Since I have some time off I can post on this piece I read some time ago entitled "
We failed to reach Europe – now our families disown us"
Fatmata breaks into sobs when she remembers the six months she spent in slavery as the "wife" of a Tuareg nomad who seized her in the Sahara desert.
"They call him Ahmed. He was so huge and so wicked," she says. "He said, 'You are a slave, you are black. You people are from hell.' He told me when somebody has a slave, you can do whatever you want to do. Not only him. Sometimes he would tell his friend, 'You can have a taste of anything inside my house.' They tortured me every day."
Remember: There was Muslim slavery in Africa prior to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and there is Muslim slavery now.
When she got back, she called her brother. But his reaction terrified her. "He told me, 'You should not even have come home. You should just die where you went, because you didn't bring anything back home.'"
This sentiment is not uncommon.
She stole 25 million leones - about US $2,600 at today's exchange rate, but then worth a lot more - from her aunt. It was money her aunt had given her to buy clothes, that could then be resold as part of her trading business. Her aunt regularly trusted her in that way.
"I was only thinking how to get the money and go," Fatmata says, though she adds that she's not a selfish person. "If I had succeeded in going to Europe, I decided that I would triple the money, I would take good care of my aunt and my mum."
But Fatmata's aunt's business never recovered from the loss of the money. And - to make things even worse - the theft has caused a rift between the aunt and her sister, Fatmata's mother, whom she falsely accuses of being in on Fatmata's plan.
This is also not uncommon. This has to be the third report I've read this year about how people are leaving stable places where they have small businesses and give smugglers relatively large sums of money to get into Europe to live on the streets in the cold in the hopes of "making it big".
That's not all though. It's not just money theft from families.
Jamilatu, aged 21, who escaped with Fatmata from the traffickers' prison in Algeria, took a plastic bag of cash worth $3,500 from her mother's room when she was out of the house. The money didn't even belong to her mother. It had all been lent to her by neighbours, as part of a microcredit scheme.
Microcredit. I used to regularly give micro-loans. A good 20% went unpaid. Then I realized that some was being used to get to Europe. Not what I intended.
And even when you try to help the returnees:
As for Fatmata and Jamilatu, they never received an allowance because they returned from Mali at a time when some other Sierra Leoneans were abusing the system by catching a bus to Mali, pretending they'd returned from across the Sahara, and claiming the allowance. So everyone returning from Mali lost out, including Fatmata and Jamilatu.
These migrations are a huge human capital drain on the "sending" countries whether they be in Africa or Central America. Entire villages are depopulated (often of the men) and economic activity halted as money is diverted to smugglers. But hey..diversity.
