Escaping the hard life into more misery
Every time I read or hear a news story about the migrants from various nations trying to make it to the better-off western countries and the tragedies they go through, my heart sinks.
Lately there have been many such stories - I am not sure if there are that many more migrants seeking a better life, or if word spreads around more. Whatever the case, it just makes you want to cry. It makes me realise the conditions they are going through in their home country must be horrendous for them to do anything to escape it and start a new life elsewhere.
You read of people who sell everything they have just to buy a very tiny space aboard a water vessel. They board that canoe with no idea where they are going, if life will indeed be better when they reach the shore at the other end, or if they will even survive the journey. After all many are not given food or drink for days. Neither are they given safety gear in case of any mishap.
Testimonies include those where a woman, nay, girl, gave birth aboard a boat; a few who saw those around them die due to lack of water or food, or who drowned. No doubt they have heard these stories before, of family and friends who didn’t make it, but still they try their luck! What therefore are they running away from? It must be a hopeless life they are living to try and do anything to leave it.
Indeed, if you are at the far end of the chain in countries like war-torn Libya or poverty-stricken ones like Niger, life is phenomenally hard. You cannot afford to take your children to school to escape the poverty you live in. You can only manage to give your family a fair meal once in two days, and that sometimes is a miracle because apart from your wife, mother and four children, you are also providing for you brother’s family of six - your brother disappeared during the height of the war and has never been seen again. You do not have a permanent job and so you do anything you can find to make some money. And sometimes those jobs, could land you in jail.
When a man and his family hear that sweeping the streets or cleaning halls of a hospital in a foreign country will earn him five times more than what he is getting, he is bound to want to do anything to get that money. And so boarding a canoe, so ill equipped will seem like the only way out of a miserable life.
What he doesn’t know is that those he has paid, do not see him as a father, son and husband trying to better the lives of his family members. All they see is money, and they will do anything to get it off him, and not be caught doing this illegal business.
They will not hesitate to jump ship and leave men, women and children to starve to death or drown.
For now these migrants are mostly thought of as stubborn. They are statistics. But they are also human beings, lives, souls... Perhaps if the powers that be thought of them that way, things would be different.
