My story was not good enough for them
I tried three times to cross the sea, but I got caught. I tried to climb the fence from Nador to Melilla, from Morocco to Spain. If my hand touches the barbed wire, it will hurt me.
Then I went to Libya and tried to cross from there. The night before crossing the sea, I had a dream: I was in my workshop and I saw a ju-ju. I took a plastic cup, peed in it, and threw it in, which turned into kittens. I woke up and knew I had broken the ju-ju and could safely cross to Europe.
We were 220 people on the beach and only 2 boats. We had 15 liters of water for 8 people, but one person died on the boat. We left at 8 p.m.; we had been at sea for 16 hours when we were rescued.
I saved all the money I received for two years while I was in this camp in Italy to pay a lawyer so I could claim asylum. But in the end, he said that my story was not good enough for them.
I’ve heard stories such as this one time and again for the last three years, as I have been working with undocumented migrants in the gig economy. Traumatic journeys to Europe do not matter if you cannot tell a ‘convincing’ enough story to your European ‘hosts’.
Or if there aren’t 700 of you dying in the Mediterranean at the same time.
