A woman has to be ‘stronger than a lion’ to cross the sea

Mediterranean Sea - On the open sea, thousands of kilometres from land, on a flimsy blue wooden boat, 21-year-old Linda* from Daraa, Syria, didn’t care if she lived or died.

She and 125 other refugees had left the Libyan coastal city of Sabratha in the dark of night, and her only goal was to get her sick mother to safety – away from the war back home, away from the freezing sea they had been drifting in for nearly two days with no food or water.

Then their boat was intercepted by German search-and-rescue vessel Humanity 1 - and Linda, her mother and the others were saved.

In the first chaotic hours after the rescue, she walked around the open deck, crying. Dressed in a black tracksuit with white stripes, she zigzagged between people queuing for a change of clothing and a long line of frozen survivors waiting to see the ship’s doctor.

Some of them were wrapped in shiny aluminium emergency blankets. When they moved, the sound reminded her of opening candy bags when she was a little girl.

Grabbing one of the crew members, her eyebrows furrowed in an effort to hold back tears, Linda whispered in Arabic: “Can I please charge my phone? I need to send a message.” She held out an iPhone with a cracked screen and traces of salt dried onto it.

She had been out of contact for 22 hours, so her fiancé of three weeks – still stuck in a Libyan smuggling shelter – did not know if she was dead or alive.

When she was told she would have to wait a few hours, her tears spilled over.

Two days later, Linda was sitting crosslegged on a blue mat in the women’s area on the Humanity 1. Above her head, yellow and purple letters read “Welcome on board” in Arabic and French.

The women’s area comprised two large rooms on the main deck, one with 12 bunks and the other a children's playroom with a mural of fish swimming towards a moon and teddy bears.

This would be the temporary home Linda would share with eight other women and 11 children who were rescued from the boat.

Five toddlers ran around, playing with rubber surgical gloves they had blown up into large, white, waving hands. A seven-year-old girl named Sarah* stopped to run her hand along Linda’s long, dark hair, lying in a thick veil down her back.

"You have to drench it in olive oil; that's how you get it long and healthy," Linda advised the little girl as she parted her hair with light fingers and braided it.

That morning, the survivors had been told the ship was heading to Taranto in southern Italy to drop them off safely. Linda cheered at the news, but that feeling had subsided.

Just over a month beforehand, Linda and her mother had sold their home in Syria to begin the journey to Germany to join her older sister, fleeing the war and famine that have torn the country apart since 2011. They are now among five million Syrian refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR).

Linda felt heavily the responsibility of getting her mother, who has limited mobility and impaired speech after falling and hitting her head, there safely. They flew to Libya and then spent a month in two different smuggling dens in Sabratha.

After paying some $17,000 – their life savings - for the dangerous crossing, Linda felt duped.

“What did we pay for?" she asked. "It’s gone and we got on a boat that didn’t take us anywhere.”

In the smuggling den, more than 100 women and children, mostly from Syria and Eritrea, were crowded into small rooms, waiting to leave the country.

The grey building and its yard were fenced by a high brick wall. It was impossible to leave, and some of the women had been there for as long as a year and a half.

In the evenings, when they were putting their children to bed on mats on the floor, Linda heard the women’s stories about how smugglers exploited women and girls in the shelter.

They lured them out with offers of special treatment, promising they would leave Libya before everyone else, and dragged them into a haze of drugs and alcohol.

Some were sold; others were raped. It was known that the men guarding the shelters did not have pure intentions.

Some would get violent, Linda explained, rubbing the back of her hand against a fading bruise along her upper lip.

“I got it from one of the smuggler’s men," she said. "He wanted me, but I rejected him. This is nothing compared to what it looked like the first week.”

The memory sparked something, and Linda’s desolate expression from the first day was replaced with one of fierceness and determination.

“Travelling … as a woman, means I have to be stronger than a lion," she said, clenching her fists. "I have to be furious, so nobody dares put their hand on us. I can’t stop being angry until I know we’re safe.”

For Linda, everything paled compared to what she had to leave behind.

In the smugglers' den, the men's and women's quarters were separated by a big brown gate that was opened occasionally for the groups to mix. They would gather in the common space to smoke shisha and socialise.

Kamal*, a 21-year-old also from Daraa, was on the other side of the gate, and he was smitten.

“The first time he saw me, he immediately went to my mother, asking for my hand,” Linda said, smiling at the memory.

Falling in love with another refugee was not part of Linda’s plan. She had promised to take her mother to Germany then return to Syria; she did not feel that life in Europe was for her.

But she fell for Kamal - he was kind and handsome and made her feel seen amid the helplessness of her situation.

