by
Pamela Kerpius

Recorded:
21 June 2021

Published:
2 August 2021

Meet Abraham.

28 years old and from Nigeria.

To reach Europe he crossed three countries: Nigeria, Niger, and the most dangerous of all, Libya.

His journey took one-and-a-half years.

He left in February 2015 in a car heading north. There were ten seats but 25 passengers. They traveled for eight hours. He didn’t have documents, so he was lucky when the car passed border controls unnoticed. At a connection point before Niger, he transferred to a motorbike that he took with one other person, traveling for an hour until he arrived at a designated village.

He stayed in the village in a connection house that held more than 100 people. He remained for a few days before moving on.

He traveled by pickup truck to Agadez, Niger, where he stayed in a camp for three days with 200-300 people until it was time to depart.

Abraham crossed the Sahara desert in the back of a pickup truck with 30 people, including eight women. There was no water at hand, only well water at various spots in the desert. “What can you do?” Abraham said about the dead bodies he saw in the wells contaminating the water. There was nothing else to drink to survive.

He saw an whole truck of passengers – 20 to 30 people – dead from an accident. There was no stopping, “You just keep going. You never look back,” he said. He saw hills of sand, rocks, more dead bodies. He heard ghosts. Voices crying out. A Nigerian man named John, 25 or 26-years-old, fell out of his truck and died. The desert crossing took three days.

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He arrived in Sabha, Libya and stayed for four months in a prison compound with more than 150 people. Each day he received one piece of bread to eat, and one bottle of tap water to drink. Inside, women were raped. They were forced into prostitution. Men were sold into slavery. Their labor used on farms.

One night, eight people, including himself slipped through a hole they made in the shower room. Guards saw them and opened fire. Three survived. “You just keep running,” Abraham said.

The next place he stayed was against his will, in a house where he was held for four months. He had no family to call for ransom money. He escaped, was caught again, and stayed in the next house for one month under similar conditions, with the exception of farm work he was forced to do.

In exchange for his labor he was driven to Tripoli where he stayed for about three to 5 months in a building that had multiple stories. He slept sitting upright. There was a “melody of guns all the time,” he said. He had to venture into the insecurity of the city in order to get food – though he was given a bottle of Coca-Cola and a piece of bread for work he found at a house completing farm and construction work.

He transferred to the coastal camp, Sabratha, sleeping on the ground in the elements. There was a house, but it already had 150 people inside. It was too crowded.

Abraham crossed the Mediterranean Sea at midnight or 1:00a.m. in a rubber dinghy with 110 people, including five women, three of whom were pregnant, an two babies. He was out at sea for hours. He watched the sun rise. It was 1 October 2016. People onboard got petrol burns – the mixture of sea water and gasoline from the engine that sears human flesh.

He was rescued, and everyone with him survived. Two more boats of people were rescued from the Mediterranean after his, and he landed in Sicily, Italy on 10 October 2016.

He is 34 years of age now and living in Middelburg, Netherlands, where we recorded this story on 21 June 2021.

Abraham is an amazing human being.