Destination Europe: Mariam’s homecoming
Words and photos by Susan Schulman
Mariam Sesay, 28, knew her family would be delighted if she were in Europe. The benefits of having someone there were obvious — better houses, children well dressed and never lacking school fees or food. Sons and daughters in Europe were the pride of their families. Everyone in Sierra Leone wanted someone in the family to be abroad.
So when Mariam heard about the so-called “Italian Programme”, she decided she would go.
It was June 2017. Without telling anyone, she sold her father’s land, turned the $2,500 over to the “connection agent” organising her trip, and left her hometown of Magburaka in the east of Sierra Leone (on a series of buses via Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso) for Agadez in Niger, where she was told she would catch a flight to Europe.
But in Niger, there was no flight, and the agent she had paid was unreachable.
A year later, Mariam has no money, nowhere to live. She is back in Sierra Leone sleeping on the concrete floor of a house in Makeni, three hours east of the capital, Freetown. If her hosts don’t share their food with her, she doesn’t eat. The police are pursuing her for an unpaid debt. Everyone looks down on her. Even her family has disowned her.
Mariam had been in nursing school before she left for Niger. She pulls a photo from her pocket, taken in the hospital ward before her departure. In it, she is wearing a nurse’s uniform and smiling broadly, a confident young woman on the brink of a professional future.
Tears roll down her cheeks as she looks at the picture.
It is a far cry from the woman she is today.
Sitting behind a tree in the dusty yard where no one can hear her, Mariam confides that she is barely coping. “I am worried — about everything. I am worried about prison. I am lonely, stressed, depressed.”
The stigma, she says, is the least of her problems. She is haunted by what happened to her in Niger and Libya. “My secret has already become part of me,” she says, biting her lip. “It is hard to work it through.”
The journey
What Mariam is trying to work through began in Agadez, long the gateway for traders travelling from sub-Saharan Africa to the north. For centuries, caravans of camels carried salt, gold, ivory, and slaves across the desert sands. In recent years, convoys of pick-up trucks overflowing with people and contraband have plied the vast, difficult to govern route.
The town once bustled with throngs of migrants, mostly looking for a way north to the coast and the chance to get to Europe. But in 2016, the Nigerien government began enforcing an EU-backed anti-smuggling law that drove the migration business underground.
Still, it didn’t take long for Mariam to join other stranded Sierra Leoneans shortly after she arrived in Agadez last year.
“When we saw all the Gambians and Senegalese and Nigerians and Ghanaians, all heading across the desert, we decided to go, too,” she explains. Piling into a pick-up, the group headed off.
Five months later, as Mariam left the Tripoli prison where she had been detained, again, after her second attempt to cross the Mediterranean failed, the better future she had dreamed of seemed further away than ever.
This time, however, she would not try again. She decided to return home.
Mariam had had enough. Along the way, she had been raped, starved, and beaten; bought and sold by captors who demanded money she didn’t have. Others phoned families back home who would go into debt cobbling funds together to free their loved ones. Not Mariam. “I didn’t have a phone, the money, or the guts to call back home,” she admits. “I would cry a lot and fear it was the end of my life, and all I could think of was how I would die here alone and no one would ever know.”
On 21 November 2017, Mariam boarded the first repatriation flight organised by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) from Tripoli to Freetown. It was not to be a happy homecoming.
‘I can’t forgive her’
The sale of the land and the money Mariam spent has left her father, Sheik Ali Conteh, 44, seeking assistance for the first time. Her failure has compromised her family’s position in the community.
“I didn’t know what my dad would say. I knew it wasn’t going to be good, but when I got back it was even worse,” Mariam says, wiping tears from her eyes. “My father and my whole family have disowned me.”
Fifteen miles away from where his daughter now resides, in Makeni, Conteh pulls up a bench in front of the his modest two-room home. He looks over at his wife, resplendent in a yellow dress, ready for Friday prayers. She is silent, staring sadly.
“Shame has impacted on us.” he confesses. “I can’t forgive her.”
The response of Mariam’s family reflects the depth of desperation in a society stretched to breaking point by poverty.
Reporter’s View: Susan Schulman
What happens when migrants end up back home with less than when they started? After arduous and traumatic journeys, would-be migrants accept repatriation offers with a promise of support. Only, upon returning home, support is hard to find and they are rejected by their loved ones as failures out of shame. Susan Schulman reports from Sierra Leone on migration’s push and pull factors and the lives of those affected.
