This text is dedicated to all the politicians who ignore the refugees and their dignity and to all the people who don’t know a thing about us…

We are the forgotten human beings. 

You must understand this isn’t an imaginary story. It is the reality, happening everyday to people who dream of Europe, the land of freedom and dreams.

No one wants to meet death. but We bought it. 

A huge thank to everyone who supported or has helped migrants, no words can express my gratitude.

There is three parts of the trip:

1st : from Sudan to Ajdabiya in Libya.

2nd: from Ajdabiya to Tripoli.

3rd: from Tripoli to Europe.

I wrote this blog to let people know a little bit about the death trip because I saw how some governments are treating the migrants, which is totally unfair. I will not talk about the African countries because this would take years to describe, and please excuse my bad english. Nobody knows what the migrants have been through to arrive to Europe and those who do know, still can’t feel it. I hope no one feels what we felt.

Every time we thought ‘the hard part is over’, the hardest was yet to  come.

The trip for Eritreans and Ethiopians to Sudan is very hard. In Sudan where I am from, it begins in the Libyan market of Omdurman, where a lot of smugglers are active. It costs almost 700 Euro and sometimes more. To get that much, people sell their homes, some sell their kidney or anything that can get them such an amount.

After that, there are two types:

1st : those who pay before the trip which is most of them

2nd: those who pay after they arrive in Libya

The trip begins once the broker has agreed by phone with the smuggler where to meet in order to get out of Khartoum at night. (The funny thing is the relationship between the smugglers and the police. In Khartoum I saw a conference against Human trafficking)

When you get in the 4×4 car, the suffering begins. If the car capacity is of 30 people, they will load it with 60 people. Add the desert, the thirst, the speed… after many days we arrived at delivery point at the Libyan border, Al Kufra district. I remember that time clearly because we lost many people, there was no water (we drunk our own pee), they left us for many days without any food or water. The Libyans smugglers ( the worst human being on Earth ) communicate exclusively with slaps, hits and punches. They are indescribable. We were later taken from car to car, again, driving through the desert and not using roads, until the main warehouse in Ajdabiya (not all smugglers have a warehouse but every major smuggler does). The warehouse is worse than jail, no enough air or food, we are locked like the animals. There, they separated us into two groups: those who have already paid and those who haven’t paid yet.

This last group will be distributed into three groups:

A: those who will stay in the warehouse until they pay or somebody pays for them .

B: those who will be taken by Libyans who need cheap or free workers. These Libyans pay a small price to the smuggler and often after many months or years, the migrants  will be kicked on the streets without anything and will start to collect the money needed to cross the sea .

C: those who will be working for the smugglers themselves. Often it’s the ones who speak Arabic & Tigrinya or who look like body guards and they are asked to organise or beat the others and sometimes to get girls to the smugglers. These usually work for many months and are then released.

Those who paid for the first part of the trip (Khartoum-Ajdabiya) but don’t have money or anyone to give them money for the next, will be sent to the city to work until they collect the money for the rest of the trip. That was my case.

To be continued ……

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