Lisa Edelwitt defied death to cross the Mediterranean in search of a better life. More seriously, she also defied her mother
Two years ago, I told my widowed mother about my plans to take a boat that smuggles immigrants across the Mediterranean. She cursed me in a rage. But today she is the happiest woman in Abidjan.
What started as a casual discussion quickly degenerated into such anger that she threatened to burn my passport. She had just used her last three cows to pay my first-semester accounting diploma fees at an Abidjan private college.
My frail, diabetic mother could not stomach the idea of her daughter and only child abandoning college to risk her life in a smuggler’s fishing boat across the windy and treacherous Mediterranean. After all, six boys in our village from the same family had just lost their lives in violent winds as they tried to reach Europe in overcrowded smuggling boats.
In a frenzy my mother invoked all the evils she’d ever heard about Madrid — though she’d never set foot in Spain. Racism, exclusion, prostitution and even cannibalism awaited anyone who successfully crossed the sea. Reluctantly I promised her that I would enter college, and I swore on my late father’s name that I wouldn’t join the illegal boats.
But deep down in my heart I was torn between two worlds. My two best friends had braved the rickety boats to Spain that set off from the Libyan coast. They had settled well in Madrid’s Ivorian community and were working day and night in restaurants. Euros were flowing back to their families in Abidjan and their parents had become proud and flashy owners of city mansions and all-terrain vehicles.
Yet I also dreamed of finishing college and becoming a chartered accountant. But the reality of the unstable Ivorian economy and politics told me that I would be the latest in the line of graduate job-seekers and unemployed.
So with the few American dollars my mother had struggled to raise for my first-semester studies, I made a stern decision to secretly pay the local smuggling bosses. But I told my mother I had paid my fees, just to calm her nerves.
Two days later, after assuring my mother that I was off to visit friends in the north of the country, I left Abidjan by car. A group of us followed guides through various West African borders and finally reached the Libyan port city of Tripoli.
A boat designed to carry 120 people at most sailed from the Libyan coast with 260 souls hanging on precariously for dear life. The trick was to avoid detection by the Libyan coast guard, so we set off at night.
Paris and Madrid were the destinations of many in the boat and each time the heavy winds tilted the boat we prayed in different tongues for divine mercy. On the sixth day of sailing we sighted the lights of the Spanish Canary Islands. Twenty minutes later, the Spanish coast guard intercepted our boat, detained our ”captain”, and steered us to the Spanish shore.
Weary, weak and hungry, we were heaped in an immigrants’ compound. Half of us were deported immediately. But after a passionate description of my dire situation and of my sick mother back in Abidjan, the Spanish immigration authorities were sympathetic to my cause and granted me temporary refugee and asylum status.
Three months later I was released from the immigration centre, and I found myself arriving in a wet Madrid at night with only a suitcase of clothes in hand. But for two months I was afraid to call my mother back in Abidjan lest her heart break and she froze on the spot. I finally summoned the courage to phone her and tell her I was safe. Her answer was tears.
After two years I returned. My mother met me: it was the first time she’d set foot in an airport and she was crying as she held my baby in her arms with my Spanish husband smiling at her. She is overjoyed that I have bought her a house in the city and that she can now go to church in a small Nissan my husband bought her.
Now she can’t stop saying that Madrid is the best place in the world. And she was very happy that I was returning home to Spain not via the smuggling boats but with my husband on British Airways.
Born in Côte d’Ivoire, Lisa Edelwitt is now a Madrid housewife