4 Nigerian Migrants Survive 14 Days On Ship By Drinking Urine
4 Nigerian Migrants Survive 14 Days On Ship's Rudder, Rescued In Brazil. Watch the video for all the details.
Four Nigerian men were found huddled in a tiny space above a cargo ship’s rudder. They had spent 14 days in that tiny place. The reason? Let me tell you. These men were from Lagos, Nigeria. One of the men was named Ebimene Friday. Since there was Economic hardship, political instability, and crime in Nigeria, he had decided to leave the country. Nigeria is Africa's most populous country has longstanding issues of violence and poverty, and kidnappings are endemic. He had already attempted to flee Nigeria by ship once before but was arrested by authorities there. This time Friday said his journey to leave Nigeria started on June 27, when a fisherman friend rowed him up to the stern of the Liberia-flagged Ken Wave, docked in Lagos, and left him by the rudder. To his surprise, he found three men already there, waiting for the ship to depart. Friday said he was terrified. He had never met his new shipmates and feared they could toss him into the sea at any moment.
Once the ship moved, Friday said the four men made every effort not to be discovered by the ship's crew, who they also worried might offer them a watery grave. To prevent themselves from falling into the water, Friday said the men rigged up a net around the rudder and tied themselves to it with a rope. When he looked down, he said he could see "big fish like whales and sharks." Due to the cramped conditions and the noise of the engine, sleep was rare and risky. The men spent 14 days like that. On the tenth day, they ran out of food and water. They survived another four days, according to their account, by drinking the sea water and their urine.
They traveled 5,600 kilometers and were rescued on the 14th Day. When they were rescued, they were shocked to learn that they have reached Brazil and not Europe. They were rescued by the Brazilian federal police in the southeastern Port of Vitoria. Ebimene Friday and Thankgod Opemipo Matthew Yeye have decided to stay in Brazil and applied for asylum. Yeye, a Pentecostal minister from Lagos state, said his peanut and palm oil farm was destroyed by floods this year, leaving him and his family homeless. He hopes they can now join him in Brazil. Father Paolo Parise, a priest at the Sao Paulo shelter, said he had come across other cases of stowaways, but never one so dangerous. Their journey paid testament to the lengths people will go in search of a new start, he said. "People do unimaginable and deeply dangerous things."
In Nigeria last year, three other Nigerian stowaways survived a similar ordeal on a Maltese-flagged ship’s rudder during an 11-day journey to the Canary Islands, Spain. They eventually sought asylum in Spain.
