Asylum seekers stories
Abdo is a teenager who was born in Saudi Arabia. Tragically, his Sudanese parents were killed in a car accident. His grandmother, who ran a small business in Saudi Arabia, then looked after him, but on his way home from school he was stopped by the police.
They checked his status and discovered that he no longer had a right to live in Saudi Arabia, so he was detained for two days and put on a plane to Khartoum in Sudan, a country he had never visited before. His grandmother contacted his aunt, who lived in Khartoum, and she eventually found him in detention at the airport. The police had arrested him on suspicion of bringing money into the country to assist Darfurian rebels.
While he was in detention, he had his chest burned with a cigarette and was made to stand on one leg for extended periods of time. The police took all his money and his phone, and these were not returned.
Akin is from Nigeria. He was intelligent and good with numbers. When he finished school, because of his ability with numbers and his reputation for being honest, he secured a job working for a Nigerian oil company.
He discovered that a large amount of petrol was being stolen from the company’s petrol tankers and devised a procedure that prevented this happening, but as a result of this he was threatened by the criminal gangs stealing the petrol and his parents lost their house and farm. His mother and father have since died. The petroleum company helped him by funding a scholarship for him to study accountancy in London. However, the company went bankrupt and his funding stopped after the first year.
Farhad is a teenager from Iran. His family lived close to the Iraqi border where he worked as a shepherd for his family, but because of his knowledge of the surrounding hills he was asked to act as a lookout and guide for smugglers taking goods from Iran into Iraq.
He was stopped and questioned on several occasions by the local police, but one day he received a message from his mother saying that it was too dangerous for him to come home.
He walked across the border into Iraq but again ended up helping smugglers to take cigarettes and mobile phones from Iraq back into Iran.
Yonas is a young Ethiopian teacher. After qualifying, in his first year of teaching he obtained a teaching post close to the Ethiopian–Sudanese border. During his first year his school was raided by the police and several teachers were shot.
He was accused of helping people escape into Sudan and arrested. After being detained for two months he was released and allowed to go back to teach in the same school. The authorities, however, refused to give him his final full teaching qualification.
He was told he needed to go in person to the prison and get a letter saying he had been released and there were no charges against him.
Youssef is a teenager from Morocco. He is homosexual, which is illegal in Morocco. He smuggled himself onto a lorry and got to Spain.
He had been told that it would be better for him to go to Belgium, so he hid in a second lorry, which he thought was going to Belgium, but he then found himself in the UK.
He made his way to the Eurostar terminal at Folkstone where he was able to avoid the CCTV cameras and security and hid under the Eurostar train. He was amazed at how quickly he found himself back in France.