More than 5,000 km away from her home in Nigeria, a woman who lost her father in a terror attack sat slumped in her seat. "My father went to work and never came home," said Juliet, 24, in a room in Catania, Sicily. (I've withheld her last name at her request.) A school headmaster and a member of Nigeria's center-right People's Democratic Party, her father died in a June 2014 attack suspected to have been carried out by Boko Haram in the Wuse district of Abuja,Nigeria.
The loss shook the family to its roots. In the chaotic days that followed, as fear spread in Abuja, Juliet left the city in the direction of Agadez, in Niger. She lost track of her mother and 11-year-old sister, and has not spoken to either of them since the attack.
A four-month journey on foot and bus led Juliet through Niger and on to violence-plagued Libya, where she stayed for two months before embarking on a three-day-long boat trip across the Mediterranean to Sicily. She slept where she could among many others in transit — in the bush, in abandoned buildings — where people died and became pregnant through rape, she said. On the wooden boat to Sicily, there was no water or food. Like all the sub-Saharan Africans I met in Italy, Juliet stayed below deck in a nearly airless hold. (Middle Eastern refugees told me that among smugglers in Libya, sub-Saharan Africans are referred to as "slaves.") Some women on board were pregnant and one man fainted, she said; "I don't know if he survived."
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