“My voice can become the voice of all”

Before crossing the Mediterranean, everyone on the boat wrapped their most cherished belongings – photographs, phones – in anything they had to protect them from the waves. For Hannah, who had left her home in Nigeria at just 15 years old, there was just one item she wanted to protect: a notebook.

That notebook became her main travel companion. It gave her a place to write her fears, her worries – and her hopes. “I always thought that if I studied, if I managed to follow the path I dreamed of, that notebook would help me,” she says now. Writing her thoughts down helped her process what she was going through.

Today, nine years after a journey filled with moments of betrayal, horror and despair, Hannah lives in Rome. She studies at university and advocates for migrant youth, including as a member of the Steering Group for UNICEF’s U-Report On The Move platform, a listening and participation channel for adolescent and young migrants and refugees in Italy.

But for a long time, achieving any of this seemed almost impossible.

Hannah left school at age 12 to care for her mother, who was sick. When her mother died, Hannah was just 15 years old. She found herself all alone.

Making a life for herself in Nigeria seemed impossible. So when someone she trusted told her there was a better way, she believed them.

“Someone, pretending to be a friend, told me they could get me to Europe in two weeks, to a place where I could study and work,” she says. “I trusted them.”

But she’d been sold. For children traveling along the Central Mediterranean Route, such exploitation is exceedingly common: around eight in 10 children traveling along the Central Mediterranean Route experience exploitation including violence, abuse, sexual exploitation, forced labor, child marriage or captivity.

By the time Hannah realized she’d been sold, she was already at the border between Nigeria and Niger.

And her journey would last 20 months – not the two weeks she’d been promised.

From Agadez, Niger, she began the trek through the desert, both on foot and in trucks, eventually ending up in Libya. More than once, she dreamed of turning back. But deep down, she knew it wasn’t possible. Turning back would mean paying her traffickers again – on top of facing the dangerous journey back through the desert.

“Everything that happened, everything you heard, was terrifying. You knew you could be next,” she says. “In Libya, I came to know true horror, people who caused harm and forced others to do the same, completely indifferent to anyone’s pain.”

“Fisa, fisa” – which means “quickly, quickly” – was a phrase the traffickers repeated often during that time, trying to hurry Hannah and the others up so they would avoid being caught. It became a poem in one of Hannah’s notebooks.

An excerpt from Hannah's poem ‘Our Journey “Fisa Fisa”’:

Before the cock crows in the morning,
before the sun rises
before it's 4 o’clock in the morning
all I feel is pain, get up fast and ‘fisa fisa’!
Everyone running not to be flogged.
Without food for three days,
without water to quench our taste
all we feel is pain, get up fast and ‘fisa fisa’!

All piled up as we crossed the desert.
In the morning the sun burns
but at night we tremble because of the cold.
Sand and dust are our only friend,
we cry and pray not to feel this hunger
Only God can help us, but all we hear is
get up quickly, without being able to stop, ‘fisa fisa’!

Arriving in Libya, we say finally but not actually,
we repeat, ‘’Oh my God does the slave trade still exist’’?
How can a man have the heart to sell another man?
Again we feel pain and it’s still ‘fisa fisa’!
 

Once at the coast, Hannah tried to cross the Mediterranean twice. The first time, the boat had an engine failure that left them stranded in the sea.

“It was the first time I’d seen the open sea. It looked massive, endless, terrifying,” she remembers.

She tried again the following night. That boat also began taking on water, but this time, they were rescued by the Coast Guard. She and the other passengers sang and danced when they finally saw land.

By that point, Hannah had managed to escape her traffickers. She was free.

In the following days, at a reception center in Southern Italy, Hannah kept writing about what she’d lived through. Though damaged by seawater, her old diary remained one of her most treasured possessions.

She came across UNICEF through the U-Report On The Move platform. That’s when her activism began, especially in defense of not just migrants, but women’s rights. “We can’t change what happened to us,” she says, “but we can be a source of help to others on the same journey.”

And today, nine years later, she is still writing.

“When I look back, I feel like I’m not good at telling my story aloud, but I can always write. And I can keep studying, keep walking the path I’ve chosen, and through that, share my perspective,” she says.

“My voice, through my poems, can become the voice of those I left behind in Libya, of those I heard crying, of those I never saw again after the journey, of all the women going through what I went through. It can become the voice of all.”