32-year-old expectant Nigerian turns refugee camp tenant in Europe

The crowd at the refugee camp

After a forced emigration to Europe  following the crisis that hit Libya where she had stayed with her husband for years, 32-year-old Nigerian Mrs. Madeline Adebisi, an expectant mother now lives in uncertainty in a refugee camp, unsure of what the future holds. She is about to be delivered of a baby, even as there is no word from her husband, who left Tripoli in April. Assistant Editor DADA ALADELOKUN reports
Like many a Nigerian who had dreamt of a better living, 32-year-old Mrs. Madeline Adebisi and her husband  sought a greener pasture in Libya. Presumably, they both had sweet tales to share there, until a few weeks ago. The North African country is at war. 


The ongoing fierce attempt to force Libya’s strongman Col. Muammar Gaddafi to relinguish his 41-year reign has since dragged the helpless woman among many others, through the valley of the shaddow of death. Now, she lives on tenterhooks in an Italian refugee camp in Lampedusa, a tiny Island South of Sicily. 
Mrs. Adebisi live in utter agony, unsure of what the future holds for her. Worse still, her heart harbours a killing tempest: She may not see her beloved husband again, dead or alive!
Her predicament began two months ago with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombardments. Poised to fight dirty, Gaddafi made good his vow to ‘unleash an unprecedented wave of illegal immigration’ on Europe. And the ships have since been arriving from Libya.
Caught in the web, Mrs Adebisi, with her pregnancy, got on the emergency trip to “nowhere in particular” against her wish. The journey as Newsweek put it, “takes about four days and conditions on the ship are often horrific. There is little food and there are no toilets on board. Expectant women are often forced to insert catheters before boarding so that their urine won’t ‘poison’ the superstitious men.”
The woman was on the trip without her beloved husband who had left Tripoli in search of work after losing his job. She has since been left living with a group of other African women who, like her, had lost their jobs in a hospital when the war broke out.  According to Newsweek, soldiers loyal to Gaddafi had forced them to relocate to a small house near the port. But after a few days, they were pushed into a boat with hundreds of others midnight and set to sea.
Three days later, after the ship failed to dock on the Island of Malta, it lost its rudder off Lampedusa’s shore. Unable to steer, its captain abandoned the wheel and the ship smashed onto the rocks, a stone’s throw to the Door to Europe, a statue erected as a memorial for immigrants who died at sea while trying to reach the continent.
“They just kept screaming and screaming, calling desperately for help. I was so worried we would lose some of those babies,” Lt. Marco Persi of Italy’s military police reportedly recalled.
At that moment, hapless Mrs. Adebisi must have said her last prayer hurriedly. “I thought I was dead that night when the boat crashed… I was sure my life was over,” she said in crass hopelessness. She has since been living in the refugee centre in La Spezia on Liguarian coast. 
According to reports, “she is about to be delivered of a baby, but she has no idea as to whether her husband is alive or dead because she has not seen him or heard from him since April when he left Tripoli.”
Perhaps Mrs. Adebisi is lucky to still be counted among the living as many in her shoes never lived to tell their stories, which has left Lampedusa’s coastline marred carcasses of capsized boats; the ports filled with shipwrecks; some with blankets, children’s toys and jackets. Deaths in the Mediterranean waters are common to the extent that fishermen now snag bodies in their nets instead of fish.
But when the woman will have the opportunity to re-unite with the rest of her family here in Nigeria is a question left for destiny to decide.
The massive wave of perilous migration may not be surprising, after all. Libya is a key transit country for African immigrants trying to go to Europe for improved living. Records show that in the last five months, no fewer than 45,000 migrants, 10 times more than the figure last year, had made their ways to Lampedusa.
Libya is not the lone “donor” of such immigrants. Thousands of Tunisians have flooded into the Lampedusa after the fall of their President, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, in the heat of the uprising  that engulfed the country in January.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has estimated that in the past two months, at least, 1,600 people have died at sea while fleeing their countries for European shores.  

Source : The Nation Newspaper