If you don’t have the money, they beat you.
If you don’t obey orders, they beat you.
If you dare to respond, they beat you.
If you ask for more water, they beat you. They don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, an adult or a child: They beat you.
If you protest, they bring you to the police.
And there you have only two options. Pay the police to be handed over to other traffickers, or let them take you back to the border with Ethiopia.
Early in the Journey you learn to keep silent and pray.
Early in the Journey you learn to forget why you’re there and to practice silence and prayer.
For ten days I stayed in Sharif al Amin, in that brick house that was actually a prison with bars on the windows. Two liters of water every twenty-four hours, and two servings of food. A mattress on the floor in quarters for thirty people.
To get to Khartoum, another two hundred dollars were needed.
I had almost run out of money.
On the third day I called Hodan in Finland and revealed that I had left. She thought I was still in Addis Ababa; I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone. I had only one minute’s time, not a second more. She knew. That’s what the traffickers allow you on their satellite phones. A minute doesn’t seem like very much, but in that situation it becomes timeless. In a minute you can say everything you need. You learn that a minute can save your life. That’s all you need.
Hodan wasn’t expecting me; speaking in rapid-fire bursts she told me to be careful, to try to become friendly with the Somalis, to always stay in a group, never to go off on my own, to do as the others did so I wouldn’t stand out. Suddenly my brain started functioning again; I took in everything she said.
She asked me where I was and I told her.
She hadn’t been there; she didn’t know the place. Her Journey had taken a different route.
I told her I needed money to continue, that I had used up what I had, and that I didn’t want to call Hooyo or Said; I didn’t want them to worry. I would call them from Italy once I got there.
I told her where to send the money.
Before ending the call she reminded me not to be afraid.
“Never say you’re afraid, Samia.”
“Okay, abaayo.”
Never.
It was what I used to tell her during her Journey.
But everything was different now. I was afraid; I was very afraid. Frayed. I felt frayed. Like the worn photo of Mo Farah stuffed in my bag; I felt as fragile as butterfly wings. As insubstantial as a cloud. Poof.
What a lot of things you can say in a minute. A lot.
The money from Hodan arrived after eight days, and two nights later I resumed the Journey.
CHAPTER 26
WHEN I GOT TO KHARTOUM, I knew I had to rest up and recoup my strength for the hardest part, crossing the Sahara.
I was shattered. I was a memory of myself, not a presence, a slender thread of memories and scattered images. That’s all I was.
I stayed in a tiny apartment on the outskirts south of the city for six weeks, along with thirty other women. A month and a half. All we did was sleep and take turns going out to buy food at the market or in a store a short distance from the house. We were tahrib; we had to be careful. We crept around like tahrib. We were shifty-eyed like tahrib. We looked like paranoid, frantic mice, always on guard. In danger of being sent back to where we’d started.
I had to call Hodan again and have her send me another five hundred dollars for a leg of the trip that was supposed to get me to Tripoli. Reluctantly, I was having her give me back Alì’s money that I had sent her for Mannaar. But things had changed. Mannaar came to me in my dreams and no longer in my waking thoughts. Awake, all I thought of was staying alive.
And no one had told me that the Journey would be so expensive.
I knew they wouldn’t take us to Tripoli, that they would leave us someplace else. But I had learned. If I didn’t want fear to get the better of me, what I had to do was not think about it.
I spent forty days stuck in that apartment in a six-story building on the ugly outskirts of Khartoum. There were only two windows, and all you could see was the concrete facades of other dilapidated buildings like ours. Flaking walls and decrepit balconies. In the distance, as far as you could see, a patch of desert could be glimpsed between two buildings.
Golden.
The heat was asphyxiating. And there were thirty-one women and three children in very cramped quarters. I spent the first ten days lying on the ground on a mat.
I didn’t even have enough air to dream.
Then I made a mistake.
In spite of everything, maybe I still felt like I was invulnerable, invincible, the Samia I’d always been. True, I had effaced myself and struggled to even remember who I was; memories flashed by only when they chose to. But maybe what we are deep inside can’t be effaced. Maybe that’s how it is, and we end up recognizing who we are only through what we do. Anyway, Ayana, a Somali girl, warned me not to do it. But the water was all used up, and we were waiting for the sun to go down to go out and buy some containers. I was parched. That night I’d sweated so profusely that the moisture had drenched my clothes and soaked through to the hard mat. I drank tap water from the bathroom. Within three hours I began to feel strong shudders running down my back, along my arms and legs, everywhere. Cold sweats. Then nausea and hallucinations. I was gripped by a fever I’d never experienced before. And dysentery. Since I’d left, I hadn’t eaten much. The muscles I had developed with Eshetu were slowly wasting away. I could see for myself. The dysentery was the final blow.
I spent twenty days on the mat in a comatose state. Ayana comforted me. She remained healthy while others fell ill as I did. If it wasn’t the water, it could be an unwashed fruit. Or a fruit rinsed with that same water. Or some rotten fish.
I should have left sooner, but I waited to get my strength back. Ayana had no one to call in Europe for money, so she would remain in that house much longer than I. She’d almost begun to think of it as home.
