I wanted to have a dream.

“I wanted to have a dream”

Sometimes they us call us “desperate”, with our eyes emptied by miles of sea crossed on little more than rafts. One can only be “desperate”, I think, to decide to entrust one’s existence to unscrupulous traffickers…

I am 25 years old, the energy of all the young people in the world, but in my eyes are weights that are only few in the world.

I knows what it means to be born in a non-country, South Sudan, which became independent in 2011 through wars fought by children kidnapped from their families.

I knows what it means to escape from the militias, a child soldier without a day of school behind me, and I knows what it means to see people die: of war, of Ebola, of heat and thirst, of torture, of shipwrecks.

I knows the borders of twenty-five African states, because my refugee legs have learned them: From the East to Central, South to the West and then to the North: Mauritania, Uganda, South Africa, Chad, Egypt, Rwanda, Mali, Morocco, Niger and many more, then Libya.

I knows the price of that phantom journey on the cargo ships that from Cameroon or Benin will take you to the Promised Land – Cuba!, Brazil! – and then it will never leave, and will force you to work for months, scrape to gather money, try again – and lose everything again.

I knows how to describe the political situations of African states and tell the work of NGOs better than the foreign correspondents of newspapers, and I knows what lies behind the international agreements that fill the headlines of the news. The truth I knows is not written in ink, but in the blood that I have seen flowing in refugee camps and Libyan prisons, before deciding that I had no more strength to attempt another journey (the fourth), I didn’t have any strength to hope for something better for myself, but I had the duty to resist the temptation of suicide, to improve the condition of others, so that all that anger would not be lost. Thus, exploiting the power of social media, I co-organised the RefugeesinLibya.org movement: a voice of protest that in a few years reached the UN headquarters. A movement, not a personal action: because «An “I” doesn’t change things. A “we” does».

I knows being threatened for my desire for justice, and I have learned to escape: on foot, on vehicles, in sewer tunnels, curled up in boxes in the hold of a ship, to escape in disguise; to escape from gunfire. And my escape finally reached Italy in the summer of 2022.

From only one thing I can’t escape: from my story and from the call to tell and seek justice, knowing that this won’t erase my wounds, but can avoid them for other people.

I also knows the price of this choice: nights full of nightmares, as I repeats my journey to schools, assemblies, associations, institutions. Meanwhile I has started studying again, because my dream has never died out; on the contrary: it has become a dream for someone else…

I now awaits a return (perhaps a new departure) – back across the Mediterranean, on the hated Libyan coast, to see again with my own eyes, to let me see; and then rewrite in the sand the trail towards South Sudan, and continue to look, understand, denounce, and try to change things, with the strength of a “we” that expands on the world map.

Because behind every departure there is no desperation: down there, beyond the night, silently awaits a little hope.