by
Pamela Kerpius

Recorded:
16 April 2022

Published:
17 October 2022

Meet Lamin.

20 years old and from Gambia.

To reach Italy he crossed through seven countries: The Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Libya.

He departed The Gambia in August, 2015. His journey took about one year and 10 months.

On the first leg of the twenty-two-month journey, he took a ferry boat from Gambia to the border with Senegal, then transferred to a taxi which after six hours brought him to Kaolack, Senegal. At some point he passed briefly through Mauritania, then connected by bus to Mali.

There was one stop in Mali, in Bamako, where he stayed one night, then continuing the next day to Burkina Faso, where again he remained for one night. The next day, his bus arrived in Niamey, the Niger capital. He stayed for four days at a connection house where he was brought by traffickers. It wasn’t safe, he says, but he went out anyway. Checkpoints and police where scattered throughout the city and on roads. 

“They’re not checkpoints though,” Lamin said, “They’re criminals. They use it to get money. That’s what they want to do. Collect money. [Then] you go.”

From Niamey he stopped in Agadez, Niger, where he stayed for less than one day. Lamin crossed the Sahara desert in the back of a pickup truck with around twenty people, all men, in a crossing that took three days. He had five liters of water only and did not eat. 

“How can you have the appetite to eat?” Lamin said.

He felt “crazy,” he said during the crossing, which took place in the intense, lingering heat of late summer. Everyone in his truck may have survived, but the calculation for survival wasn’t so simple. Sometimes one truck would miss the line of sight on the two others that made up their caravan of three. The driver had a compass of course, but he’d lose track anyway and be unable to find the road.

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The driver stopped at a well for more water. The water though was bad. It was dirty. There is no other choice in the desert. His driver left them there for three days––no one was sure he’d come back, and while it was a huge relief when he did, people were already dying. The survivors went back aboard the trucks, but two had died. He encountered two girls from Nigeria, giving them water and watched them recover. But he had to continue on and never found out if the girls lived or died.

More checkpoints arose in the remainder of the crossing before Libya. These criminals at the checkpoints, holding them up for money, made them remove their shoes and stand on the hot sand as torture. 

“I still feel the heat through my shoes,” said Lamin. And yet it was too cold at night to rest. He said, “to sleep is a problem.”

Finally, the truck arrived in Libya, in Bahye, where he only passed through, before stopping in Gadron. It’s an uncommon stopping point in the stories Migrants of the Mediterranean has documented, typically it is a transitory place more than a holding place. In Lamin’s case, he remained for a year against his will. 

He was rounded up by police in Gadron and taken to prison. He was beaten every day. Sometimes up to six people were beating him at once, flogging him on the bottom of his feet, landing blows across his face. He had broken bones. 

“You can cry for small pain,” said Lamin, “For big pain you don’t cry. You take it.” 

He spend eight months in the prison in Gadron, eating a piece of bread as his daily meal––just enough to stay alive. “You don’t know what comes next when they beat you. They could kill you,” he said. They wanted 500 dinars to release him from the prison. “You have the money, you have the solution.”

Lamin tapped his head with his finger, “mentality,” he said is the thing that made him stay strong during this time. “I’m not afraid anymore after Libya.”

After leaving Gadron he traveled to Sabha, stopping for one day, passed through Bani Waled, then took three more days before reaching his final destination in Libya, the coastal city of Sabratha. He stayed in an “incomplete house,” a compound that was just constructed to its frame, for three to four months.

On 30 June 2017 Lamin crossed the Mediterranean Sea in a rubber dinghy with more than 130 people, including over 10 women, some of whom where pregnant, plus an unspecified number of children. He was at sea for five or six hours. It was dark on the water. At 10:00a.m. they spotted a ship with a red and orange flag––maybe it was German, said Lamin.

“I don’t know where we’re going,” after he was saved during the emergency operation in which everyone aboard his boat survived. He was on board for a day then transferred to a bigger ship, landing in Palermo, Sicily on 1 July 2017.

He is 28 years of age now and living in Frosinone, Italy, where we recorded this story on 16 April 2022.

Lamin is an amazing human being.