Stories

This is the story of Ibra. Three years ago he crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a patera to come to Spain. In June, he passed with high marks the entrance exam to a Spanish course. In September he began to study public health and this week he is telling his story to the students of…

Hanane comes from the town of Mostaganem on the northern coast of Algeria. In 2008, Hanane fell in love with a Spanish man she met in Mostaganem. In the months that followed, she married him, she came to Spain, fell in love with Spain, had a baby girl, fell in love with her too, and…

Luís left his home in Chepén, Perú when he was 18, almost 15 years ago. He came from a farming community and a poor but happy family that liked dancing, telling jokes, and going to the beach. They lived on a chacra, a small plot of land that they worked with their neighbors and extended…

“The problem was there before all of us. We were just born into it, like the generation before us and the one before it.” This is how Baba described the conflict that plagued his tribe in his homeland of Ghana. Though the tribe had a history of conflict, Baba explained, “You didn’t see it. It…

Bruno Diabang is one of many Senegalese immigrants that arrive in Spain by the thousands every year. However, Bruno’s story does not begin like that of many, on a patera, a rickety wooden boat built for the 1,200-mile journey from Senegal to the Canary Islands. Bruno’s story begins with a woman whose name is Rebeca….

In June of 2009, Iranians surged into the streets of Tehran in protest of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection as president. His landslide victory insinuated fraud and left outraged citizens demanding, Where is my vote? As protests escalated, the opposition massacred these crowds. Citizens were randomly and methodically killed or captured. Nasrin was living in Tehran while…

Patrice was born in Cameroon, the middle child of seven and everything that connotes. Patrice’s father worried about his son. “You’re not my father!” Patrice was known to scream. “I’m going to run away. I’m going to leave!” And so one day, when Patrice was ten, his father took him out alone. They sat down…

“Damn gondola,” Iñaki wrote on the postcard he sent his girlfriend from Rome, six years after the gondola ride that changed her life forever. “The problem is,” Rolande confessed, “It might have been ‘blessed gondola’ after all.” A long series of mixed fortunes and misfortunes led Rolande from her hometown of Douala, Cameroon to Italy…

Sometimes, all you know his how the story ends. “I know that I will die with my feet on my soil and be buried in a white kafn, but many things must come before,” said Rachid, a Moroccan immigrant who has lived in Spain for eleven years. Rachid comes from a large family in Tangier,…

At 27 years old, Malick, a native of Gambia living in Senegal, set out for the Canary Islands on a creaky wooden boat with 113 people. There were days when waves slammed across the boat, when storms shook their vessel and their spirits; days when Malick did nothing but pray, days when he thought he…