JOURNEY'S END: After his boat was found off Lampedusa, Abdi Salan was bused and then choppered to a hospital. He remains in Palermo — for the moment
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An Egyptian man is at the tiller. He has assured the traffickers he knows how to skipper the boat. In case of engine trouble, he tells them, he might need help. The smugglers say not to worry — one of the Somalis on board is a mechanic. It's about 3 a.m. when the motor rumbles to life and the boat leaves the Libyan shoreline behind.
THE LAST NIGHTMARE
There is, of course, no mechanic on board, and after the engine dies the boat drifts across the sea with no land in sight. After a week, Abdi Salan is sure they will never be found — alive or dead — and his parents will forever wonder what happened to him. The passengers are withering in the sun, their exposed skin blistering and peeling; at night, when the temperature drops from 35C to below 20C, their skin shivers and crawls. By day they see ships passing in the far distance. Some men try to make oars out of pieces of wood. The boatman burns shirts for smoke signals. All in vain. On the fifth day, another ship appears, and the boatman dives into the sea and disappears, the first among them to die. Others are soon to follow. Driven half-mad by thirst, people begin to drink seawater and moan with hideous cramps from the salt in their bellies. Some lean over the side to scoop the sea into their mouths, fall in and drown. Ismail is among the first to die. As the corpses accumulate, some discuss what to do with them, others try not to look as they check for a heartbeat, say a quick Muslim prayer and dump the bodies overboard one by one. By day 13, more than 40 have been dumped into the sea, and two dozen people are sprawled across the floor of the boat, barely breathing. "I saw people dying all around me," Abdi Salan recalls. "I was just waiting to die, too."
In 2001, the medical-relief organization Médecins sans Frontières began sending staff to Lampedusa to treat the near-dead immigrants who wash up on its shores. On Oct. 19, msf nurse Andrea Felappi got a call that an Italian finance-police helicopter had spotted a green-and-white fishing boat some 80 km southeast of Lampedusa. The boat had been at sea for 15 days. Of the 85 men and women who left Libya on it, just 15 were barely alive, lying among 13 corpses they were too weak to cast overboard. "All were either unconscious or in a severely confused state," Felappi says. "To not die after what they went through requires a survival mechanism that's difficult to identify. The body must respond with all the force it has."
Among the living was Abdi Salan. Some three hours later, after intravenous tubes of fluids and medicine were administered, he was helicoptered to a Palermo hospital. He doesn't remember much from those hours. "But I'll always remember how well the doctors treated me," he says.
He spent three weeks at the hospital, recovering from exhaustion and dehydration. Abdi Salan now lives in a spartan hostel room with four other survivors. He's still too weak to take more than short walks outside, so he spends most of his time watching television, learning his first words of Italian, and waiting for word on his request for political asylum. If it isn't granted, he'll either be shipped back to Mogadishu — or disappear and become another undocumented alien. Asked if he still wants to go to England, he smiles and repeats the football slogan his doctors have taught him: "Forza Palermo!"
He has also talked by phone with his family in Mogadishu, who had heard news reports about the fateful boat. He glossed over the details to his mother, not wanting her to worry any more. But to his younger siblings, he made one thing clear: "I told them," he says, "not to do what I did."