Then, finally, I was well again. I’d recovered my strength. At least as much as I needed.
They squeezed us all in, only this time there were even more of us than the first time. Eighty-six. So packed in that we gagged for lack of air. Once again a jeep.
After a few kilometers no one spoke anymore, no one complained, no one even thought of singing. The stretch through the desert is much tougher. The heat is so intense you could die, and besides that, the vehicle proceeds more slowly, maintaining a constant low speed. It doesn’t brake or accelerate, so as not to get stuck in the sand. Everything is grueling, even breathing. It’s like crawling along on an endless road at a snail’s pace. As you move ahead, you can see the road lengthen rather than shorten.
That leg was supposed to last four days. We waited only for the times when the jeep would stop, twice a day. Once, in daylight, to do our business and sip some water. The other, at night, to sleep on the sand. The days had turned into a single, endless, prolonged waiting. From the moment you set out again, you started counting the minutes until the next stop.
All around, a lunar landscape in which earth and sky are one. Your points of reference vanish. It’s like diving into a mirror. An endless expanse of sand. So uniform that you too end up turning into sand. And not just because it filters in everywhere, so that it quickly fills your eyes, throat, and lungs with grit, and you have to swallow so it won’t clog up your mouth. Soon you stop fighting it and simply close your eyes, clamp your jaws shut, and count. You count to a thousand, and at every hundred you swallow what little saliva you have left, keeping count with your fingers. You know that when you get to a thousand, twenty minutes will have passed. Amir, a Somali, taught this to me on the first leg of the trip from Addis Ababa to Al Qadarif. Then you count to ten thousand. That comes to over three hours. When you’ve counted to ten thousand three times, it’s almost time for the stop. Going on like that, you
too end up becoming sand, because you see yourself as a minute grain of that white expanse, or as one of the seconds of time that, like a madwoman, you can’t get out of your head.
I kept my plastic bag tucked under my T-shirt.
We had ten liters of water per person for four days. Two and a half liters a day, which in the intense heat of the Sahara aren’t enough for even a few hours.
Every so often someone would fall asleep or pass out from lack of air. It happened to me too. The woman next to me, an old Somali, noticed it and tried to wake me up by nudging me with her shoulders, but I didn’t respond. Then someone who had managed to hide a bottle of water pulled it out. They passed the word and in a few minutes the bottle reached the woman. She poured a little on my head and I came to. What had happened to my strength? Where was the little Olympic warrior? Had I really been in Beijing, or was it all a dream? The opening ceremony, with me a bright star in the firmament of the strongest in the whole world? And Mo Farah in the middle of the field, laughing and relaxed? Another hallucination?
In the evening we traveled until even the drivers were ready to drop. To avoid being seen by police helicopters patrolling the desert, the traffickers keep the lights turned off, using them as little as possible. You’re in the Sahara at night with no light, crushed among dozens of bodies on a dilapidated jeep creeping along like a snail.
As soon as the sun went down it felt like we were traveling in a nightmare. Counting relaxed me and fed my imagination. Every now and then I thought I was on a plane, like when I went to Beijing and took the sleeping pill. As it had then, the constant noise of the engine made me dream of being in an endless, dark tunnel. Suddenly I opened my eyes and everything slipped away. I was going to China; they were my Olympics. The hotel would be beautiful. I would shake hands with Veronica Campbell-Brown. She would look at me curiously at first, then with admiration. I would run in a huge stadium in front of TV cameras from around the world. I would give it my best. At the end everyone would stand up to applaud me, journalists from throughout the world would interview me, my face would be seen in every corner of the planet.
Then a sharp bump, an abrupt swerve, or a deep depression, someone vomiting. I was plunged back to where I was. In a dark tunnel that wasn’t a dream. Hours and hours without headlights, guided only by GPS.
Eighty-six of us clinging to the technology of a GPS.
There are no roads in the Sahara. There are no tracks. Each trafficker on each Journey follows his own particular route. In the morning the tire marks are covered over by sand. Erased forever. No Journey is the same as another.
For days you’re in the hands of human traffickers who in turn are in the hands of a small box that communicates with a satellite.
Around three in the morning we’d stop someplace in the midst of that expanse of sand dunes, eat moffa, a grain and corn-flour mush, and try to get some sleep; we lay there huddled around that rusted vehicle, which from outside seemed minuscule.
The families stayed together, the children crying. The older people moaned and groaned.
I had become friends with an Ethiopian girl, Zena, a little older than me, who wanted to be a doctor. Her dream was to get to Europe and enroll in college. Any university in any European city— to her it made no difference. She was traveling with her elderly grandmother, who was always glued to her.
In spite of everything, we couldn’t sleep. It was difficult to sleep. Many people prayed. They prayed out loud. The children were never still and the parents didn’t know what to do. There was one child in particular, Said, four years old, with his mother and father. Said seemed possessed. He cried all day and didn’t stop, not even at night. He never stopped. Given the way he kept crying, making his throat sore and scratchy, his voice had become hoarse and croaky, like that of a muttering, demented old man or an abandoned dog tied to a post for weeks. The parents did their best to keep him quiet. Every night they had to take turns moving a distance away in order not to disturb the group. Otherwise someone might go berserk. You had to be careful about everything.
