Goodbye,
my child

Samuel Kabamba’s mother Veronique applied for visas several times to treat Samuel’s heart problems, as well as her own cancer, in Europe.

The applications were denied. Veronique boarded a boat with Samuel from Tangier, Morocco. Both drowned in the Strait of Gibraltar on January 14, 2017. Samuel’s body floated to the Spanish coast, and Veronique’s to the Algerian coast.

They left behind Samuel’s father, Aimé Kabamba, in Congo. The Spanish Embassy refused to assist Aimé, but after efforts from various social organizations, the father was able to travel to identify and bury Samuel. Samuel was buried here in Barbate, Spain due to the prohibitive costs of repatriating the body from Europe.

Halikari Dhaker died after six months in his mother’s womb as she crossed the border between Poland and Belarus.

His mother, Avin Irfan Zahir, was a Kurdish woman from Iraq. She was found by volunteers unconscious in the forest, and hospitalized for hypothermia and acidosis, a starvation-related condition that can lead to a fetus’s death. The child was delivered in the hospital as a stillborn.

In the hospital, she “could not stop screaming,” Polish volunteer Piotr Matecki told Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. Avin died in the hospital at age 38, leaving behind five children and their father.

Youssef Ali Kanneh was in the arms of his seventeen-year-old mother from Guinea as they boarded a boat from Libya.

Youssef was one of six people to drown in the shipwreck on November 11, 2020. Youssef’s mother was held in the reception center of Lampedusa, and attended her son’s funeral.

Italian journalist Mauro Seminara wrote of the funeral, “When it was time to bury the small coffin, in that bare earth that the Lampedusa cemetery could offer, the mother exploded in deafening pain.”

In November 2017, Madina Hussiny and her family crossed the border from Serbia to seek asylum from Afghanistan when Croatian police ordered them to turn around and return, a practice that violates the European Convention on Human Rights.

That night, as they walked in the dark, exhausted, Madina was hit by a train. After Madina was taken by an ambulance, the family was left with no confirmation of where she was taken or whether she was alive, or a number to contact. Support groups including MSF and HelpRefugees helped them track their daughter.

When Madina's body was returned to them three days later, the Serbian police ordered the family to bury her immediately, without paperwork, and were given four bottles of water to wash the body per Muslim funerary rites.

Madina’s father, Rashid, said to the police, “I would rather you bury us all here than make us bury her like this,” he told The Guardian. “I will carry it in my heart for ever, that I did not give her a proper ceremony.”

Little is known about Mosavi Mahya, except that she was a two-year-old child, and her final resting place is in Agios Pantaleimos cemetery on the Greek island of Lesvos.

Four-year-old Diyana Nazar's family traveled from Afghanistan to visit her grave a year and a half after her death in 2015. They could not afford the cost of repatriating her body to Afghanistan, but bought a stone marker for her resting place in Doğançay Cemetery. This hilltop cemetery in Izmir, Turkey, is estimated to house over 400 people who have lost their lives attempting to cross to the Greek islands.