Don't Tell Me You're Afraid (19 page)

But instead . . . Instead of Tripoli they took us to another prison, just outside the town of Ajdabiya.

Yet another scam.

To leave there I would need fifteen hundred dollars, which was a lot even for Hodan and Omar. I stayed there for almost two months.

I
had
to reach my destination. And in the end I gave in. I called Hooyo to ask for money from her and from my siblings too, confessing that I'd left on the Journey but lying and saying that everything was fine. I told her that we had only one minute, not to cry, everything was going well, I was happy and I even found time to train. In a short time I would reach Hodan. By then I no longer even believed it myself. It had been five months since I'd left Addis Ababa, and it all seemed hopeless.

In the prison of Ajdabiya they treated us better than in Kufra, but two prison police robbed me of seven hundred and fifty dollars. Actually, you pay the police, not the traffickers. These are the same police who sell you to those who will take you to the next destination. In my case they'd demanded fifteen hundred
dollars when they'd asked others for seven hundred and fifty instead. They had dug in their heels, adamant. If I hadn't agreed, they would have done to me what they'd done to other girls who were alone: They would have raped me. Like Taliya.

All I could do was wait.

Pray, wait, and read. In fact there were letters in that prison. In Arabic, in Somali, in Ethiopian, and in English, left there somehow, for some reason, tossed aside in a corner, accumulated over years and years. Letters from prisoners or from their loved ones. Maybe they were mementos of the dead that the guards had never had the nerve to discard. In those letters there were lives. And so, reading them, I rediscovered what no longer existed inside of me. Life. Memories. Love. Promises. Courage. Hope. There were some from a man who wrote to his wife every day. Each morning when the sun rose. A young woman who, dreaming, wrote hopeful words to her two-year-old son, who'd been left in Somalia. A little boy who asked his father and mother to be brave, in letters that were never delivered. They were orphaned words, which had never reached their destination. I liked to think that they were meant for me.

In those two months all I did was read and sleep. I hadn't had the energy to train for some time. If the individuals who had written those yellowed letters had had the strength to write what they'd written, I could make it too. I reread them continually, learning my favorite passages by heart.

There was also an Internet connection. I had a young Somali man lend me a few cents, and every now and then I e-mailed Hodan. In the days that followed, I lived in expectation of her
reply. She told me that everything was fine in Helsinki and that she couldn't wait for me to get there. She cheered me up, telling me to remember that it would all be over soon.

Lying on the hard, tick-infested mat, I asked myself if it was all worth it. My answer was no. Why had I let myself in for this? All I wanted was to be a two-hundred-meter champion. No one in the world, over the brief course of his life, should have to go through this hell.

One evening a group of three Somali men escaped from the prison. The guards had forgotten to bolt the door. I'd met one of the three men, Abdullahi, a couple of weeks ago; he'd lent me the money for the Internet. I'd told him my story. He remembered the race in Beijing. He said his wife had told him about me. She had remained in Mogadishu; he would support her, sending her money every month, once he got to Italy. We'd become friends. We talked, we confided in each other, and occasionally we ate together. At first he didn't believe it was me; he thought I'd made it all up. It didn't seem possible that I had been reduced to sleeping with fleas in a prison in the Libyan desert.

The guards brought us supper, rice and vegetables and half a liter of water; then they left for the night. That evening they hadn't locked up, and Abdullahi came to me and asked if I wanted to join them. They would escape when night fell and walk to the town of Ajdabiya. The following morning they would find a way to get to Tripoli from there. It wasn't complicated, but if they were caught, they'd be killed.

I had to decide. I had only two hours and I couldn't talk about it to anyone.

Five months ago I would have said yes. That evening I said no to Abdullahi. I think Aabe was pleased with me. I would stay there and wait for money from Hodan and Hooyo.

The men left two hours later and we never heard anything more about them.

Then, at last, the money came. I left the letters to a sweet Somali girl who had just arrived, depleted and tearful. I told her that reading them would save her life. There they were and no one paid any attention to them. Yet it was only thanks to them that I had survived that prison.

I was alive, in fact, and free at last. I would travel with nine other people in the trailer of a truck carrying sacks of corn flour. The most comfortable leg of the Journey.

