dangerous. The boat can capsize. She can be beaten, starved, or extorted by human traffickers. She could die. Or, like the 10 previous attempts she made to cross, her escape may be prevented by rough seas or border authorities. Still, for Sadeka, a 21-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, making the trip seemed the only way to start over.
It was that or languish behind barbed wire, potentially for the rest of his life, in the largest refugee camp in the world, his immediate family spread across three countries.
Sadeka’s story is the microcosm of the Rohingya. Taken to the brink of destruction by angry soldiers, human traffickers and hostile governments, a community that was already believed to have reached well over a million in Myanmar was divided, not by a single action, but by a series of blows that they left a people with no place to call home.