Meet Sainey

He was in Niamey for three or four days before leaving for Agadez, where he stayed for two weeks. It was a precarious place to be for the high level of patrol and presence by local police and UN officials. He was on edge the whole time. Night patrols would find people and transfer them to the UN’s deportation camps, so he had to be vigilant to stay out of sight. Some friends went out and never came back.

In the compound where he stayed it was more like one big foyer. People were just dumped in the huge open space—around 100 by his count, including around five women, one of whom was pregnant, and one child. People couldn’t go out to eat in Agadez, so Sainey was the home cook.

When he left the city, which for him was more literally just the four walls of that compound, he boarded a pickup truck with 24 other men; there were around 10 trucks in the larger caravan that carried women as well, all destined for Libya.

Sainey crossed the Sahara desert in about three days. “You don’t even have time to eat or drink in the desert,” he said. “The [more] fear you have, the less you eat.”

He arrived in Tajahri, Libya, a connection point where he stayed for two or three, maybe four days, haggling with local Arab men for the price of his next journey. Sabha, Libya, was that next stop, and he stayed there for one week, working construction, lifting and placing cement blocks for buildings.

“In Sabha, we are a lot,” he said of the number of people in the migrant community crowded in the city. When he wasn’t working he was inside at a connection house that held more than 100 people, but who can count. There were markets on the outside. He was sometimes able to buy his own food and cook it at the house, but given the scarcity of money and resources, he mostly relied on Kasoura*, a local Arabic word for food scraps and waste.

It was “a very dangerous place,” said Sainey, who described an attack at the connection house that occurred one night. Gunshots rang out. On this occasion, it was a conflict with the management, the smugglers whose territory inherently overlapped as they coordinated the dense volume of people in such a small space.

He got out of Sabha and transferred to Bani Waled, a three-day trip. It seemed like there were checkpoints everywhere as he neared the city limits. He was placed in a dog cage in the vehicle; a sheet of nylon was secured over it to keep him hidden. Even after he arrived in Bani Waled, he stayed in the truck at night.

In the morning, after the four-day stop in Bani Waled, movement began to Tripoli. It was a whole day of travel to get there, but he didn’t stay but for the day. Instead, another connection man (“Everything is a connection,” Sainey said), a Gambian man, met him for further payment, and agreed to take him to Sabratha, the teeming seaside camp where he would make the Mediterranean crossing.

But he had to call his family again to make the payment. So in the meantime, the Gambian man had it in his interest to keep Sainey strong and safe. That meant making sure he had food and pocket money to get by. If his new client should falter, the man’s payday wouldn’t come in. He took Sainey and a number of others by taxi to the shore. They had to move unnoticed. Sainey was placed in the trunk of the car, while others were put under the lining of the seats.

They were stopped and robbed.

“Take off your clothes. Give us your money,” the men demanded, as they stripped them of any and all material goods.

The trouble didn’t stop once he arrived at the first connection house in Sabratha, either. He was surrounded by his companions, people who are still his friends today, “Bakary, Ousman, Yanks, Alka,” he said, “we are all there, we are all in the same place.” An attack on the house pushed them to another spot in the area, the “White House,” an abandoned hotel** modified as a connection house for migrant trafficking.

For Sainey, he didn’t have the safety of sleeping indoors however. He and his group of companions were relegated to a clearing just beyond the property of the hotel. They created their own makeshift home, but there was no roof, nothing that would keep them protected.

“When nighttime come [if] it rains you cannot sleep,” said Sainey, describing the exposed conditions.

The day of the week he left Libya and pushed off the shore is deeply imprinted in his memory, “Saturday” he exclaimed.

Sainey crossed the Mediterranean Sea at 3:00 a.m. on Saturday, 15 April 2017 on a rubber dinghy with about 140 people, including women, some of whom were pregnant, and two children. A white boat, an Italian rescue vessel appeared and he was saved at 5:00 p.m., after more than 12 hours at sea and landed in Lampedusa on Sunday, 16 April 2017.

Sainey met with MotM more than seven years after rescue, when a MotM community member and Sainey’s friend since his time in Libya, Yanks (Gambia), made our introduction. He remembers our presence on the island, although we did not interview at the time. He is 24 years of age now and living and working in Boscoreale, Italy, an area outside of Naples, where we recorded this story on 20 November 2024.

Sainey is an amazing human being.

*Arabic name given phonetically
**The “White House” is a regularly mentioned point of connection in Sabratha that appears to be a once flourishing hotel from the Gaddafi years.