Still sleeping in the trailer, we made a two-day stop in Sirte to wait for a few other
tahrib
.

Then we set off again.

Finally, after a week, I was in Tripoli.

It was December 15, 2011. Exactly five months since my departure from Addis Ababa. A year after leaving Mogadishu.

I was free.

When we heard the sounds of the city from inside the trailer, we began to cry. Ten wraiths weeping silently inside the trailer of a truck. Ten wraiths who were ashamed of their tears. All the same, those tears brought us together. That's what happens when you cry as one. I will always carry with me those nine tearful faces. They will always be my brothers and I their sister. I realized that I hadn't cried in months. The desert had drained me of everything, even my tears, my saliva. It had drunk them all up.

When we stopped in a big square and they told us to get out,
I felt light as air. I could barely stand on my feet, but by some miracle my brain began to function.

They abandoned us in that busy square; it was almost sunset, and several stalls selling sweets and kebabs were closing up. Ten wraiths covered with sand, smelly and filthy like pigs.

Ten wraiths among the Libyan inhabitants.

The traffickers opened the trailer and said: “You're free.”

Then they climbed back into the cab and drove off, raising a big cloud of dust and leaving us there to breathe the diesel fumes that by now were part of our lungs.

We found ourselves lost. And famished.

No, we found ourselves.

I was free.

Free as the air, free as waves breaking in the sea.

I
N
T
RIPOLI
I
LIVED
for almost a month in the Somali district. All of us Somali and Ethiopian
tahrib
waiting to embark for Italy occupied about a dozen buildings crowded together in the same neighborhood east of the city. An ugly, dirty area fit for illegals and sewer rats like us. Yet from the very first moment my arrival in Tripoli was a liberation. I never wanted to see the desert again for the rest of my life; that much I was sure of.

There was nothing I hated more than the desert. When you spend months there, the desert gets into your bones, your blood, your saliva; you can't ever get it out of you. You carry the dust everywhere; even if you wash with running water it stays with you forever. But the worst thing is that the desert extinguishes your soul, it obliterates your thoughts. You have to close your eyes and imagine things that aren't there. Months and months of stretches of sand. Wherever you turn, at whatever time of day or night. Only sand and nothing but sand. It drives you insane.

Once I got to Tripoli, I realized that it was a miracle that I'd
survived. It was only thanks to those yellowed letters and to the Olympics that I'd come through sane and not stark, raving mad. It's only when you see the light after being in the dark a long time that you remember the color of things.

That's what happened to me. I remembered what the world was like. And I loved it.

We lived in cramped rooms. Thirty or forty people in each apartment. I was with forty women from all over Africa: All the illegal emigrants meet up in Tripoli. There were Nigerians, Congolese, Somalis, Ethiopians, Sudanese, women from Namibia, Ghana, Togo, the Ivory Coast, Biafra, Liberia. Adults, adolescents, young women, little girls, old ladies. All together and finally safe.

We felt safe. We were in a city; there was everything we needed to live: water, fruit, food. It was all there and no one would snatch it away from us or beat us. I would have stayed in Tripoli for a lifetime, as many thought they'd do once they got there, if it hadn't been for the fact that we were
tahrib
and the police had it in for us as a result of agreements made between the Libyan and Italian governments. If caught, we were to be sent back to our own countries. We knew that.

Nevertheless, we weren't interested in living undercover in those days. If we'd made it that far—some in two months, some in two years, some, like me, in five months—if we had overcome the Sahara, if we were survivors, all we could think of at that point was reaching our destination. Only the destination. Everything else was eclipsed. For us
tahrib
in Tripoli there was only that one goal. Tripoli for us was a transit point, a faint breath of wind, the rustling of a leaf, the blink of an eye.

Then too, in Tripoli there's the sea. The city, like Mogadishu,
is awash with the scent of the sea. That's why my energy returned, the desire to live and take pleasure in life. But there too, as in Mogadishu, I could not go to the sea; if they caught me I would be arrested. I would have to wait; I would just have to wait to get to Italy.

And so, along with food, the urge for companionship came back, to eat together, tell one another our stories, take turns planning our future. And talking. Words are lifesavers. And the words uttered by far the most, by each in his own distorted accent, were “Italy” and “Lampedusa.”

