Hey folks,
I wanted to highlight a couple of key moments from my recent story for The Atlantic, "Purgatory at sea.” Firstly, I’ll mention that you can now listen to a reading of the story below.
In the piece, I mention a Red Cross officer named John Ogah. Because of growing violence in Nigeria from terrorist groups like Boko Haram, Ogah fled to Tripoli in 2013, where he shared an apartment with 15 other Nigerians and found work as a welder. One night, a group of armed Libyan men broke into the apartment to rob it, and in the process shot and killed one of Ogah’s apartment mates. This sort of thing was not out of the ordinary for migrants in Libya, Ogah told me. “Rapes and killings all the time,” he said.
Ogah decided to flee again, this time to Europe. He found a trafficker, covertly arranged passage across the Mediterranean on a boat carrying 300 other migrants, and, in May 2014, came ashore in Italy. He made his way to Rome, where he spent months living on the streets. To earn money, he begged and carried people’s bags outside a supermarket in Rome’s Centocelle neighborhood.
One day, a man wearing a motorcycle helmet and carrying a large meat cleaver pushed past him into the grocery store. The man walked to the counter and demanded money from the register. Security footage from the store shows Ogah watching the incident. When the thief attempted to leave on his scooter, Ogah grabbed him, wrested the cleaver from him, and held him down until police arrived.
Here is a video of rather dramatic footage of his heroic intervention.
Classical pianist Francesco Taskayali was also featured in the story as he worked as a Red Cross volunteer on these quarantine vessels. Word had spread among the Red Cross workers that a renowned pianist was in their midst, and several of them asked him to play a concert for them. He agreed, but asked if he could do a concert for the migrants too. The logistics were tough, but eventually he persuaded the ship’s captain to allow him to play for migrants on the upper deck during some of their outdoor smoke breaks. The concerts were inspiring.
Here is a collage of moments when Taskayali played for the migrants on-board the quarantine ships.