On those nights, lying on the sand with the aimless, dark forms of the desert cockroaches and beetles, I thought about Hooyo and I thought about Aabe. I cried and silently begged my father for help. Or I talked to Hodan, telling her that I would be with her soon. I thought about Beijing, the happy days, about that first morning at the hotel in front of the BBC. About the applause, the fans standing and shouting my name.
I focused on the upcoming London Olympics and tried to bear up.
By doing that, I was slowly able to fall asleep.
At noon, after driving for two days, the Land Rover broke down, this time for real.
It started jolting and jerking for a while; then it got mired in the sand. We were in the middle of the Sahara with brutal heat and no protection.
We all got out. The traffickers tried to disassemble a few parts without letting anyone get near the engine. After three hours they realized that there was nothing they could do and called for help, transmitting the coordinates of the GPS.
The children were already crying; the elderly tried to take cover in the meager shade under the jeep. We were stranded there for twenty-four hours. The water had been used up long ago. We thought we would all die, and that individual thought became a collective one. Somehow, all of a sudden, everyone began to buckle under the same pressure, as if a huge mallet had materialized and begun pounding down on all our heads simultaneously. The endless hours stretched out in hallucinations: Sitting on the sand without protection, those visions became a common delirium.
Then the sound of an engine was heard in the distance. We didn’t know if it was real or imaginary. But before long the silhouette of a vehicle appeared from behind a dune. They had found us. And they also had water; there were lots of jerricans tied to the outside.
That same evening we resumed the trek.
You quickly become ruthless. Everyone thinks only of himself.
No one tells you this before; you learn for yourself that it’s up to you not to fall out of the jeep. If you fall off, the traffickers won’t stop. They tell you that right away, before the start of each stretch.
There are only three rules, the same for every trip, and each time they’re repeated.
Number one: You can’t take anything with you but the plastic bag.
Number two: If at any time you rebel against the conditions of the Journey and force the vehicle to stop, you will be left where you are.
Number three: If you fall out of the jeep, the driver will not stop.
This last rule is meant to prevent hang-ups. It’s not like they would lose too much time. All they’d have to do is stop, pick up the person who fell off, shove him back into the jeep bed, and be on their way again. Yet that’s not what happens. If you fall, you won’t be rescued. If you knew that you could let go, many people would do it. Within a few hours the others would get discouraged. After a few days in the intense heat, the insignificant ants that we are would rise up. Better to stir everyone up against one another and avoid the risk of having the tires get stuck in the sand.
And besides, you’re just a hawaian, an animal, who pays to be transported from one place to another, nothing more. In fact, for the traffickers you’re evidence of the crime if they should be stopped by the police. Every complication means a loss of time.
On the last morning Zena and her grandmother ended up at the back of the jeep bed. We had slept a distance away from the vehicle to steer clear of little Said, who wouldn’t stop crying. When they called us at dawn, we knew we had to get a move on; otherwise we would be left for last. The grandmother could hardly walk: She’d sprained her ankle; maybe her foot had been in the wrong position for too many long hours. I ran ahead to save a place for them. But someone started yelling, saying I couldn’t hold places for anyone else, everyone had to fend for himself. I said something about an elderly lady, and an Ethiopian woman started shrieking, threatening to slap me if I didn’t stop it. She sat down ne
xt to me. I tried to move back but there was no way; the mass of humanity was too dense. I had to stay where I was. I called out loudly to Zena, and from the back she told me not to worry: They had found seats.
All of a sudden, after a few hours, someone shouted something in a language that wasn’t mine. Perhaps Arabic, perhaps Ethiopian, maybe Sudanese or English. Then someone up front started pounding his fist on the roof of the driver’s cab.
“Stop! Stop!”
I thought someone felt sick; it happened occasionally. The driver went straight on as if he hadn’t heard. The man kept on banging and banging. After a while the trafficker lowered the window and stuck out his arm, his open hand facing the jeep bed in the Arabic gesture that means “Go to hell.” Shove it!
Then word passed from ear to ear.
Someone had fallen out. Zena’s grandmother had fallen out.
CHAPTER 27
THEY DROPPED US OFF AT the Libyan border. It was October 12, 2011.
The Land Rover stopped and we waited there.
I don’t know how they knew that Sudan ended at that particular spot, since we were surrounded by nothing but sand. In any case, Sudan ended there. We waited for hours.
Then they came to pick us up.
Libyan traffickers.
Much worse than the Sudanese, so everyone said. Because in Libya the law is more severe.
They showed up, loaded us onto a small bus, and took us to the prison in Kufra.
Our worst nightmare had materialized.
We all knew what Kufra was. A place where you were likely to stay forever, if you didn’t have the money they demanded— and it was a lot of money. Or else when you started stinking like a corpse, they took you back to the border with Sudan, just before you died. They left you in the middle of the Sahara to drop dead there.
That’s what everyone said.
Our arrival, however, was not traumatic. The place was better than the prison in Sharif al Amin: bigger, more spacious. A light-colored building of rough concrete blocks, it stood right in the middle of the desert.
Little Warrior Page 16