The decision to leave was not a single thunderclap but a slow, gathering storm. In my heart, Nigeria was home, the soil that knew my ancestors, the air that carried the scent of rain and cooking fires. But hope had become a scarce commodity, a currency I no longer possessed. Europe, a word spoken in hushed, reverent tones, was the new promised land. And Libya was the door. I knew the journey to that door was through the fire, through the endless, unforgiving sands of the Sahara.
It began in Kano, a city humming with the chaos of a thousand departures. I paid the smugglers with the sum of my family's savings, a bundle of naira notes that felt too light for the weight of the life I was buying. We were herded into the back of a battered Toyota Hilux, packed so tightly our shoulders and knees became a single, shifting puzzle of humanity. For a time, the familiar landscape of Nigeria scrolled past—the green fading to brown, the trees shrinking into stubborn shrubs. Then, one morning, I woke to a world made only of sand and sky.
The Sahara. It is not silent, as I had imagined. It has a voice—the constant, whispering hiss of the wind, a sound that gets into your soul and scrapes it raw. The sun was not a friend; it was a merciless, white-hot eye in the vast blue sky, and there was no hiding from its gaze. We had one water bottle each, and we learned to sip it not for thirst, but for survival, a few precious drops to wet a tongue that felt like sandpaper.
Days bled into nights. The truck became our world. We shared stories in fragments, our voices hoarse from the dust. There was a boy from Benin City who dreamed of being a footballer, a woman who hummed lullabies to a child that was only a memory. We were strangers, but the desert forged a strange and powerful bond between us. We were a family of ghosts, haunting the wasteland, our only purpose to keep moving forward.
There were times when I thought the desert would claim me. I saw mirages—shimmering lakes that dissolved into heat-haze, phantom cities on the horizon. I saw the real ghosts, too: the skeletal remains of trucks like our own, half-buried in the sand, grim monuments to journeys that had ended. In those moments, I would close my eyes and think of my mother's face, of the promise I had made to myself. It was a tiny flicker of a candle in a vast, dark room, but it was enough to keep me going.
After what felt like an eternity, we saw it. Not a mirage this time, but the faint, hazy outline of buildings. Libya. The feeling was not the explosion of joy I had anticipated. It was a quiet, trembling relief that settled deep in my bones. We had crossed the ocean of sand. We had survived.
As I stepped onto the soil of a new country, the dust of the Sahara still clinging to my skin and clothes, I was not the same person who had left Nigeria. The desert had taken a part of me, but it had also forged a new one. A person who understood the true meaning of thirst, of hope, of the will to simply endure. The journey was over, but I knew, standing there under a foreign sky, that my story was just beginning.