Little Brother: A Refugee's Odyssey by Ibrahima Balde

Little Brother: A Refugee's Odyssey by Ibrahima Balde

Author:Ibrahima Balde
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781951627959
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00


16

When I arrived in Sabratha, someone who looked like one of my kind approached me. He told me that if I was looking for a European program, I was to follow him.

“I know the place from where they all take off,” he said.

“Baba Hassan?” I asked.

And he nodded yes with his head. “That’s where we’re going.”

The Baba Hassan camp, or trankilo, is huge and wide open. There, if you want to find a place to lie down, there’s the sand on the ground. If you look up, you see that there’s no roof over you, everything is open to the sky. If you look to the left, you see only migrants. It’s the same to the right. We were over six hundred in that camp, many from Guinea.

Before I could go to sleep, they asked for my name. “Balde, Ibrahima.” And my age. “Seventeen.” A man with a long beard was making notes, and he had some doubts. He asked me again, “What year were you born?”

“The fourth of August 1999,” I replied, “in Conakry.”

“Oke,” he said to me, and he wrote that down. Since that day, I’ve been officially five years younger than my real age.

They had taught me that trick in Algeria: “When you go to Libya, it’s important for you to say you’re younger than eighteen years old. That way, they can’t put you in prison, and if you don’t go to prison you have a chance of surviving.” And so, in front of that man with the long beard, I was born for a second time, but in 1999. But I hadn’t changed the day: 8/4: the fourth of August.

After that, they took down some other dates, but I was half asleep and I don’t remember much. I do remember what they said to me: “From now on, you’re a Baba Hassan person. And in order to get onto the European program, you can’t go to any other group. Your price will be decided by Baba Hassan, and once you’ve paid, we’ll tell you when you can go.”

“Oke,” I answered. I hadn’t explained to them why I had come to Libya, because I was afraid they would throw me out, or take a stick and break one of my bones.

That’s how things work in Sabratha. They stock up the migrants in some area in order to organise their traffic. And once they’ve got you in a particular camp, you’re not allowed to embark with any other group.

The other day, someone from here told me that Europeans give a lot of money to block the Libyan migrant trade, and that’s why there are a lot of people like me in Libyan prisons. I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t understand politics that well, but I know very well what kind of a place Libya is.

Libya is one vast prison, and it’s very difficult to get out of there alive.



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