In Half 4, Jimmy’s determined look ahead to rescue was a lure. The boys who got here promising Europe delivered him as a substitute into the arms of traffickers. Chained, tortured, and compelled to name house for ransom, he turned seventeen in a Libyan cell the place screams have been foreign money and hunger was the norm. His household was helpless. His physique was breaking. And simply when escape appeared inconceivable, they offered him once more.
Catch up right here: Part 4: How a Nigerian teen trafficked through Libya became a celebrity barber in Europe
Getting Trafficked, Once more
The nightmare wasn’t over. It had solely modified arms.
The Arabs offered them, and this time, the customer wasn’t overseas. He was Nigerian. The identical man Jimmy and his group had been instructed would assist them cross into Europe. Their supposed saviour was the one who betrayed them from the beginning. He had given up their location. He had organized for them to be captured. Now, weeks later, he returned to “purchase them again.”
Once they arrived at his compound, the story flipped. He instructed them he had “rescued” them. That he had paid a fortune to safe their launch, and that now, they owed him double.
He moved them to a distinct jail. It wasn’t a dungeon of chains and fuel burns like earlier than. There have been no shackles. However there have been partitions, armed guards, locked doorways, and a rule: you could not depart.
The beatings did not cease. They got here from Nigerians now. From males who spoke the identical language, got here from the identical nation.
Morning and night time, ache was a part of the routine. Earlier than breakfast, beating. Earlier than sleep, beating. You bought used to it such as you received used to starvation, such as you received used to concern. It was merely life now.
They have been fed twice a day. Typically swallow, generally spaghetti. However what did it matter if you have been too sore to perk up, too bruised to chew, too drained to really feel?
The person had all their contacts. Each quantity they’d shared earlier than leaving Nigeria. So he made them begin once more, calling house, begging, screaming, pleading for hundreds of thousands in ransom.
Jimmy known as his mother and father once more.
This time, the silence on the opposite finish wasn’t ignorance; it was helplessness. His mom was sick now, out and in of the hospital. His father had no means. His siblings had nothing to promote. There was nothing left to strive. His mom sobbed via the road, her voice weak, her spirit damaged.
“They mentioned they will throw me into the ocean if we do not pay,” Jimmy instructed her.
However she had no reply. Simply tears. “This may be the final time we communicate,” she mentioned. And in that second, Jimmy knew. No assist was coming. Nobody might save him.
So the traffickers made a brand new determination: in the event that they could not earn cash via ransom, they might earn cash via labour. They started asking every prisoner what ability that they had. What they may provide.
Jimmy thought rigorously.
In reality, he had no actual expertise reducing males’s hair. All his time in his brother’s salon in Benin had been spent round wigs and girls’s kinds. He knew tips on how to trim and mix artificial fibres, tips on how to form lace fronts, however not tips on how to line a person’s hairline.
However you could not say that in Libya. Speaking about girls, touching girls’s hair, and admitting you labored in feminine salons was harmful. Lethal, even. So he lied.
He mentioned, “I am a barber.”
And identical to that, a blade and a plastic comb have been positioned in his hand. No clippers. No mirror. Simply uncooked instruments and expectations.
Jimmy began reducing hair in probably the most unthinkable place possible: Libyan jail camps.
He trimmed the identical males who beat him. Light the perimeters of different captives. He was moved from one holding facility to the subsequent, reducing hair for Nigerian and Ghanaian prisoners who, like him, have been caught in limbo.
And in some way, a seed was planted.
“I wasn’t reducing in a store,” Jimmy mentioned. “I used to be reducing in jail camps. For a similar males who chained me. For captors and prisoners alike. Razor blade and comb. That is all I had.”
It wasn’t freedom. Nevertheless it was a begin. They instructed him he’d must work off his debt. So Jimmy set to work.
Simply when Jimmy thought the worst may be over, or possibly that it could by no means finish in any respect, struggle broke out within the camps…
Don’t miss Half 6 of Jimmy’s story subsequent Friday, solely on Pulse.ng.
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