Meet Yoro
Yoro (Gambia), 12 days after being rescued. Lampedusa, Italy. 28 April 2017. ©Pamela Kerpius/Migrants of the Mediterranean
by:
Pamela Kerpius
Recorded:
28 April 2017
Published:
2017
Revised:
1/10/25
Meet Yoro.
22 years old and from Brikama, Gambia.
To reach Lampedusa he crossed six countries: The Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and the most dangerous of all, Libya.
His trip took about 9 months. He spent one month in Agadez, Niger, for work, chopping trees that would be burned for charcoal.
After he departed Agadez, Yoro made the next step of the journey. He crossed the Sahara desert with 28 people in the back of a pickup truck with just five liters of water. There was one young man fell out of the truck as it was climbing a hill. Yoro had met him in Agadez before they departed, where his health and strength were already struggling. The demands of the desert were proving too much, and when he fell, he landed on a stone and died.
The truck stopped for three hours while Yoro and the passengers laid him to rest in a makeshift grave. It was nine days in total making the Sahara crossing, a travel time of more than double the usual*. He spent 24 hours with no food. Water ran out. He used his shirt to make a pouch to scoop up water from a source his driver acquired along the way.
He arrived in Bahaye**, his first stop after crossing the national border into Libya. He was locked inside a compound in the city for two weeks, where daily he received just a half-liter bottle of water to drink, and a piece of bread that was shared among a number of others.
The next transfer was to Sabha, but his driver never showed up. They called a contact in Agadez to find out what went wrong, and as a contingency plan, the trafficker in Agadez sent a local Arab man to move them instead. He and his group had no choice but to go forth with the stranger behind the wheel.
He was stacked inside of a car with 27 people. Some were laying down, everyone was squeezed like cargo into a crate to make as many people as possible fit. The algorithm of human trafficking is always the same: the more people transferred, the more money made.
Yoro arrived in Sabha, Libya, and stayed in the city for one month.
“Sabha is very hard. Very, tough place,” he said. “You cannot go out or they will cut you.”
Four men he knew were cut because they left the compound. For his part, he was too afraid. Over the days he subsisted on salty water that was so contaminated it gave him stomach pains. He said the compound was run like a military camp.
He transferred to Bani Waled and remained for six months, working, and then enduring prison.
“Sometimes when you have a good man who can take you to work, at the end of the day he pays you,” he said, but not infrequently, he wasn’t paid at all.
“Almost 40 people died in front of me.”
He worked for one full week for a man who never gave him wages. He complained, and was told he had no right to because he was a slave. When Yoro spoke up, the Arab man called the police and he was thrown in prison.
There were a cluster of camps in the area, all of them prisons. Inside, people were beaten and starved daily.
“Every day people are dying because of hunger,” he cried. “Every day people are dying.”
He was beaten seriously and was given electric shock through his feet. His back was beaten with a pipe. Still, his fate was different than so many more.
”Almost 40 people died in front of me,” he said.
The beatings and torture were done to extract ransom payments from family members, who were called as he endured them. But the line never got through to anyone, and regardless there was no money they would have been able give. He was beaten anyway.
It was a Friday, he said, after two months at the prison, when Arab men – those guarding him – were fighting among themselves. It was the distraction he and about half of that prison population around him used to escape.
Again, he a returned to the man who had enslaved him, demanding payment and medical care. He refused to move for three more days until that man finally agreed to give him 30 dinars and some dose of medicine.
From Bani Walid Yoro moved north to Tripoli via multiple car transfers. In total the relatively short trip took two weeks to complete. Each time he was packed into an overloaded car, but even has he arrived at the compound in Tripoli there was little relief. There were about 300 people at the connection house, where he stayed for a week before the next step.
Sabrathalin* is the coastal camp he arrived after Tripoli, and without a roof over his head he camped out in the open for one month. Sometimes it would rain on him while he slept.
Yoro crossed the Mediterranean Sea on a Friday night in a rubber dinghy with 168 people, including six children and 30 women, two of whom were pregnant. He was sitting on the edge of the raft, his feet dangling in the sea water.
He was out at sea for 10 hours before he was rescued by the Guardia Costiera and taken to Lampedusa, Sicily, where he landed at 6:00 a.m. Easter Sunday, 16 April 2017.
When he woke up on his first day in Lampedusa his mind went blank. Was he was still in Libya? No, he had survived.
Yoro is an amazing human being.
*MotM reports an average of 4-5 days to complete the Sahara desert crossing from Agadez, Niger, to the first stop in Libya.
**City name and spelling is not verified.