Imagine the situation
You are a refugee from war in your homeland. Your mother sold her body to raise the money to send you and your brother out of the country to the ‘safety’ of another land where you live with your uncle, a man who loathes his sister for what she’s had to do to keep her children alive.
You’re young, pretty and poor and the only way to get your residency paperwork renewed is to go to your ‘sponsor’ who holds the power of life or death (residency or deportation) over you and your brother. He tells you that the fee for processing the application is equivalent to 4 months of your uncle’s salary but he thinks that you should pay. You tell him you have no money and he says that you have something that’s ‘worth’ that much. He assaults you and you can’t sit down for days. Your uncle takes your brother and moves away leaving you homeless. You get a job in a café where the owner sells you to one of his customers, a fat ugly man who has sex with you in the back room of the building. You turn to sniffing glue and drinking perfume to escape the pain in your body and the sadness in your heart.
You are from Eritrea, sent to live in Saudi Arabia and you are a fifteen year old boy.
If this is ‘sanctuary’ what does hell look like?
