“Please God never send us back to the hole that is Algeria”. Abdu and Bassem (not their real names) were prepared to risk their lives to escape the future that awaited them in their native country. And although they knew it would not be easy, they could never have imagined what a nightmare their dream journey would become.
On September 27th, the young men said goodbye to their families and embarked with 15 other migrants on a boat that would set sail for the promised land: Europe.
“They were very difficult days. I don’t wish it on anyone. If they sent me back to my country, I wouldn’t do it again,” says one of the two young Algerians. Their boat sank some 120 kilometres from Spain. Fourteen of them were rescued on 4 October; the sea engulfed the other three, who could not be located.
The IB3 programme Zoom managed to contact two of the 14 castaways and recorded their heartbreaking testimony in an episode that will soon be shown on ‘IB3 A la Carta’. In words to the public entity, the young men explain that they had to spend 11 days adrift on the raft without provisions: “Your life is in God’s hands, without food or water for eleven days. Imagine that. We drank water from the sea, and caught fish as best we could,” recalls Abdu.
As soon as they saw land, two of them jumped into the sea to get help. They did not return. About nine hours later, two other migrants became desperate and jumped out of the boat to look for a solution. A few metres further out, they began to drown and called for help. “I went to help them, and one of them said ‘I can’t’. I told him ‘if you go down, I’m going down with you’. And the one who least expected to die, died,” says Bassem, dejected: “I would have preferred to die myself. I swear”.
Everything went wrong. What was supposed to be an “easy and quick” trip of about 20 hours turned into a real struggle to stay alive: “Every time we went to sleep, we felt like we were about to die. We all became religious, we started to beg and pray,” explain the Algerians.
“Thank God, we were rescued soon after. But we still feel the salt of the water on our skin, we are in shock and dizzy”. The young people left for Barcelona as soon as they were released.
“We spent eleven days in God’s hands, drinking water from the sea and catching fish as best we could”
ABDU
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.