Q&A: Author Muhammad Zaman on why health care is an impossible dream for 'unpersons'
"There are millions of people who remain invisible to us," says Muhammad Zaman in his new book We Wait for a Miracle.
The miracle he is referring to is access to health care.
He's writing about various kinds of displaced people: refugees — people who cross international borders; the internally displaced, who leave their homes but remain in the country; and the stateless, who lack proof of citizenship or national ID cards.
They are "unpersons," Zaman says, quoting the term coined by George Orwell — pushed into displacement by conflict, by climate change, by persecution, by political change.
In the book, Zaman, a biomedical engineer and director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University, tells stories of people from four countries — Colombia, Pakistan, South Sudan and Uganda — who try to obtain care for friends and families in their communities.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
This question feels terrible to
