Sa’ad was in secondary school in Hargeisa, Somalia, when he decided to leave for Europe. He did not feel he had a future in Somalia and friends who had gone to Europe were encouraging him to join them. He contacted a smuggler who arranged for him to travel through Ethiopia and Sudan to Libya. Like most other youngsters leaving for Europe he did not want to tell his family, but he had a bad conscience about that.
“My family didn’t know about my decision and I wasn’t going to inform them. It’s painful to leave your family and go to a place you don’t know anything about. You can’t imagine how difficult it was. You sleep badly, your thoughts are on overdrive, you feel dizzy in your head.”
Having arrived in Ethiopia he felt that his bad forebodings were coming true. The smugglers were not telling him the truth about the journey and what difficulties lay ahead. At the border between Ethiopia and Sudan he and his fellow travellers were taken over by Sudanese smugglers. Sa’ad thought they were behaving like bandits.
“People get seized by bandits at the border. They try to traffic people. They were selling human beings and pulling them by the arm to get them, like animals, saying, I’ll sell them, no they’re mine!”
The smugglers took them to Khartoum from where they continued through the desert. Conditions were awful, unbearably hot during the day and ice cold at night. They were driving non-stop at high speed for four days until they reached Libya. There they were handed over to Libyan smugglers and now they were ordered to call their families for money. They were badly beaten to force their parents to pay quickly.
Having paid, they were taken on the next leg of this horrible journey, through the Libyan desert. Some people died of sickness and were simply thrown off the vehicle. When they arrived to the coast they were told to request even more money from their families and were tortured if they refused.
Finally Sa’ad was at the beach and a boat was being prepared for them. It was a small inflatable boat and they were supposed to steer it to Italy by themselves.
“They gave us a small boat made of plastic and put it in the sea. That’s all. They leave you there. Either you die or you survive. You survive or you capsize. The man who was steering the boat had no previous experience. He was one of us. He had been trained for two days how to drive and control a boat. How to direct it and where to add petrol.”
After 18 hours at sea they had lost direction and were in a desperate situation when they were rescued by the Libyan Coast Guard. They were put into detention where Sa’ad says the conditions were as bad as in the traffickers’ camp. He stayed there for three and a half months and when he was given the opportunity to repatriate, he gladly accepted.
Sa’ad returned home with mixed feelings. He was relieved to be back but regretted his hasty decision which only brought him misery. Sa’ad is now advising other youths to get the correct information about Libya before they decide to take that route.