Image source: BBC
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A great tragedy befell the people of the village of Al-Sharif, affiliated with the Biba district of Beni Suef Governorate in Upper Egypt. Dozens of the people of the Egyptian village died as a result of Storm Daniel in Libya, while dozens of others are still missing.
The people of the village, which is about 160 kilometers from the Egyptian capital, Cairo, gathered on Wednesday morning to receive the bodies of 74 of their young men after their arrival from the Libyan city of Derna.
People lined up on both sides of the Egyptian village, while ambulances made their way to the cemeteries in a solemn funeral procession, where the bodies were buried.
The ages of those Egyptians who died as a result of Storm Daniel in Libya ranged between 18 and 30 years old.
There were mourning pavilions, most of whom were siblings, cousins, or relatives. There is almost no house without a dead person.
Image source: BBC
Amidst sadness, wailing, and faces on the faces of the village residents, we wandered from one house to another.
Poverty appears on the people of the village, where hundreds of young people work in Libya as construction workers, most of whom immigrated illegally for a better life and a secure future.
Sadness is one
Image source: BBC
One family lost about 16 of its children, including siblings and cousins. Jumaa Al-Sayyed Al-Dabaa sat mourning his three sons, Mahmoud, Ahmed, and Sayed, who died as a result of Storm Daniel and the subsequent floods. The three traveled illegally to Libya, and were working in the construction field, and the grieving father wishes he had not helped his children collect money to travel.
In a nearby house, families gathered to mourn Shaarawi Rashad and his wife, Nawras, who lost three of their children as a result of the natural disaster in Libya, leaving only a fourth son, who is 7 years old, left behind.
The three sons, Rashad, Muhammad, and Ahmed, belong to the same “hyena” family. Nawras says that she blames poverty and difficult living conditions that prompted her children to travel, and she wishes that they had obtained job opportunities in Egypt without having to emigrate.
The eldest son was preparing for his wedding in two months, and he and his brothers traveled to collect the wedding expenses. The mother said, while fighting back her tears, that her children had all died, leaving only her to grieve.
The father says, with signs of shock visible on his face, “The death of my children broke my back. They were my support and help in this world.”
Shaarawi believes that the Egyptian authorities did not intervene to check on the Egyptians there or even to preserve their bodies, which, according to him, were in land customs between Egypt and Libya without refrigerators to preserve them.
Image source: BBC
“They were buried like sows in the fields.”
In a simple house, Fatima Muhammad sat crying for her three children, Mahmoud, Ahmed, and Abdul Rahman, who died as a result of the Derna disaster. They are all in their twenties and have been working in Libya for periods ranging from months to three years, and the eldest of them, Mahmoud, was suffering from a heart disease.
Her children went to Libya in different ways, by sea and land illegally or by air legally, and their travel cost between 500 and a thousand dollars for each of them.
The fifty-year-old woman lost her husband three years ago, and the departure of her children exacerbated her wounds. Fatima says that she did not believe the news of her children’s death until she received their bodies and buried them next to each other, like crops in the fields, as she describes.
The three children left, leaving five grandchildren and their wives. Fatima cries and screams, unable to believe what happened. Then she pulls herself together and expresses her intention to raise her five grandchildren and take care of their young mothers. She has no source of livelihood other than working on agricultural lands that she rents from their owners.
Image source: BBC
Missing people, no news of them
Ashour Nasr’s situation is not much different from the rest of the village’s people. The fifty-year-old man is suffering from anxiety after there was no news of his son, who was working in the Libyan city of Derna.
The son sent a WhatsApp message to his father on Tuesday, before losing contact with him.
Nasr says that his son traveled like many others in order to collect the costs of a license to build a house for himself, in light of the high cost of a government license to build a house and then get married.
Mrs. Raya Faisal is also still waiting for any news about her two sons, Ahmed and Mohammed, who are missing in Libya. Raya says that she prays to God that they are alive, as they are her whole life, and she does not know what would happen to her if she received news of their death. She says that she does not She finds someone to help her to ask about them in Libyan hospitals, and asks the Egyptian government to send officials to search for the missing people.
There is no official statistics on the number of Egyptians in Libya, but the International Organization for Migration estimates the percentage of Egyptians working in Libya at 21% of the total foreign workers in Libya.
2023-09-14 02:52:24
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