Imtiaz A. Hussain - Rohingya Camp Narratives: Tales From the ‘Lesser Roads’ Traveled

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Our volume evolved like the Rohingya saga itself: with floods of conflicting, harrowing information, interpretations, and idiosyncrasies littering the BangladeshMyanmar border, all further jolted by the 2020 pandemic-related lockdown beginning in March. Of course, that saga began with the August 2017 eviction, followed by the deluge of just under a million refugees upon border camps. This volumes dozen authors also began to scramble with their nuggets of insights to get into this volume by that years end. Both streams meandered through lockdown restrictions, the Rohingya refugees still searching for their promised land, the Rohingya scholars likewise collecting, collating, and concluding fieldwork observations to share with the general public.

Under the most extraordinary circumstances of illnesses and quarantines along the entire pathway, debts built up, both personally and collectively. We, the authors, owe many more thank-you wishes than we can presently accommodate or, frankly, even recall. Our apology is full and sincere. Still, Nadia Sultana, in her Office Manager capacity of the School of Arts and Social Sciences (SLASS) in Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), steadied the ship, chipped in with typing, and kept us all connected, most particularly through an unplanned January 2021 webinar which allowed us to share our preliminary findings with other inquiring minds. Mahfuz Ahmed, IUBs Deputy Director of Central Information Technology Services (CITS), admirably handled that webinar, and SLASS students hopefully caught a glimpse of a problem or two they may ultimately grapple with in their senior theses.

We wish them, and all others working toward that same goal, wherever they may be, our unflinching gratitude and support. Ultimately, any and all error/s remain/s ours, and ours only.

Dhaka, Bangladesh

February 2021