Meet Barry

By
Pamela Kerpius

Recorded:
18-19 September 2024

Published:
18 April 2025

Meet Barry.

17 years old and from Lagos, Nigeria.

To reach Italy, he crossed three countries: Nigeria, Niger and Libya.

In total his journey took about two months, beginning on 23 March 2017, four days after his birthday, the last of which he celebrated in Nigeria on 19 March 2017. He hugged his dad that day at the bus station, cried, and boarded a bus with two friends on a route that would take him to the northern Nigeria border. The bus was so full he stood for the duration of the trip, eight whole hours.

He just prayed to God to keep his peace during the time, and when morning came he had arrived at his first stop in Kaduna, Nigeria. There, a driver came to accompany Barry and the others to a connection house nearby. There were a few others there too, and although he stayed for a matter of hours, say three or four, a smuggler stuck around to look after him and the group to ensure they stayed safe.

When it was time to leave, a driver put them in a pickup truck to Kano, Nigeria. It was risky there. It is the Muslim area of the country that has seen a lot of instability, and Barry and the others stood out as strangers. From Kano, he traveled east to Sokoto, Nigeria, a city closer to Nigeria’s northern border with Niger, and traveled the remainder of the way to the border by motorbike.

It was a discreet crossing that went undetected by border control for how remote the crossing point was. Already, there was sand from the Sahara hindering his movement, but he made it. 

“We needed to hold ourselves strong,” Barry said.

He waited at a small connection house from there, a small place that did the job of keeping him hidden and not much else. It was something like an abandoned garage. There weren’t any provisions there, but he traveled with a few snacks to survive—a bit of bread, some gari, and there were liters of water leftover in a canister to drink. He stayed locked inside the garage-like house until a big enough group amassed, around 100 people, to make up the caravan desert crossing.

The vehicles arrived, a number of Helios pickup trucks that took about 25-30 passengers each. Barry began the first leg of his Sahara desert crossing in one of the pickup trucks that took about 4-5 hours—but this was merely the transfer to Agadez, Niger, while Barry had paid for a complete transfer through to Libya. Although he was lucky to make the first part of the crossing without violence or incident, he admitted he was just hoping for survival.

“God, help me,” he said about the form of travel that put such physical and mental duress upon him. “It’s a journey of no return,” Barry said. “There is no going back.”

In Agadez, he was hidden in a big fenced-in yard, closed up and deserted by the townspeople, but filling up precipitously by others in the migrant community being dropped there by smugglers. By his count, there were at least 200 people in waiting for more than three days before the second leg of Sahara travel began.

The smugglers called out the names of the people who had paid for the crossing to Libya. Barry among them climbed again into another Helios truck with about 30 passengers total on board, including 7 or 8 women, 3 children and even babies, for a crossing that would take two weeks.

This crossing was beyond demanding. Water supplies were running out. The heat was incredible.

“That was where I thought I wouldn’t survive. My skin was burnt. My trousers were burnt. My face was burnt,” said Barry, “In the desert water is life.” Like so many before him, he came upon a well, one notoriously polluted. He had heard dead bodies had been thrown in it. White particles drifted through the water like a snow globe. He drank it anyway. A man traveling with him took a bottle of his own urine to his mouth while the other passengers shouted for him to stop, but he was too desperate and drank.

The scenery was wretched. Skulls and bones littered the desert. Barry was thinking of his family, the younger ones especially, “I have to be alive for them.”

It was a three or four day patch when he and his group were abandoned entirely in the desert while the drivers went further ahead to Gatrone, Libya, to negotiate with the police for their crossing. The waiting was sometimes mundane. He would chit-chat with another woman in the group who he learned was from his same town in Nigeria. At other points it was terrifying. They heard a sudden scream of motorbikes approach. The gang of thieves lined them up and took count, knowing how many to expect, Barry learned, because the smugglers ahead had coordinated the attack with the gunmen. People were pulling money out of the hiding places they kept on them. “Everyone was in a panic,” Barry said, “everyone was crying.”

Everyone paid up with whatever they had. The drivers returned. It was three more days in the desert before his truck at long last crossed the Libyan border, and passed directly through to Sabha. Barry was so thirsty he fainted when he stepped out of the truck.

