Zahra managed to collect the fare for her escape, mostly from relatives living abroad, but the courage needed to take the journey she was planning had to come from within.
The 23-year-old Somali woman, who took up a job this summer as a housemaid in Jeddah, described her perilous, clandestine journey from Mogadishu to Jeddah.
Zahra left her homeland on April 10. For as long as she’s been alive her country has been bogged down in civil war that has brought little more than chaos and danger to the Somali people. Along her monthlong journey to Saudi Arabia Zahra encountered drunken bandits, armed militiamen and human traffickers. (These migrant smugglers are referred to as mukhallis, “savior” in Arabic.) She traveled by land and sea, usually under the cover of night and always uncertain if the next leg of the journey would be her last.
Today, Zahra is safe, but feels overworked cleaning a house in Saudi Arabia for SR800 riyals a month. She dreams of moving to Europe.
Zahra said working in the Kingdom has not met her expectations; she works as a maid by day and a nanny at night. “I feel like a slave,” she says.
“My family is now torn apart, each one of us is in a separate place,” she tells Arab News through an interpreter. “Even my family members who are there in Somalia, they were obliged to leave and live separately in different rural areas after they escaped recent attacks.”
Zahra, apparently unaware of the shift in leadership at the United Nations, asks “the ruler of the world Kofi Annan” to help her find passage to Europe.
Zahra began her journey from Mogadishu in a minivan driven by a Somali man who negotiated checkpoints manned by armed militia members. For 10 days — the time it took to travel from Mogadishu to Djibouti — Zahra said they were stopped numerous times by highwaymen threatening to shoot them unless they were paid for safe passage.
At the border with Djibouti, Zahra said they encountered drunks with guns who threatened to kidnap and rob the migrants. Zahra described how most of the group fled and went to a police station inside Djibouti while two members of the group stayed behind, chatting with the armed alcoholics.
Exhausted and frightened, the group was having second thoughts about this journey. Unsure of what the police would say, the migrants claimed they wanted to go home. But Zahra recounts that the cops were lenient. The officials referred the migrants to a mukhallis — a “savior” — who would find a sailor to negotiate the narrow sea channel between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and deliver them to the shores of Yemen.
Night boat to Aden
For four days the group waited at a safe house, men in one dank room and women in another until passage could be negotiated from Djibouti to coastal town of Obock, where a boat would take them near the Yemeni port city of Aden to a refugee camp run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Zahra said that at one point a gang accosted them; the group fled and hid until they could meet the boat for the night passage to Aden.
Thus began what Zahra said was the most frightening part of her journey: Riding overnight in a small fishing boat filled with 30 to 40 migrants, crossing from Obock to Aden south of the Mandeb Strait that separates the Arabian and Red seas.
About halfway into the five-hour journey, the boat motor stalled, leaving the passengers adrift in the middle of the night.
“We gave up and were expecting nothing but death,” she recounted.
Luckily, after some tooling the pilot managed to get the motor working again and the migrants touched down on the shores of Yemen at about 3 a.m. The next time Zehra would see warm food and clean clothing was when she arrived at the UNHCR camp in Aden.
Into the Kingdom
The Ethiopians who had joined the Somali refugees on the journey across the water were turned away by the UNHCR because it only provides shelter for war refugees, not migrants. From here Zehra plotted the next leg of her journey to become a maid and nanny in Saudi Arabia.
While UNHCR camp might have offered the possibility of refugee status and asylum in a host country, Zahra walked away from the camp and into the unknown streets of Aden.
The group she was with stayed in Aden for 20 days camped out in a rural area filled with beggars and car washers. Eventually they negotiated passage to the Saudi border from a Yemeni truck driver who charged each migrant SR400.
At the border they were instructed to cross into Saudi Arabia on foot in a remote area to meet a car with a Saudi driver who would drive them to the southern town of Abu Arish.
At the Saudi borders Zahra said her group was “harassed” by a gang “looking for women.” Without elaborating Zahra said her group managed to escape the clutches of the thugs.
In Abu Arish, a driver demanded SR3,000 from each passenger for the ride to Jeddah.
Zahra’s journey is repeated in one form or another by thousands of migrants from the Horn of Africa. The UNHCR estimates that 522 boats delivered 25,764 people to Yemen across the Gulf of Aden in the first half of the year alone. The UN agency also said it has recorded 146 drowning and 85 missing people in the same period of time.
Apart from the dangers of crossing in overloaded craft piloted by human traffickers, these waters have become a battleground between the navies of world superpowers and the pirates that hide among the fishing vessels and other small watercraft that dot these waters. Distinguishing a vessel manned by thugs and other boats has become a challenge for these naval forces.
Many of these refugees come from war-torn Africa. In Somalia’s case, many flee through Kenya, bound for South Africa. Others attempt more difficult passage to Europe. Still others, many others, end up like Zahra, an undocumented Saudi maid.
