There, Aisha’s mother worked as a cleaner but soon fell sick, and Aisha was compelled to take over her mother’s work, cleaning hotels as well as selling clothes in the market. Still only a child, Aisha had become the family breadwinner. Soon after, aged just 15, she was forced to marry a Yemeni man and gave birth to two sons. Her husband did not work, and Aisha supported them all.
Not yet an adult, Aisha had already suffered so much—the loss of a parent, displacement, child marriage, and back-breaking labour—but she carried her burdens with resilience and dignity, working hard to look after her young children. “Our life had improved,” Aisha says.
Then in 2014 war broke out in Yemen, and Aisha’s world was turned upside down. The conflict has been devastating, pushing four-fifths of the population below the poverty line, and forcing 4.3 million from their homes. Among those displaced by the fighting are people such as Aisha who had come from elsewhere, hoping to find safety in Yemen.
The war quickly took a personal toll on Aisha, when her brother and three of his children were killed in a missile strike. Aisha rushed to her ailing mother’s side but, traumatized by the death of her son and grandchildren, she died a month later.
“When my mother died, I said to myself, ‘You no longer have a mother or a brother here, what are you going to do?”
As the conflict intensified, Aisha decided it was better to uproot herself than risk her and her children’s lives by staying, so she gathered together what money she could and, following others who were also fleeing, boarded a boat to Sudan, hoping to continue to Egypt, and then Europe.
Leaving, she escaped not only the war but the husband she had been forced to marry as a child. But when Aisha and her two young sons reached Egypt, they found it was not possible to cross from there to Europe by sea, so when smugglers promised a simple journey to neighbouring Libya and then to Europe, Aisha believed it might be a way out, even though she knew the journey would would be especially difficult as a single mother with young children.
“There isn’t just one smuggler,” she says. “For example, one in Egypt has contact with another in Libya. The one in Egypt persuades you to leave, he makes everything look easy and there’s no problem. But when you get in the car, you feel like you’re in trouble.”
Crammed in on top of one another, with her children on her lap, Aisha was terrified as the driver raced recklessly through the desert. Her sons suffered nausea and vomiting from travel sickness. She feared for herself, and her children. “I was afraid that my children would die on the road, that they would die of thirst and exhaustion.”
“I felt very bad because of my children,” she says. “When I looked at their faces, I cried so much. I was scared, my stomach ached. The worst thing is that the children are struggling so much you hate yourself, and all you can think about is when will you reach Libya and get out of this car?”
Eventually, they did reach Libya and were taken to a place close to the beach, but instead of being ferried across the Mediterranean Sea as promised, Aisha and her children were held under armed guard in a warehouse with others for eight months, promised that their crossing would happen soon, but it never did.
One night another armed gang attacked the warehouse in an attempt to kidnap the migrants and, in the confusion of the ensuing shoot-out, Aisha escaped with her sons, thanks to the help of some Sudanese captives who assisted in getting the children away from danger. “I was afraid of losing the children, or of one of them getting shot, or of me getting shot and my kids finding nowhere to flee,” she says.
After that terrifying experience, Aisha abandoned her hopes of crossing the sea to Europe. Instead, she decided to try a different route, a long circuitous journey back to Sudan and through Chad to Niger, and from there to Algeria and, eventually, Tunisia, where she now lives.
After suffering such dangers and uncertainty, and being forced to put her children in harm’s way, Aisha warns other mothers against attempting such a journey. “Don’t put your children’s lives at risk,” she says.
ENDS