“I was half dead. I was able to count my ribs.”

At the stop someone handed him a supply of water. He started drinking immediately. He immediately started sweating. In short order he went through two whole 25-liter cans of water. He collected himself as best as he could, organized the purchase of a small parcel of food with what money he had left, and departed Sabha after two or three days. The connection house was overwhelmed with people, up to 500, he said, but who can tell.

The drive was 12 hours from Sabha to the seaside camp, Sabratha. “Lapalapa,” lap-to-lap he traveled with his fellow passengers cramped inside a vehicle like cargo. His body was so stiff it went frozen. Blood does not flow. He hid a two-liter bottle of water under his clothes, keeping it obscured from the other passengers. As we conducted this interview, Barry’s eye caught the glass water bottle on the table between us. “This is how much I drank,” he said, lifting the aluminum cap.

He’d sip mere capfuls of water and hold it in his mouth for hours, slowly letting it drip down his throat and cool his mouth. Any amount less discreet would draw the attention of others, “Please, help, I’m dying,” they’d plead with anyone who had a bottle in the desert.

The whole journey there was no sleeping. People were shouting, crying, screaming in pain. He looked out from under the tarp to get a glimpse of where he was: a gun would be pointed at his face. The vehicle cut through Tripoli without stopping and he was finally dropped in Sabratha.

“It’s actually beautiful,” he said about the ancient Mediterranean town. Ancient architecture still stands. The rich blue and green of the Mediterranean hugs its golden shore. But the beauty almost instantly invoked his fear, “How are we going to be able to cross the water?” he wondered.

He stayed on the shore for three weeks, calling his family in Nigeria twice to wire money; each time they came through, allowing him to buy just enough food and water to survive. He might have had an earlier departure had the sea not been so unsettled by weather.

Fear permeated the camp in the meantime. There was so little there for them to survive on, yet it was too dangerous to go outside for work. Barry slept on the ground. Rain fell on him at night. He got sick. He was cold and suffering headaches. There was unpredictable violence breaking out around him. “Small boys,” young locals with guns, would shout for everyone to stay quiet. One flogged his waist with the back of a gun that left him in long-term pain.

“Everybody [was] looking for a means of survival,” said Barry. He was just 17, but “baby or not baby, you need to be strong for yourself.”

On 3 May 2017 at 4:00 a.m. Barry boarded a rubber dinghy and crossed the Mediterranean Sea with 120 people, including 15 women, 5 children and 1 baby. Another man on board saw his wife die in Libya and alone carried his surviving children on board at his side. Charles (Nigeria) was onboard this boat, as was Jeffrey (Nigeria). The petrol ran out. They were “just waiting,” adrift on the open Mediterranean for nearly 30 hours. A boat passed on the horizon but didn’t stop because they didn’t want the responsibility of saving them.

“It was just grace,” Barry said, about how he survived, but couldn’t let go of the mystery of it either. “There’s no beginning and no ending,” he said about the sea, “it’s just blue.”

He struggled to keep up, not to panic. Another ship came close, but it was flying a Libyan flag, spooking everyone on board. No one wanted to be arrested and return to the torture and violence of Libya. A Gambian man, another passenger, threatened to puncture the dinghy if they approached the ship because “it’s better to die in the sea than go back to Libya,” Barry said.

The ship was a kilometer away by now, and quickly diminishing from their view. But it turned back. The passengers started waving their clothes in the air to get its attention. It stopped, the crew threw a rope, and they saw: it was a group of French engineers using a Libyan flag to access its national waters.

The children were rescued first, then the rest. Barry and the passengers spent a day on the ship, a brief respite to bathe, eat and gather clothing while they waited for the Guardia Costiera, the Italian Coast Guard, which had been called. Their rescue was just not coming however, so the ship drove them ashore instead.

When Barry landed in Lampedusa, Sicily, on 5 May 2017 he stepped off the boat and cried.

“I thank God I’m still here to share my story,” he said. He is 25 years of age now and living in Rome, Italy, where we recorded this testimony on 18 and 19 September 2024. Remembering what happened, he said, “it makes me stronger. I take it as motivation. Why I have to be someone,” he said.

“I can’t lose.”

Barry is an amazing human being.