Mi nombre es Alem

A refugee’s journey north

Alem had been tossing and turning for the past few hours. He hadn’t slept much since he arrived in Libya four weeks before, his mind constantly alert for the roving militias or police targeting migrants like him, his thoughts bent forward to the journey that still laid out ahead of him and the questions he couldn’t help but mull over. Would he need more money? Would he make it across that waiting stretch of sea? Could he get beyond Italy’s shores to Germany or Sweden, and complete that final trip, skirting from the life he knew to the one he hoped to build?

In some ways he hadn’t slept since fleeing his home of Eritrea four years before, his days blurred into a nightmarish sequence of a life lived on the margins. Rootless without a home or family, community or country, he had found himself alone each night with unanswerable questions of the future and known fears of the past, tossing in his bed as he drifted through the empty expanse of an unrealized dream.

Seguir leyendo...