Yahya’s Escape
After his mother died, the young boy was beaten, deprived of an education and forced to work. One day he found a way out.
18 September 2015
Gambia
Italy
Yahya didn’t know exactly when
he’d been born, or how old he was when his father first sent him out
with the cows into the arid scrubland of northeastern Gambia. Four,
perhaps. Maybe five.
For the next 10 years, that was all he
knew – driving the cattle out of the village at sunrise, breathing the
red dust raised by their hooves, swiping at the flies that plagued the
animals across 40 kilometres of hard ground.
There was a primary school in the village,
but Yahya never went inside. Nor did he go to the mosque. His father
and half-brothers were Muslim, but Yahya was the only child of a second
wife, a Christian from Sierra Leone. What was the point, his father
thought, in sending this boy to school or teaching him to pray? Instead,
he beat Yahya and kept him frightened and illiterate.
Sometimes, when no one was watching, Yahya
made the sign of the cross. He wasn’t sure what this meant. It was
something he’d seen his mum do, something he thought might keep him
safe. It didn’t. When he was 13, his mother died of an unnamed fever.
Yahya hid his grief from his half-brothers, who would laugh and lash out
if they saw tears. But when he was alone with his cows, Yahya wept.
Yahya poses for a portrait at the restaurant in Catania where he now works. UNHCR/Fabio Bucciarelli
Yahya’s father had always been violent,
but now the beatings got worse. “My dad told me ‘You are not Muslim.’ I
told him ‘You never teach me about Muslim’. He told me, ‘Maybe I kill
you.’ ”
That was when Yahya, now 15, began to plan his escape.
He waited until the rains came – his
father and half-brothers would be sure to sleep late – and fled on foot
before dawn. He took two T-shirts and a pair of trousers in a plastic
bag. In his pocket, he had five Gambian dalasi – less than one U.S.
dollar.
It was pitch black, but by daybreak he had
walked across the border into Senegal and reached an asphalt road. The
first car stopped. Soaking wet, his sandals slimed in mud, Yahya got in.
Yahya and his cousin Aliou take a selfie on the seafront of Ortigia, where he used to go during his first months in Italy. UNHCR/Fabio Bucciarelli
Three months after the car ride, he
stepped off a bus in Agadez, Niger. To get this far, Yahya had worked as
a garden boy in Mali. Now, he gave what little he’d saved to the
smugglers and set off on a three-day drive in a pickup truck across the
Sahara. Just south of the Libyan city of Sabha, the convoy was overtaken
by men with guns.
Yahya was taken to Tripoli by Libyan
smugglers and locked in a basement with a hundred or so men and boys
from across sub-Saharan Africa. There was a hole in the floor for a
toilet, but no water. “Smell coming in the prison,” Yahya remembers.
“Sometimes, you don’t sleep.” The smugglers brought down a ration of
stale bread twice a day, and beat the Africans with plastic pipes and
the butts of their guns. When a boy roughly Yahya’s age complained, the
smugglers shot him through the knee.
“In the prison, I see only death,” Yahya
recalls. But about a month after he arrived, his luck changed. He was
taken upstairs to the jailers’ house, where he washed dishes, took out
the trash and kept his mouth shut. He worked there for a year before the
gang took him to a holding cell on the coast. A few weeks later, around
midnight, Yahya walked out into the Mediterranean and hauled himself
onto an inflatable boat. It was the first time he had seen the sea.
“In the prison, I see only death.”
Packed in among 113 people, he watched the
lights of Africa recede and vanish. Then there was only darkness, and
the sound of the motor labouring through the waves. Everyone was sick.
By dawn the wind was dying, and on the second night, “the water, they
are silent.” A full moon rose and flying fish jumped out of the light.
“The moon, the sea, night-time,” remembers Yahya. “It is very
beautiful.”
On the third night, someone saw a ship’s
light on the horizon. An hour later, the Italian coastguard arrived.
Yahya was the first to climb the rope ladder. He fell asleep on deck,
and didn’t wake up until the boat docked in Sicily.
Still only 16, Yahya was taken directly to
a reception center in Priolo. It’s an institution, encircled by a
chain-link fence and oil refineries. He might easily have spent years
here, the days merging into a numbing glare of sun and boredom. But
about four months after Yahya arrived, a Sicilian lawyer named Carla
Trommino, concerned by the conditions, set up an initiative to match
unaccompanied migrant and refugee children with local families who are
willing to help them start a new life. It would be no easy task. Yahya
was just one of 5,232 unaccompanied or separated children who arrived in
Italy during 2013.
One of those who volunteered was Barbara
Sidoti, an academic who agreed to mentor and assist four teenage boys
from Gambia and Senegal. In the spring of 2014, she came to Priolo to
meet them. One of the four, mute with shyness but smiling at her from
across the director’s office, was Yahya.
Yahya speaks with his tutor, Barbara, at the restaurant where he works. UNHCR/Fabio Bucciarelli
Mostly, Barbara was helping the boys with
legal bureaucracy, but whenever she had a free afternoon she picked them
up in her old Renault and drove them into Siracusa to show them
something of Sicilian life.
Gradually, she realized that what they
really wanted to do was cook African food, and by summer she was taking
them to her own home so they could use the kitchen. The dishes that
emerged were full of flavour and imagination. When the boys didn’t have
an ingredient, they made do with something else from Barbara’s
cupboards. This kind of fusion, she thought, was exactly the process by
which Sicilian cuisine had evolved. Greeks, Arabs, French – they had all
brought their recipes across the Mediterranean, adapting them to the
produce of the island until new forms emerged. If Sicily was now going
to absorb thousands of Africans, their influence was bound to be felt,
sooner or later, in the food.
“If you show Yahya something, he gets it immediately.”
That same summer, a friend called with a
request for help. He ran a theatre in Catania, with a bar and
restaurant. The chef was moving on. Did Barbara know anyone who might
like to take over?
Four months later, Barbara had hired a
chef, developed a menu, and opened 11Eleven, the first Afro-Sicilian
restaurant in Europe. Yahya, whose only experience of work was herding
cows, put on chef’s whites and began learning the basics of Italian
cuisine.
“If you show Yahya something, he gets it
immediately,” says Salvo Baltico, the restaurant’s head chef. “When he
arrived he was young, scared and extremely shy. But he wants to learn,
and he’s an intelligent young man. Now, he’s a valued partner to me in
this kitchen.”
Yahya and a colleague prepare food at the restaurant where they work in Catania. UNHCR/Fabio Bucciarelli
For Yahya, the steadiness of the work and
the presence of Barbara and Salvo have been profoundly reassuring. For
the first time since his mum died, he has found adults he can trust.
With their encouragement, he has started to build an independent life in
Italy.
In the two years since he was
rescued, Yahya has learned to read and write, to speak English and
Italian, to operate a mobile phone and to navigate social media. In
August 2015, he moved into a private apartment in Catania, not far from
his restaurant.
Finding a girlfriend is one challenge that
Yahya has yet to figure out. Not long after his 18th birthday, he wrote
to Barbara asking if she would choose a Sicilian wife for him. It was
hard, he said, to know which girls were good and which were bad. Gently,
Barbara explained why this was never going to work. Yahya is still
looking, and has reluctantly abandoned the Gambian idea that a suitable
match might be arranged. “Now,” he says, “my system like European
system.”
He is adamant that he will never go back
to Africa. But when the storms break over Sicily and the island smells
of rain-dampened earth, Yahya still remembers his cows out in the bush.
Every day, he says, “I think about my mum. If she can see me now, she
will not believe it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment