Little lives on the sea

by Lidia Ginestra Giuffrida

A gentle cry, two little black eyes and a tiny body just a few centimeters long inside a deflated life jacket. This is how little Moses arrived in my arms. His mother, from the iron boat she was on, thought first of saving him by literally throwing him onto the rubber dinghy of the Humanity 1, the search and rescue ship of the German NGO SOS Humanity. Around us, it was dark, while the sea violently hit the dinghy, and the gasoline on Moses’ body made me fear he could slip from my arms at any moment. I breathe. He stayed silent, looked at me, and then began to cry like a child whom had just emerged from his mother’s womb. In the seconds that separate our exchange of glances from the return to the frenzy of the rescue, one thing is clear, and that is hope. The sea is the place where I learned the meaning of the word rebirth, and the meaning of the word hope. Of the latter, of hope, I saw it incarnated in the eyes of Moses’ mother, inside that small boat that was still swaying endlessly. She did not speak, did not cry, while she entrusted her body to the waves while waiting for someone to bring her too onto the dinghy, but above all, she entrusted her son to me. She looked ahead, as if she knew that from that moment on their lives depended only on what they were about to find on the other side of the sea. “If he is safe, then I am safe too”, she told me later aboard the mother ship. This remains the only thing I know about her.

The woman spent the four long days of sailing toward the port of Genoa with her gaze fixed into emptiness, and smiled only when Moses made one of his funny faces. Near her, sitting on their own beds inside the space dedicated to women and children, are eleven other girls, each with her own baby.

They have fled from Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast; most of them do not know who the father of their children is because their children were born from the violence infliced while being trafficked. “In the desert the traffickers kidnapped and abused us”, one of the women recounts.

Amara was sitting on one of the beds to the left, while her son Samuel played with a little stuffed toy given to him by the ship’s volunteers. “I’m twenty-five old and I come from Sierra Leone”, she says with a steady voice, “I had my first child when I was eighteen, he was born after being raped, and I had the second after another act of violence. The community mocked me because my children had no father. Every day for me meant reliving that violence. The people’s eyes, their jokes, everything reminded me that I had been raped”, she continued impassively.

“When I turned twenty-three I decided to flee with some friends and with my twenty-two-year-old cousin. I was forced to leave my children, one four and the other seven, with a friend, hoping they would one day be able to join me in Europe. From Sierra Leone we went to Guinea, and from Guinea to Mali, then to Algeria and after that to Tunisia. One of my friends died in the desert, of hunger and thirst. My cousin, instead, was raped by the traffickers and then killed”.

She pauses, her voice trembles, she wipes away a tear and continues, “She too had a son in Sierra Leone, a three-year-old boy. I was the one who convinced her to leave in search of a better future. I hoped she’d make it, that we would arrive in Italy together. I didn’t know how to tell my aunt that her daughter was dead. I still remember as if it were today how much she cried when I called her”. Amara continued the journey alone to Tunisia, where she met the father of Samuel, the child who would give her back the hope she needed to find the courage to keep going.

“After Samuel was born, I rediscovered why I was there, traveling, why I was running away. I found again the hope I needed to continue chasing my dream of a better life”, the woman concludes.

Hope on the Humanity 1 has the body of Moses sleeping peacefully, the little hands of Samuel playing, and the broken smile of Amara. Hope here is three months old, weighs just over five kilos, and has already crossed through hell. To recount Moses’ story shows that the future, despite everything, keeps knocking and asking to be welcomed.