“Where are we going, mom? Why are there so many people on this boat?” The question was obvious, but the answer was devilish and Ndeye Sarr cleared up the interrogation of her nine-year-old daughter as best she could: “I don’t know, but I think we’re going to Spain.” The girl insisted: “And can we bring my brothers? I do not want to go alone”. “No, it’s too late, we can’t get out of the canoe,” the mother concluded while she tried not to get dizzy. She began a journey of seven days and seven nights on the high seas.
That of Sarr, a 30-year-old Gambian woman and mother of five children, is an exceptional story because of how she ended up, almost by chance, on that boat that left Gunjur, a fishing town in the Gambia, and arrived at the island of El Iron last October 4. But it is also a daily story of poverty, violence and abandonment, which pushes hundreds of women to throw themselves into the sea with their children in their arms with a single conviction: “I had no other option.”
Sarr was dedicated to finding charcoal for cooking and selling it to his neighbors. With that she supported her five children alone, from three to 11 years old, but barely, because he was incapable of assuming any unforeseen event. Like when the roof of her house collapsed in the middle of the rainy season and she had to distribute the children around the neighborhood because there was no one to sleep there. She was beginning to be fed up, worried and was already ruminating on the idea of going to Egypt to clean houses, but she never imagined what would happen that morning when she went out in search of coal and found some men putting supplies into a boat.
“What are you doing?” he asked them. They were going to Spain and Sarr, who saw his opportunity there, ran home, took his nine-year-old daughter, asked his mother to take care of the rest, and returned to the beach to get on the boat. He paid the ticket with the little more than 30 euros that he had saved to pay for the roof. “I don’t regret it, this is the only way I can give my children a chance,” he says quietly.
Women are silent protagonists on migratory routes. She is seeing them in the images of photojournalists who manage to capture the moment of her disembarkation in the different Canarian ports, but then, somehow, they disappear. Hosted in special centers for the most vulnerable migrants, they go out into the streets in groups and avoid them because they fear being punished for attending to journalists. They are rarely talked about.
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The Canary Islands are once again experiencing an emergency situation with the arrival of more than 7,500 migrants in the last two weeks alone. They travel in boats that leave from Morocco, but above all in huge canoes that leave from Senegal, but also from Mauritania and the Gambia. Men are almost always crowded there, but more and more women are seen.
Of the more than 20,000 people who have landed in the Canary Islands, they represent 7%, according to Red Cross figures. It is a modest figure, but the percentage has grown compared to 5% in 2020, when the Canary Islands route was strongly reactivated again. These barges have also brought 53 babies who are still breast-feeding and almost 150 children up to 11 years old. And, although men are also seen in charge of their little ones, most of these children are accompanied by their single mothers.
“Traditionally, migrations to Europe have been led by men,” explains Cristina Manzanedo, lawyer for the Ödos Program, dedicated to welcoming sub-Saharan women who arrive in Spain alone or with young children. “Years after their arrival, husbands managed to bring their wives, but the pattern is changing and in recent years we are seeing that women emigrate independently of men, although they continue to have a subordinate position to them.”
“Mom, what is all this?”
In the same canoe in which Sarr and her daughter were traveling, another three-year-old girl was asking questions. “Mom, what is all this?” But this mother couldn’t even find the words. “Could not answer. It was the first time in my life that I got on a boat and I was very confused… I only saw sea and sun, sea and sun,” recalls Sainey Njie, 23 years old. The journey of this barge, which sailed more than 1,700 kilometers with more than one hundred people on board, was relatively calm, but especially complicated for the women who were on it, with no experience at sea and in charge of their babies. “The trip was very hard. I brought food for my daughter, but there wasn’t enough for us and we ate just enough to survive… The water ran out before we arrived,” recalls Njie.
The young woman, who is walking with her little girl around her shelter in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, is the youngest of five siblings who lost their parents when they were just children. “I only know who my mother was because of the stories they have told me, I don’t remember her,” she says. It’s the only time she sheds tears.
Njie left school at age 11 to go to work selling fish. At 15, her uncle forced her to marry a man ten years older than her, one more of the child and forced marriages that still mark the reality of millions of African women.
She hated that man, but she had two children with him, the little girl who traveled with her and a five-year-old boy who stayed in Gambia. Finally, she managed to separate, despite the stigma that still haunts divorced women.
“I know that coming here is a radical change, but I was alone and this was the only way I saw to give myself a better life and take care of my children,” she explains in English. “Everything was too hard there,” she maintains.
The young woman, like the rest of the women who spoke with EL PAÍS, remains silent when asked about some episodes of her life. Extreme poverty is the engine that moves them, they say, but the figures of inequality and violence against women and girls in many African countries give some clues to what they fail to tell.
In The Gambia, for example, 46% of women between 15 and 49 years old have experienced physical violence at least once, according to a 2020 report by the National Statistics Office. And, among married women, 41% reported having suffered some type of violence, whether emotional, physical or sexual, from their husbands. Despite their important role as contributors to family economies, dozens of other data show how far Gambian women are from approaching equality.
Manzanedo denounces how “invisibilization” affects all these women, “regardless of their context.” To them and their children. “They are a minority group, there are no detailed figures about them and their circumstances,” he explains. “We know very little and, without information, there are no good public policies that can address the needs of these profiles.”
The heat suffocates in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The thermometer reaches 35 degrees late Thursday afternoon and the women leave the reception center to take refuge under the trees of a nearby park. They almost always go in groups, dressed in the tracksuits that the Red Cross gave them when they arrived on the island or in dresses donated by neighbors. The children flutter from hand to hand, while they converse in Wolof, a common language of Gambians and Senegalese. But one of them is always silent.
Poverty and secret journey
Aisha Kunta, 18, is the youngest of the adult women who have arrived alone on the islands in recent weeks. She describes herself as a girl who has only been able to count on herself. “I am the oldest of five siblings and I lost my mother in 2015 and my father in 2017,” she begins. “I left school because no one could pay the fees and I went to work selling fruit to support my brothers. I had no one to help me,” she laments.
Kunta learned about the departure of the canoe from Gunjur a few days before. He distributed his brothers among relatives and left. She has only spoken to one of them since he arrived, a nine-year-old boy who told her that he missed her. And Kunta remains silent again. “I’m quite sad,” he says with his eyes fixed on the ground.
If it weren’t for the small community of survivors that gathers every day in the park, Anna Jarju, 28, would be losing her mind. She cannot stop thinking about the five children that she has left with her mother in Kartong, 20 minutes by car from where she left the canoe that she brought to the four protagonists of this story. “It’s the first time I’m separated from them, I feel a lot of pain,” she says.
Jarju is the only married one in this group, but she excluded her husband from any decisions. “I didn’t tell him, because if I had he would have stopped me from leaving,” she explains. “He spent a week looking for me, thinking something had happened to me,” she remembers.
The woman describes a life of “total poverty.” She grew tomatoes and onions on a small plot of land and sold ice cream when she had to let the land rest, but her salary did not reach 45 euros a month. When asked if he thinks he made the right decision, if he regrets getting into that canoe, Jarju puts a hand to his forehead and looks up: “It’s not a question of whether it was the right decision or not, it’s “I had no other option.”
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