Meet Stella

“Def Def*, I remember that place,” she said, “that is the only place I remember,” said Stella. “I don’t even know if I passed through [the Sahara] desert or not. All I know is I was in the van, all through.”

She arrived in Tripoli and remained for two or three weeks. It was getting dangerous there, to the point she thought it was better to return to Nigeria. She was hearing gunshots, hearing about women being raped. She was hidden in the trunk of a car on her way out of the city when she heard bombs going off, an attack that happened near the Tripoli airport.

She returned to the connection house that was by now emptied out. She heard more gunshots. The same night they went to the bush by the seaside. “We are close to the sea,” she said, with no shelter to protect her, “we are just outside.” There were forty or fifty others at the shore. That night it was cold. She needed a place to sleep, she was so tired—and cold. The discomfort was as distressing as her disorientation. What was coming next and where am I exactly? Everything was in the hands of other people who she didn’t know if she could trust.

Then, in one moment, she spoke to someone next to her, one voice among tens of others lingering on the shore. The trafficker grew angry. The others warned her how violent he could become. Before she arrived there he had already killed a man. But as she was talking, he called her over. He started hitting her. “For what?” Stella objected. “I did not insult you, I did not talk to you, I did not say anything to you—I was talking to someone who was sitting close to me.”

The violence escalated. He took a large piece of wood and brought it down upon her. “My face was swollen, my head was swollen,” she said. He beat her mercilessly.

“All my mind, my body, my being, I was thinking, let me go to where I am going—to where I’ll be safer,” said Stella, “That was what was on my mind.” People tried to hush her so the man would stop. But it was too late. The damage was done and done so deeply that he had knocked her unconscious.

Then, the sensation of water on her skin. “I thought maybe rain was dropping,” as she came to, blinking with a headache. She was in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea on a rubber dinghy with many other people, now shouting, “Please rescue us!” as she glimpsed the rescue ship before her.

She never saw her friend Madeline again. She was calling for her when she woke up, but she was nowhere to be found. The woman next to her explained. After Stella was carried aboard the raft after the beating, her friend tried to follow, but was diverted to another one. “Up to this day I never heard from her,” Stella said.

The rescuers took her aboard to safety and punctured and destroyed the rubber boat on the water. She sat down. Thin metal sheets were shimmering. The metallic thermal emergency blankets that cut the cold of the water on her skin. They asked her about her travel. She said, “It is just God,” that saw her through. It was still the middle of the night onboard the ship. She was brought directly to the Italian mainland, to the port of Naples, where she landed on 28 or 29 August 2014.

“I never had any plan to come here,” Stella said, but admits she always liked the Italian language, which she had heard in movies, and now speaks daily herself. She is 32 years of age now and living in Albanova, Italy, a small town near Naples in the Campania region, where we recorded this story on 2 February 2024.

Stella is an amazing human being.

*City name and spelling unverified and written as spoken phonetically during interview. “Def Def,” however, could be the Algerian border city Debdeb that is frequented by many as they travel further east toward Libya.