In mid-March, Sadeka Bibi set off with a small package of belongings to an unmarked spot next to a road in south-eastern Bangladesh, full of hope and fear.
A truck met her there, drove her to a place near the coast about an hour south and boarded a boat that would transport her illegally to Malaysia, where a man she had never met was waiting to marry her.
I knew it was dangerous. The ship could capsize. She could be beaten, starved to death or extorted by human traffickers. He could die. Or, like the previous ten attempts he had made to cross, his escape could be thwarted by the rough seas or border authorities. Still, in Sadeka, a 21-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, the journey seemed like the only way to start again.
It was this or that faded behind barbed wire, potentially for the rest of his life, in the world’s largest refugee camp, his immediate family spread across three countries.
Sadeka’s story is that of the Rohingya in the microcosm. Driven to the brink of destruction by soldiers, human traffickers and hostile governments, a community believed to have surpassed one million in Myanmar has been destroyed not by a single action, but by a series of blows that have left a people no place to call home.