by
Chiara Iacuzio

Recorded:
22 September 2022

Published:
31 July 2023

Meet Promise.

19 years old and from Nigeria.

To reach Europe he crossed three countries: Nigeria, Niger and Libya.

His journey began in the first week of April 2016 took six and a half months. Before he left home, he lived with his dad, and his younger brother and sister. From Nigeria, he crossed the border to Niger, where he spent two weeks until, together with his cousin, he reached his next destination, Agadez, Niger.

In Agadez the drinking water was salty, but it was all he had to survive without the ability to buy expensive bottled water. Promise and his cousin drank salty water like that again and again throughout the journey.

From Agadez, Promise crossed the Sahara desert in the back of a Toyota Hilux pickup truck which carried thirty people. “The sun in the desert is five times hotter than the sun here,” said Promise, and as the pickup drove, the sand would kick up and hit their faces. Skin would peel off from it.

One day during the crossing, after a whole day with no water, the group finally found a well: finally, the relief of quenching their thirst. It was 9:00 pm, pitch dark in the desert. When morning came, they returned to the well again before continuing forward through the desert. It was then they learned the water they drank the night before was contaminated. It was black. They saw dead human bodies floating in it. Nevertheless, the journey had to continue, once again, without water. Promise started to cry.

After three days and three nights in the desert, Promise made it to Gatrone, Libya. Once in Gatrone, Promise was so hungry that he had no choice but to sell his phone to make money to buy food. Only after he sold his phone, did he find out that there were no shops to buy food.

That night, in the shelter where he and his cousin stayed, two people were cooking a spaghetti dish. Everyone in the shelter was hungry, but the couple would not share their food, not even with those begging for it, because that one dish of pasta constituted their own long-term food supply. Starvation, whether witnessing it or suffering it himself, turned out to be a recurring theme in Promise’s journey to Europe.

Getting to Sabha, Libya, Promise’s next destination, took around three days. At first, he had the money to survive, but food was still a struggle. There is strength in numbers though, and in Sabha, the more money people contributed to the shared pot, the better chance they had to eat.

The two kilos of “bako” (the Arabic word for semolina, as spoken in Libyan dialect) they were able to buy could feed up to fifty people. But not everyone could contribute, and those who couldn’t would frequently starve. Promise spent three months in Sabha, and left only after receiving 50 dinars from his uncle.

This time he was heading towards Tripoli. He arrived in Gargaresh, an area just west of the capital city. He recalls a man who would stand guard at the exit of his compound house and assault, or rob anyone who tried to leave. Promise felt threatened and seldom went out as a result.

After numerous attempts, Promise made it to Sabratha, Libya, a coastal camp, and the last piece of land he would find before attempting to cross the sea. He spent two long months at the camp, where he witnessed many abuses, of which women, he says, were often victims. He saw a migrant man selling women into prostitution in exchange for freedom.

The same happened in exchange for food: women were desperate to eat, and a predatory man exploited this. He would take a single sandwich and cut it into 10 pieces; whichever of the women was desperate enough would, in exchange for sex, get one of those small slivers. That was the price of food for starving women. Other times payment for prostitution would be withheld. It happened to a group of women who were regularly raped by a man who entered the compound at his will, Promise recalled, with horror in his eyes.

The first time that Promise attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea it was mid-September 2016. That night, the smugglers were informed that the Libyan police were patrolling the water; the crossing did not take place and the boat went back ashore. One week later, he tried again. The women embarked upon the inflatable boat first, the men followed next, sitting at the back; it was still at the shore when its thirty passengers saw water leaking through its wooden base. The trip was stopped, and once again, he found himself back on Libyan soil.

Two weeks later, Promise crossed the Mediterranean Sea in a rubber dinghy on 12 October 2016 at 2:00pm. with 150 people, including a number of women and two babies. The boat was named “Lampedusa Boat,” and by 3:30 pm—just an hour-and-a-half in—Promise says, the water was already leaking inside. But he was determined to make this crossing: “We could not go back to Libya: we were not ready to die,” he said.

Passengers took off their clothes and used them to soak up water in a desperate attempt to keep the boat afloat. Then, suddenly,  the engine stopped. Lampedusa Boat floated lifelessly, like a fragment of wood on the rough waters.

A Tunisian Cargo Ship passed. Promise and the other passengers thought they were soon to be rescued. They waved and screamed—they did everything they could to catch its attention, but it did not even look at them and sped away.

In a moment like this, one needs to think fast, but thinking fast does not always lead to the best or safest solution. On Lampedusa Boat, there were four gallons of petrol stored in plastic containers. Some of the passengers thought of using the containers as flotation devices.

“Libyan petrol is not like the Italian one,” Promise said, “when you touch it, it burns your skin.”

In actuality, when seawater mixes with petrol it causes what is commonly referred to as “fuel burn,” a chemical burn which instantly sears the skin, sometimes causing third-degree burns. Women and children are the most affected by this as they are frequently placed on the floor in the center of the boat. This is erroneously considered a safer place, instead, it is where leaking fuel pools and gathers, leaving the passengers more susceptible to burns.

Passengers emptied the containers into the water. Some slipped into the sea. “It was dreadful,” Promise said, “everyone was crying, babies were crying.” Everyone who got into the water suffered excruciating skin burns.

At 11:59p.m. Promise saw a Spanish airplane. Ten minutes later, a ship was on the horizon, a Spanish Red Cross vessel. It circled them three times. Two passengers leapt toward it while it was moving and died.

The rescue team began handing out life jackets. Promise explained, “The rescue team passes the life jacket on to you, and you have to pass it on to the person behind you and so on.” But people started moving and panicking, and the chaos aboard the boat threw twenty-one people into the water. All of them died before they could be rescued.

Promise, who was sitting at the side of the boat with his legs straddling the edge, was knocked into the water by oncoming waves. He was unable to swim, but kept afloat with the life jacket he already had on. As the Spanish Red Cross rescue boat maneuvered around the dinghy to deliver the life jackets though, he got trapped underwater. His fellow passengers started shouting.

“Their boat was suffocating me,” Promise said. “They rescued me from underwater and they put me on the rescue boat,” he said. “They had to press on my chest—this way I threw up the water. That night, I drank so much Mediterranean water.”

Promise and the other passengers were rescued on 13 October 2016 and brought to European waters during a storm that kept them from port for two days while weather conditions improved. There was scant food and water, but he was alive. He landed in Catania, Sicily, at 9:00pm. on 14 October 2016.

He is 26 years of age now and living in Naples, Italy, where we recorded this story on 22 September 2022.

Promise is an amazing human being.

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