Jose Maria Rodriguez |
Las Palma de Gran Canaria, (EFE) . He had to think twice about what those letters SM with an anchor from the entrance emblem could mean, but the orange ship was unmistakable.
“I was shocked, I said: It’s the same as the ship that rescued me. What do I do here? I thought I was dreaming, if you tell someone they don’t believe you. Going all this way to return to the company that rescued you ”, she confesses. The “company” is Maritime Rescue and its personnel on land that day fate gave them the opportunity to experience in person the gratitude of the thousands of young Africans who owe them their lives, like this 31-year-old Moroccan worker.
The story of Abdel and his patera companions
Salvamento has shared in the podcast that he publishes every fortnight on the occasion of the 30th anniversary, “Las caras del mar”, the story of Abdel Haouri, one more among thousands on the Canary Islands Route or in the Mediterranean, but who responds in first person to those questions that his sailors also ask themselves: why do they risk their lives in that way? What does it feel like in a tiny boat at the mercy of the ocean?
Abdel and his 30 boat companions, including a woman and a baby, were rescued by the Guardamar Concepción Arenal almost 150 kilometers south of Gran Canaria on December 15, 2020. That same day, in the same service, that patrol boat Spanish rescue rescue rescued 133 people from five barges.
Haouri’s boat was the third rescue of the day. His group had left from Dakhla, in the south of the Sahara; They had been at sea for two and a half days and despair began to spread on board: water and food were scarce and the waves splashed them continuously, because they were in the most dangerous part of the journey, the one that the skippers call “the frying pan”. because there it seems that the water “boils”.
“It was horrible,” he sums up. “You try to fall asleep so you don’t feel anything. You have no idea if you are going to make it or not, if you are lost or not, or where you are. You entrust yourself to a man who drives the boat and you don’t even know where he is taking you. You go… you just go”, relates this young Moroccan.
Leaving home because you don’t see any future
He left his home, in a town near Beni Mellal where he sometimes earned a living as a truck driver, because he no longer saw a future. “You feel that you are trapped inside a box in your own country and there are things that push you to emigrate, to leave your family, your mother, your brothers, your friends… to leave everything because you think you are going to achieve something good in life. “, remember.
Abdel’s mother tried to stop him, because of the woman she knew that hundreds of people lose their lives every year in small boats like the one her son was going to take to the Canary Islands. “I can’t let you go to die like this, she told me. I answered her that we are already dead, that she wanted to get a new life for my family, to help myself.
From the moment he boarded, he tried to think little, to abstract himself from the risk he was running, but on board there were situations that brought him back to reality, such as the only woman who shared the trip with them, with a baby of four months in arms
“He told us that he wanted to jump with his child, that he couldn’t take it anymore, that he preferred to die. We started to say no, no, they are going to rescue us! Then the plane passed, a Salvage plane. Shortly after, after 30 or 40 minutes… a boat. I do not remember the name”.
The ship was the Guardamar Concepción Arenal, one of the four maritime rescue patrol boats. Haouri remembers that some began to jump around her and that she hugged people she didn’t even know, but in her memory of that moment the baby’s face always appears. “It stuck with me.”
Of the rescue, the sailors who offered them their hand to get on an orange boat like the one he recognized in the Madrid offices also come to mind. “When you see those kids with their vests, those materials, you say: They are supermen, people who work in a very dangerous job helping people they don’t even know.”
Abdel Haouri stresses that he has no words to thank them for what they did for him. They took him out of “the frying pan” and gave him back the future to which he aspired. “I’m a realist,” he confesses, “I’m still at point 1. Not at point 0, but at point 1 and I’m going to keep going. Little by little I am going to achieve my dreams”.