The girl from the sea

-Don't go to sleep! Hang in there, Cheikh, they're coming".

The girl's voice sounded both sweet and energetic in that drifting cayuco, in the darkness of the night.

It reminded me of my sister Fatou's when she woke me up in the mornings to go to school. I was often late, but she would not allow me to miss a single day. "School is our salvation," she would repeat to me. You don't know how lucky we are. That the missionaries have opened a school only half an hour's walk from our home is a good fortune that we can't miss.

My poor little sister Fatou, how much she loved me! She took care of me when my mother died and made sure that I lacked nothing by selling fish at the market. She was hacked to death by the same people who later destroyed the school and burned our houses. Then came the drought, the abuse of the companies that monopolized the fishing business, the drop in the price of gold by the smugglers that made the work in the mine unsustainable....

I tried everything to survive and now I see myself here, lost in the middle of the ocean, falling into the trap of death in my attempt to escape from it. After 20 days in this pestilent boat, with no water and no food, almost everyone has died. And I am about to. In fact, I can't wait for this torture to end.

-Cheikh, wake up, they're coming! -The girl shouted at me again, "Cheer up, there are a lot of people praying for you.

With a lot of effort -when you are dehydrated, even fluttering your eyelashes is like a weightlifting exercise-, I was able to open my eyes and see her. What a surprise I got! She was not as young as her voice sounded, and she was holding a child in her arms. She was agitated, nervous. She kept looking at the horizon with concern. I had no idea that she had embarked with us and, besides, her appearance was not that of someone who had just spent more than two weeks without food or drink; but the child's face did look familiar...

Exhaustion overcame me, and just as I was about to close my eyes again, the little one came up to me and touched my lips with his hand. A torrent of cool water seemed to rush suddenly down my throat, my lips and tongue dry as a shoe sole, and at the same time a glow took them out of my sight.

The flash turned out to be coming from the powerful searchlight of the rescue ship that had just found us. Several crew members came down to check on my companions, took me aboard and confirmed that I was the only survivor. What had happened to that mother and child? I had had them by my side only a few minutes before.

Once in the hospital, I asked through the interpreter about that strange couple that helped me to resist. No one could give me an explanation. A doctor told me that it is normal to suffer hallucinations in the state I was in; but one of the nurses took out a kind of prayer card he was wearing around his neck with an image of a woman and her child. "It is a scapular of the Virgin of Carmen," he told me. She is the patroness of the people of the sea who invoke her in times of danger. Maybe it was she who saved you.

I don't know if it was real or a dream, but I do know that, since then, every night I remember those who may be suffering in the middle of a journey like mine. I remember when the girl at sea encouraged me by telling me that there were many people praying for me, and I also join in that cry while thanking her with the words that the nurse taught me and that were the first words I learned in Spanish, singing to her: Hail, Star of the Seas!