A few days later, Doaa told her mother that she had decided to go to Europe with Bassem. Hanaa was devastated at the thought of Doaa’s making the difficult, dangerous journey, but understood that they felt this was their only shot at a better life. But just thinking about Doaa’s being crammed on a boat with hundreds of other refugees horrified Hanaa. However, she knew that Doaa, having made her decision, would be adamant about carrying it out. “Either you let me go to Europe, or you can send me back to Syria,” Doaa told her mother the first time Hanaa protested. She looked at her determined daughter, now nineteen years old and an engaged woman, and knew that she couldn’t stop her.
That year already, over two thousand refugees and migrants had lost their lives attempting to sail to Europe, and it was only the beginning of August. Late summer and early fall, when the seas were relatively calm and the weather warm, was peak season for refugees to sail across the Mediterranean. More lives would inevitably be lost at sea. Worldwide wars, conflict, and persecution had forced more people to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere than at any other time since people began keeping track of the displacements. By the end of 2014, UNHCR would record close to 60 million forcibly displaced people, 8 million more than in the previous year. Half of those were children. Every day that year, on average, 42,500 people became refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced, a fourfold increase in just four years.
The chief reason for the massive increase in refugees was the war in Syria. With refugee populations swelling into the millions in neighboring countries, and with little opportunity to work and educate their children, more and more people were risking their lives on dangerous journeys to reach a better life in Europe. People fleeing directly from the relentless violence in Syria found criminal agents in their home cities who not only offered to smuggle them across the border, but, for the right price, across the sea to the promised land they would supposedly find in Europe.
The lucrative business of smuggling people away from the wars and poverty of Africa had quickly expanded from Libya to meet the growing demand from Syrians and Palestinians for a sea route from Egypt.
The smugglers were not difficult to find through word of mouth in refugee neighborhoods or on Facebook, where they advertised what looked like vacation packages on luxury yachts. Two tickets to Europe would cost Bassem and Doaa $5,000, with $2,500 to be paid up front, and the rest being paid if they made it safely to Italy. The smuggler Bassem found was a Syrian middleman using a fake name who was known in the community as the go-to front man. He told Bassem that he could sell him passage on a safe ocean liner and that the journey would take no longer than a few days.
As the day to leave approached, Doaa began to have a sense of foreboding about the trip. One day as she and Bassem were at their favorite café, talking about the smugglers’ promises of safe passage, she shared her fears with him. She told him she’d had a premonition that the boat would sink.
“You worry too much, Dodo,” Bassem admonished her. “I have just as strong a feeling that it will be fine.” But he wouldn’t tell her about his own dark fears. Bassem always wanted to be strong for her, and that meant keeping his concerns to himself.
Bassem didn’t have enough money left in his savings to pay for the trip, and the Al Zamel family had no extra cash at all. To come up with the money, Doaa sold the gold bracelets and necklace Bassem had bought her for their engagement, and the laptop he had given her as a gift. Hanaa also sold some of her jewelry to pitch in, reluctant to see the pieces go, but wanting to invest in her daughter’s future and willing to pay extra for a safe boat. Bassem’s family in Syria also wired him $200 to help out, and all this added up to $2,500, enough for the down payment plus 500 euros to start up in Europe. They had no idea how they would come up with the rest, but figured that once they were there, they could borrow and work to pay off their debt. Bassem paid the smuggler and was told to wait for a call.