Mbarka Aballat has no tears left. She has cried so much in recent weeks that her eyes have dried up. Sitting on the floor of the Moroccan living room of her house, almost completely covered with her melfa, she tells us about her son, El Ghalli Echine, one of the victims of the boat that sank this Sunday in Lanzarote and left behind 25 dead, one missing and six survivors.
El Ghalli lived until a few days ago in Assa, a Moroccan town located 300 kilometers from Agadir and about 400 from Tarfaya, from where the boat of death departed. We must not forget that this point on the African coast is the closest to the Islands. It was all in vain. A few meters from their goal, a stroke of bad luck awaited them.
Bojmaa Akhalan and Elhabib Nassiri, 17 and 16 years old, also left Assa full of hope for their entire family. The three were friends and students. Good boys, their families repeat tirelessly. Akhalan and El Ghalli have not been able to tell the adventure. They are the face of a story, their companion Elhabib is the other side. He survived. And, due to his status as a minor, he will be able to stay in a center in the Canary Islands until he reaches the age of majority.
"Thanks to Allah, our son is alive, and God willing, in the future he will be able to work and help us; but what he has done is a real suicide, right now it is as if he had been born again." Speaks Elhabib's father, Mouloud Nassiri. He was the only one in the house who did not know the young man's intentions. His mother and aunt were the ones who helped him prepare for the trip.
"WE ENGRAVED THE PHONE NUMBER ON HIS ARM"
"We weren't sure about it, and in case there was a problem, I engraved our information on his arm, with the phone number," says the aunt, Najat Nassiri, proudly of her idea. Next to her, Elhabib's three siblings - two children aged four and 11 and a 14-year-old girl - follow the conversation with their heads down. Yassine, the 11-year-old, tremblingly holds a photo of his brother and cannot help but break down and cry. He misses Elhabib, his mother says, while explaining that they have already been able to speak to him by phone and know that he is fine.
A few meters from this house, El Ghalli's family suffers in silence. The youngest son, about 14 years old, Rachid, is harsh when asked about his brother's trip. He did not agree. But his parents did. "My husband gave him 35 euros a month every month so he could save and take a boat one day; my husband died two weeks ago, and that's when he decided that the time had come," says Mbarka, who says she has no idea how her son organized the trip or who he contacted to find a place on the boat.
"I turned on the TV and found out everything through Al Jazzera." That's how Mbarka found out about her son's death. "We needed El Ghalli, he was our hope." This 49-year-old woman assures seriously that she would never allow her two young children to emigrate to Spain clandestinely. "I already have too much drama on my shoulders, we couldn't bear it." But she did help El Ghalli.
In Assa, and in many other poor and depressed towns in Morocco, it is the parents who encourage their children to risk their lives with the illusion of getting a job, a salary, a source of income for their families, says Mbark Boujdid, from the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) in Assa. "They know that the children go to juvenile centers and are not repatriated, and here there is nothing, there is no work, they see no other way out," he insists.
150 EUROS FOR 15 PEOPLE
About 14,000 people live in Assa and the unemployment rate is 70 percent. There is no agriculture, no livestock, nor tourism or industries. Elhabib's father is lucky, he is a civil servant in the city. He is lucky because he has a job, but not because of what he earns: 150 euros, with which he feeds 15 people including children, aunts and nieces. El Ghalli's mother asks the Moroccan authorities for more investment in the region and the Spanish authorities to favor regular immigration, "like with the strawberry pickers who go to Huelva."
But, now, in the house of El Ghalli and Akhalan, the only thing they ask is when they will return their children. When will they be able to watch over them and bury them in the same land that saw them born and from which they left with a goal: to get their families out of poverty. "I hope someone helps us, they have told us that it could cost us up to 3,000 euros, I have never seen so much money together, it is totally beyond our possibilities."
In the absence of identifying all the bodies, everything indicates that many of the occupants of the boat were from the same area. For the moment, it is known that another of the young men was from Guelmin, just two hours by car from Assa, and that there was also a member of the El Aaiún expedition. The road ahead is long, but everyone hopes that their heroes will return to pay them honors. "They are our idols, small, but ours," Mbarka sighs.
Erena Calvo/ACN Press