Their love story can only be described as brief. Because of the gate between the quarters, they only saw each other a few times a week. In the meantime, they kept in touch via messages and phone calls, planning their future away from the shelter.

“The gate separated us, but when they would open it, I would run to him. My heart was torn to pieces every time we had to say goodbye,” Linda said.

Then news came late one evening - after a month of waiting, departure for Italy was within hours. Linda and her mother packed the few belongings they still had: clothes, some photographs of their family, and the old house key that Linda wanted to keep as a memory.

Just as they were about to leave the shelter, one of the smuggler's men - the one who had bruised Linda's lip - decided not to let Kamal go.

“He pointed at him and said: ‘Not you, not today.’ We were one second from leaving together,” Linda said, her eyebrows furrowing again as she tried to control the tears.

“He was punished because of me; I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she cried before silently staring at the floor, waiting for the tears to stop.

The children stopped playing and fell silent when they saw Linda crying. Three-year-old Amira*, a girl with golden curls, tried to comfort her by climbing onto her back.

When the girl's mother entered the room to see what the silence was about, she darted away.

Rania, the 23-year-old mother, smiled at her little girl’s receding back.

“One of her legs is shorter than the other. She’s had surgery twice in Syria, but it hasn’t helped. Hopefully, they’ll be able to fix it in Germany,” she said, tucking a few strands of hair back into her headscarf and sitting beside Linda.

Linda and Rania became friends in the smuggling shelter, where Rania had already been for two months with her three daughters, her 10-year-old sister and her 12-year-old nephew when Linda arrived.

Rania says their time there was a constant cycle of hunger, humiliation, lice and filth.

“We’d get small food deliveries every two or three days. My girls were crying for bread. And we weren’t allowed to leave the shelter's walls, not a single step outside,” she said, holding up her index finger in warning.

When Rania’s husband was killed four years ago, shot 15 times in crossfire between Syrian regime forces and fighters in Daraa, she found herself alone with two daughters, pregnant with the third, and no job. She had to rely on relatives to send her money from abroad.

Every month, her mother – who relied on government benefits in Germany – sent $100. But eventually, Rania decided to try to join her mother. There was nothing left for them in Syria.

“My mother took out a loan of $4,500 so we could flee … as soon as I land, I’ll start working to pay every dollar back.”

Travelling alone as a woman comes with its rules, Rania explained, noting the first rule is that no matter how nice the men you meet along the way are, they will try to take advantage of you.

Sometimes this has meant that she has had to play dumb, acting like she didn't understand their advances and was so struck with worry for her children that she could grasp nothing else.

Rania talked over her three daughters running around the room, playing exuberantly. One of them dropped a packet of BP-5 bars, a high-calorie, vitamin-enriched emergency food that they were given on board. The young mother opened the package carefully and gave each girl a bar.

“On that boat, I was thinking over and over again: ‘How did I do this to my daughters? Am I crazy to risk their lives?’ I left because I wanted to keep them safe, but on that wooden boat, I couldn't stop questioning what I was sending them to,” Rania said.

Linda added: “Those hours before we were rescued, she held her youngest and wailed.”

“All my daughters want to become doctors when we get to Germany,” Rania said, smiling proudly and pulling her youngest closer. Amira* giggled in her mother’s arms and shook her head.

“I dream of making kebabs and selling shawarma,” she announced, stamping her foot to punctuate her sentence.

The next morning, as the ship accelerated towards Taranto, Rania walked around barefoot. Her feet were pale against the deck’s cold surface, the harsh wind cutting through her black tracksuit.

Her shoes were left on the wooden boat when they were rescued, leaving her embarrassed to meet Italian land authorities barefoot.

“We have nothing left. The most important thing is my girls. I want to dress them, feed them, and see them live in peace. I don’t ever want to have to ask anyone for money again,” she said before going to thank the crew for helping her with her children.

Sitting in rows with the other survivors, wrapped in grey blankets, Linda and her mother huddled close together, watching the small coastal town grow larger on the horizon.

None of the women were at the end of their journey, but Linda said she had regained her strength after the harrowing sea crossing.

The only belongings she had left were a small black purse containing their passports and her phone. She had lost the house key she brought from Syria.

“Everything is gone,” she said. "The days, the memories, every remaining part of our family.”

Linda finally managed to contact Kamal; he was still with the smugglers, and she worried about him.

Gazing out at the grey industrial harbour on the heel of Italy, she said that if he decided to return to Syria, she would be prepared to follow him, adding “I hope he’ll join me wherever I end up.”

* Names have been changed to protect the respondents’ identity.