Meet Blessing

Meet Blessing.

24 years old and from Benin City, Nigeria.

To reach Italy she crossed three countries: Nigeria, Niger, and the most dangerous of all, Libya.

She left Nigeria on 3 August 2015, and in total, her journey took ten months.

From Benin City, she traveled to Agadez, Niger, before leaving for Libya.

Blessing crossed the Sahara desert in the back of a pickup truck with more than 80 people. As she told the story, her friends listening on gasped at the number she named because there are usually somewhere from 20-40 onboard.

As is often the case in desert crossings, people fell from the truck. Sometimes they were picked up and saved, sometimes they were not. She fell from the truck herself and was lucky the car stopped to retrieve her. There was no water, just what they were able to pull from the occasional dirty well along the way. Fifteen passengers, she said, died making the trip.

Her truck crossed the Libyan border and she remained in Sabha, Libya, for two weeks in a compound that had no windows, no sunlight, no place to sleep, and no toilet. People locked inside had nowhere to go to use the bathroom, “just anywhere,” she said pointing to the ground. There was a separate room where the women were able to go to wash their private parts.

She was transferred to Tripoli and remained there for months. Timing is unclear. She doesn’t know when she arrived or when precisely she left, but she guessed it was somewhere around seven months.

“I was sick,” she said over and over, “I don’t know how long,” diminishing the gravity of the experience. Her legs were paralyzed from sleeping crouched in a ball. She hadn’t stretched her limbs in months, any movement she made was just to hobble to the bathroom throughout the day.