PAIN IS LOSING A CHILD

During the week of 14-22 December 2019, conflicting information emerged with regard to the boats that had set off from the city of Dakhla for the Canary Islands. Relatives tried to clarify the number of people and boats in danger on the route to our organisation. Large numbers of boats were arriving on the islands and we were concerned that others had remained at sea without alerting us to their presence.
On 21 December, our organisation received an alert from two vessels that had left Dakhla three days earlier. With information from two family members, one searching for his partner and the other waiting to hear from his wife and son, we were able to piece together the events: a total of 108 people had set off to sea in four groups, but their families had no further information. The father of the missing child explained that three of the wooden boats had reached Las Palmas and that the fourth, which he believed to be carrying his wife and three-month-old baby, was rumoured to have landed in Tenerife. At Ca-minando Fronteras, we searched in vain for the supposed survivors as their families insisted that they had arrived, desperate to find their loved ones. “In Tenerife, they take their phones away and that’s why they haven’t contacted us”, “in Tenerife, there are some areas without phone signal so they haven’t been able to call”, they repeated to reassure themselves.
To confirm whether or not the fourth boat had arrived amid the families’ desperation, the baby’s father gave us Kourotum’s telephone number. She had travelled on one of the three boats that had arrived in the Canary Islands with her daughter Nora. However, her 12-year-old son Kanate was still missing: he had been separated from his family and put onto the boat that had disappeared.