by
Pamela Kerpius

Recorded:
31 March 2021

Published:
April 2021

Meet Habz.

20 years old and from The Gambia.

To reach Italy he crossed five countries: Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Algeria, and the most dangerous of all, Libya.

He left Gambia on December 15, 2016. His journey took about three months, and went through Algeria to the desert, rather than via Agadez, Niger, like many others coming from West Africa.

From an unnamed point in Algeria Habz crossed the Sahara desert in the back of a pickup truck with 15 people. The trip took one week. There were two trucks in his caravan, his and another that had many more people inside, including women and children. He had enough water to make the trip, but had to share his supply with passengers in the other truck who did not.

He remembers checkpoints in the desert. At one, his traffickers dropped the passengers in the sand under the open sky for hours. He thought after three hours he was not going to survive and that his traffickers had abandoned him for dead.

After four hours they returned with a new truck, shooting guns into the air to frighten Habz and the others. One passenger among him spoke some Arabic and was able to negotiate with the traffickers; they boarded the truck and continued on with the journey.

The truck never stopped except for when the drivers pulled over to go to the bathroom. He never slept, he said, it wasn’t possible under the stress of the desert and the constant movement of the truck.

One Senegalese passenger fell off the side of the pickup. He fell backwards and landed on his neck, which was bleeding when the truck circled back to retrieve him.

He arrived in a small, unnamed city in Libya at 6:00a.m. and was hidden in a compound. At 8:00a.m. he was freed, and piled back into a car to continue travel to Sabha. The car was smaller than the previous truck bed, and his traffickers tightly pressed people inside. One smacked Habz on the knee with the butt of his gun. Some people were packed between the legs of seated passengers. Some were put into the trunk.

They tried to put Habz in the trunk, but he was vomiting from sickness of stress or poor water quality and he convinced them to let him travel seated inside the car; his friend instead got moved to the trunk for travel.

He ate only biscuits and water to survive. In Sabha he stayed in an open apartment building that kept more than thirty people inside. Some remained for days, others for months – it all depends on how much money you have. The more that’s in your pocket, the quicker the journey can commence.

Habz stayed for a week, but he saw others kept under violent circumstances, some being taken out for slave labor, others being held and tortured under ransom. Others worked in the compound itself, cooking and cleaning in order to earn enough money to make the next step of the journey.

Everyone slept on a blanket or mat thrown on the floor. Women and children were separated from men and kept in another room. Women were raped. If they fought against it they were threatened with death.

He saw bodies discarded in the street in Sabha. He had never seen anything like it, he was frightened and sad and for the first time thought he was better off returning home to The Gambia. But the current of human trafficking is so strong to fight against at this point in the journey, he said, that it is easier to continue toward the sea than to convince traffickers to make the reverse trip.

All the while he was drinking only impure tap water that was salty and continuing to make him sick. He was desperately hungry and needed more substantial food to survive. So he ate his first few bites of plain cooked pasta that was served to him, but that made him vomit.

He left Sabha in the back of a huge cargo truck – more than twenty people were packed inside, but at least it had a top over it to shield them from the sun. They took two days’ rest in a small unnamed city, then continued onward to Tripoli to a connection house.

Habz spent a month in the connection house with over 40 people inside. Those people were held for ransom in the ways we have heard before. They would be asked to call family members on a trafficker’s mobile phone, beaten before making the call for money. Habz remembers finding creative ways to hide his money from thieving traffickers. He cut holes in his clothes or in the lining of his shoes to slip cash secretly away inside.

Like everywhere else in Libya, he almost only had salty tap water to survive during this time. Once a week a delivery of bottled water would arrive and the people would collect the bottles to have something to refill when the supply was gone. He was sick to his stomach all the time, but was lucky to have a bit of medicine he acquired along the way to ease the pain.

He moved to a coastal camp near Sabratha, to what he called the “white house,” a former Libyan military camp. So he was not visible to authorities on the lookout for migrants, he slept inside. Yet outside, traffickers would shoot at the house, frightening everyone inside. Habz stayed here for one month waiting for the weather to improve so the sea would be calm enough for his raft to survive the sea.

Habz crossed the Mediterranean Sea in a small rubber dinghy on 18 March 2017 at 11:00p.m. with 30 people, including four women and three babies. He spend 13 hours on the open sea, lost somewhere in international waters before a German rescue boat arrived.

One at a time, the German rescuers pulled each passenger to safety; it was 19 March 2017. Overnight, he and the rescued traveled on the deck of the boat directly to Italy. Habz landed in Lampedusa on 20 March 2017.

Fourteen days after his rescue we met Habz on Via Roma in Lampedusa, it was 3 April 2017. We were scheduled to record his story in the immediately following days, but before we could meet he was transferred off the island. We kept in touch until we met again for the first time almost exactly four years later in Middelburg, Netherlands to record this story.

Habz is an amazing human being.

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