‘It’s a Joy for Me to Bury Them’: A Quest to Honor Migrant Dead

NADOR, Morocco — For months, Boubacar Wann Diallo couldn’t sleep at night time with out leaving a gentle on.

As an occasional volunteer with AlarmPhone, a hotline assist group for folks crossing between Morocco and Europe, he was haunted by the telephone calls he obtained all too typically from determined girls and kids screaming as they have been swallowed by the ocean throughout storms and shipwrecks.

However even that, horrible because it was, was not what disturbed his sleep essentially the most. What gave him the worst nightmares have been the unidentified our bodies that washed up on the seashores round Nador, a metropolis on the Mediterranean coast in northern Morocco, which have been then piled up unclaimed within the native morgue. He vowed to make it his life’s work to see that they obtained correct burials.

“It’s a pleasure for me to bury them,” Mr. Wann Diallo stated lately exterior the doorway to the morgue, which bears a line from the Quran: “To Allah we belong, and to him is our return.”

“I need to give closure to the households,” he stated. “It makes me really feel good. It hurts me when persons are buried with out their kin. I put myself of their place.”

Mr. Wann Diallo, 32, moved from Guinea to Nador in 2013, and within the intervening years he has turn into one of many metropolis’s most recognizable figures, greeted by folks in every single place he goes.

As a migrant himself, he has discovered to navigate the racism and discrimination towards Black sub-Saharans that’s routine in Morocco. He has cultivated shut ties with native officers who’ve welcomed his help in figuring out tons of of unclaimed our bodies.

Nador, simply 9 miles from the Spanish enclave of Melilla, has long been a magnet for undocumented sub-Saharan migrants, attracted by the possibility of gaining entrance to Europe by scaling a fence. In recent years, however, the European Union has given Morocco the means and financial support to reduce clandestine migration, elevating fences and rising patrols at sea. As a outcome, profitable crossings plunged by 50 percent in 2019 from the earlier yr. That, in flip, has pressured folks into taking higher possibilities and, in some instances, to attempt extra harmful crossings.

With the variety of crossings down, fatalities have additionally dropped. However that has not lessened Mr. Wann Diallo’s willpower to determine the useless, giving households information of their family members, nevertheless heartbreaking. “To households, there’s all the time some doubt that the particular person perhaps didn’t die,” he stated. “It’s very onerous to consider and settle for that they’re useless.”

Mr. Wann Diallo, the son of presidency staff, was born in Guéckédou in southern Guinea and grew up within the capital, Conakry. His father, now useless, was married to 4 girls and had 25 kids (seven with Mr. Wann Diallo’s mom, his fourth partner). After incomes a legislation diploma from the Kofi Annan College of Guinea, he began a recording studio that produced artists vital of the federal government.

That introduced him into the sights of the native safety forces, and in 2013, he was pressured to go away the nation for his personal security.

With some financial savings however no particular plan, he headed for Morocco, the place he had heard that he had a good likelihood of discovering work. Beginning in Casablanca, he later joined up with a fellow sub-Saharan whom he met within the Moroccan capital, Rabat, and traveled throughout the nation, lastly touchdown in Nador, although he says he by no means supposed to attempt to get to Europe from there.

He spent a few months tenting out within the forests across the metropolis, the place many sub-Saharan migrants collect earlier than attempting to transfer on. Alarmed by the poverty, illness and infrequently filthy residing circumstances, he started attempting to assist them, discovering work for them on farms so they may earn sufficient to scrape by and getting them medical consideration.

“I generally inform myself that perhaps God despatched me right here like a messiah to assist folks,” he stated. “I do know I’m making my mom proud. Individuals again house inform her about how I helped them.”

He turned a authorized resident and now works full-time as a discipline agent for a native group, Asticude, that helps migrants in transit.

When he’s not accompanying migrants to the physician, the pharmacy, to courtroom or visiting them in jail, he’s busy figuring out our bodies generally so decomposed they’re unrecognizable even to their very own households.

It isn’t a simple process. Step one is to search matches between pictures households ship him and the images of corpses on the morgue. Mr. Wann Diallo seeks assist from consulates and embassies, and in addition from migrants who knew the individuals who have been on the identical boat the day it sank however who’re afraid to converse instantly to the authorities.

If that fails to reveal a match, he turns to Fb teams with dozens of pictures of migrants who’ve gone lacking. His Fb web page is a sort of memorial to his activism, with many postings that keep in mind the useless.

Sitting in his small room crammed with motivational talking books, a pc and audio recording gear for a podcast he hosts on entrepreneurship, Mr. Wann Diallo pulls out one in every of his three telephones (one for private calls, one other for skilled calls and a third for social media).

At present, the social media telephone incorporates pictures that he despatched to the household of a Senegalese-Guinean man whose funeral he lately organized. The person’s physique was discovered within the forest after an nameless name.

The {photograph} reveals his swollen, disfigured face and his physique laid on a crimson sheet and wrapped in a white shroud, following Muslim custom. The useless man’s pregnant spouse didn’t assume it was him however, after some hesitation, his mom lastly concluded that it was her son.

As soon as he makes a constructive identification, Mr. Wann Diallo asks households to grant him energy of lawyer to request authorization to proceed with the burial. Most households willingly comply, as a result of few can afford the price of repatriation. Simply getting the physique to Rabat prices about $1,400. Switch to one other nation prices 1000’s extra.

The native Muslim cemetery is a desolate place, a dusty discipline strewn with dozens of unidentified graves. Our bodies, lots of them nonetheless unidentified regardless of Mr. Wann Diallo’s efforts, lie beneath mounds of rock and filth. Small stones are inscribed with the date of burial, a quantity given by the authorities and the gender of the corpse. Some stones simply learn “physique elements.”

“As soon as I bury, my job is over,” Mr. Wann Diallo stated. “Households typically inform me, ‘We don’t have to pay you something. God will repay what you probably did for us.’”

Mohammed Jalleta runs a mortuary that always helps with these burials for a modest payment that’s picked up generally by the households, however failing that by consulates or embassies, group teams and the town. He met Mr. Wann Diallo three years in the past, they usually have presided over dozens of burials collectively.

“All these folks, they undergo, they drown, they have been simply trying for a higher life they usually gambled with it,” Mr. Jalleta stated. “You may solely really feel sorry for them.”

Mr. Wann Diallo is exceptional for preserving an upbeat demeanor at the same time as he faces his grim process.

Whereas he often avoids getting emotional, there was one case that touched him, of a man who had left Mr. Wann Diallo’s homeland, Guinea, in search of remedy for superior kidney illness and who died in Morocco.

“I attempted the unimaginable for him,” Mr. Wann Diallo says. “I received him a hospital room, medical care, the whole lot. However he got here to Morocco to die.”

He nonetheless retains a small bag with the person’s private results: paperwork, medication, two passports, a driver’s license, toothpaste and a toothbrush. The household, he stated, couldn’t afford to pay for the delivery.