And I speak with Rachida Nchouapine, 26 from Cameroon, who arrived in Tunisia almost one month ago, but whose days are filled with endless anguish.

In December 2016, Nchouapine left Cameroon after civil war broke out and she saw her parents killed in front of her. With her husband and son, Yakouba and Mohamed, and her sister Majoi and her two children, Ange and Warren, the small family ventured through Nigeria, Niger and Algeria, before arriving in Libya. Somewhere in the desolate vastness of the Niger/Algerian border, their group became disorientated and lost in the Saharan desert for six days without food, a time especially hard on the young children, before stumbling into Algeria and finally Libya.

Like so many others, things didn’t improve when they made it to Libya. Nchouapine was held captive and abused by militias for months at a time. “I was jailed with my sister and our little children,” Nchouapine said. “I was raped in front of them.”

Finally escaping these horrors after nine months, Nchouapine, her sister and their children all ended up in a secluded cove on the Libyan coast, packing themselves into a crammed boat bound for Italy. After only a few hours at sea, their frail ark was taking on water, and in international waters, finally capsized.

“There were so many deaths,” she said. “I was swimming in the middle of bodies.”

When she made it on board the rescue ship, she found her sister unconscious and unresponsive, and one nephew sick from swallowing so much seawater, with no sign of her son. She made the decision to leave her husband and other nephew with the Italian rescuers to accompany her sister on an emergency helicopter, unaware they would be separated and flown to different continents.

Her sister died two days later in a hospital in Tunisia, and was buried in a nearby Muslim cemetery in Sfax.

When I spoke to Nchouapine in late February 2018, she was still in Tunisia with one of her nephews, and didn’t know what had happened to her other nephew, or her own son. Nor did her nephew know that his mother had died more than three weeks earlier.

Nchouapine, fighting through tears, is worried her child will be offered up for adoption. “It’s not easy to live like this,” she said. “I am alive, and someone else is going to adopt my child, but I am still alive. I don’t want this.”

“They should have grouped them in the same place so that everyone can be reunited with their family and people with each other. But they split us. They split us, and other people.”

An Ocean Between the Waves