Never in my life have I loved talking as much as I did during the long period I spent in Tripoli. We formed teams according to nationality and challenged one another at cards: Each taught the others their own ways of playing, and then we argued over the rules. We taught one another words in our respective languages. We talked about our families, our homes, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our sweethearts. Our favorite dishes. We wondered how awful the food would be in Europe. We wondered what the people would be like. We imagined the houses we would have. The kitchens. The bathrooms with a tub and shower. Carpeting on the floor, or parquet. And what we would do, our work. I would be an athlete. There were some who dreamed of being lawyers, some teachers, others nurses or pediatricians. Some just wanted a family. We passed the time together, talking about our respective plans. And we also thought about practical things. Like how we would leave. For the last time.

The routine for crossing the sea was the usual. You arrange for the money for the voyage; then you wait. You wait for them
to come and call you and tell you, with no time to prepare, you're leaving in an hour.

You know that anything can happen at sea, but you don't think about it. All you think about is the destination. If all goes well, in two days, two and a half at most, you'll be in Lampedusa. But anything can happen. The sea is a bigger obstacle than the Sahara; the traffickers tell you that when you contact them.

I went with two other Somali girls.

“Prepare for the worst,” they tell you. “What you've faced so far is nothing. By comparison, the Sahara is a cakewalk,” they tell you. And you don't believe it. It can't be true. What I had faced up to that point was hell, nothing could be worse. Besides, the sea,
my
sea, couldn't hurt me. We'd had a rendezvous planned for nearly twenty years now. I knew it and the sea knew it. In Italy, at last, we would meet up. One of the first things I'd do was plunge into it and enjoy that vast, welcoming immensity.

The boats are old pieces of junk that should be used only for scrap iron. The sea's power is capable of engulfing them at any moment. For us
tahrib,
however, they were pure gold, luxurious cruise yachts. In addition to engine failures, the trafficker might get lost; the damn GPS could fail or make a mistake. Or we might even run out of gas; it seems impossible but it happens: Sometimes they miscalculate the amount of fuel they need, or they unintentionally extend the route and are left empty. You know that anything can happen but you don't think about it; what you think about is the destination.

There you are, waiting for that moment for weeks or months, and when it comes you're caught unprepared. Every time. There's
no way to prepare; I don't know anyone who was ever prepared. Not in terms of what you need to bring with you: There are only two or three things and they are always with you. No, prepared in your head. Prepared for the fact that it's the end of the Journey.

You don't know if it will be morning, afternoon, or night. It's usually at night, but you can never tell; it depends on the trafficker's strategy. There are some who decide on midnight, so they can be offshore before the light. Some opt for the afternoon, so they can already be far out to sea by daybreak. Others instead choose the early morning, so they can cover a long distance and be far away from Africa when darkness falls, and therefore less visible.

I was hoping my voyage would be in the afternoon; it seemed like a quieter time to start out.

I was jittery; Hodan had told me that she would promptly send the money I needed, twelve hundred dollars, to the address I had given her. I couldn't wait.

It didn't even take a month. I don't know how Hodan came up with the money, but I didn't care; it was one of the things I'd ask her once I got there.

My turn came a few days later, on January 12, 2012. It wasn't in the afternoon. It was in the morning, at 4:00 a.m. I was awakened and told to leave.

But my trip lasted only three hours. That's how short-lived my joy at being at sea was. We hardly had time to board—seventy of us in a rubber dinghy that was too small—when we had to turn back. The air that morning was electric; the sun wouldn't rise until two hours later and the excitement among us was so tense you could cut it with a knife. We settled into our
places in silence, some on the outside, some in the middle. I ended up at the stern on the outside next to the traffickers; because I was skinny I squeezed in between two hefty Nigerian guys whose arms were as big as my legs.

But it was a fiasco.

A doomed attempt: The dinghy began to take on water almost immediately. The traffickers swore in Arabic and for a while they kept going anyway. Then they stopped. “We're turning back,” they told us. The end of the line, the end of our dreams and hopes.

“We were lucky to notice it early on, still close to the coast,” they said. “If we were midway there we'd have sunk. We'd have all drowned.” That's what they told us.

Only three hours.

Then back to Tripoli.

And nobody gives you your money back.