'I don't want to be a criminal': Migrant teens hope for better life after rough passage from Africa

It's a bright, windswept afternoon in the Sicilian port of Pozzallo. Across the wide, empty expanse of asphalt, a few teenage African boys stand hesitantly at the edge of the dock, as nearby, some Italian bathers lounge in the sun.

The kids on the dock are curious, but cautious. One speaks a little English, enough to say they are from the same village in Eritrea, that together, without parents, they crossed the Sudanese desert to Libya, where for about $4,000 each, they boarded a crowded boat to Italy. They show ID bracelets and photocopied paper.

A few days earlier, they were among hundreds of exhausted people who stepped off Italian rescue ships at Pozzallo and are being kept in the migrant holding centre behind a high gate in a restricted area of the port.

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But on this hot summer day, the kids in the centre have been given an afternoon pass. Along the desolate boardwalk, dozens of them stroll, some stopping at the pay phone to unfold worn slips of paper with the numbers of relatives in Europe on them and try to call.

One group of boys stands beside a scruffy patch of grass watching Italian kids play soccer. Among them are Alieu and Alaijie, both 17.

Alieu says he left home in Gambia because his parents "were suffering to pay my school fees and there is no future for the youth in Gambia."

He sold his cellphone for money and slipped away early one morning. His parents would have stopped him leaving, he says.

He worked his way across central Africa to Libya to pay traffickers for transport on the back of a crammed pickup truck.

"It's very dangerous. In Libya, there are a lot of Arab people with guns and they will shoot you without you doing nothing. They would break your leg. They are terrible."

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He paid $150 to traffickers for a spot on a boat to Libya. Before he left, they kept him in an overcrowded compound.

"More than 600 people in one camp. Sometimes you went for two or three days working, without food. Even to take bath is a problem. To change clothes is a problem. You will wear the same clothes for three to four months."

After his ordeal in Libya, he told his brother not to come. He wants to study, but more than anything, he wants to free his mind.

"My mind is full of problems, full of thinking. Of my mother who is suffering. She wakes up early in the morning to go to the market to sell [vegetables] to have money to feed. If I have a job here, anything I have, I will send it to my mum."

'Let me go'

Alaijie, whois also from Gambia, left home without telling his family, too.

"My education is not too far, Grade 1 to 6.If you want to go further, you must pay school fees. All my friends have education and when I see them I feel sorry for myself because I don't have it.

"I have six sisters I lost my father, but my mother is still there. I sell firewood for little money. I say, let me go and do something and develop my future. So I come to Europe."

In Libya, he worked for six months, carrying concrete blocks, until he was abducted.

"I was on the road to go to work and a car took me inside the camp and many black men were there and they were suffering. In the morning time, small food, evening time small food, afternoon time, small food. The two toilets are there, more than 1,000 people in this one prison. All the time they are beating you, beating you. If you are sick, no medicine."

Here in Europe, he is eager to work to help his family.

"I need clean money in my life. I don't want to be a criminal. I want to share with my family, but since I prepare my journey, I give them nothing. I don't know how they survive. When I call them, my mother says, I'm fine, I'm fine. But I know [it's only so] my mind can steady."

Girls, too, make the trip on their own.

One group of five girls agrees to talk, but say they do not want to be photographed. Only one speaks some English Bhana, a distressed-looking Eritrean with a long, thin face.

Bhana says the group are friends from the same village, sent by their parents across Sudan to take the boat here from Libya.

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When asked about Libya, she shakes her head and looks down. She doesn't want to talk about it. All she says is that they slept in the Sahara for two weeks and the Libyans hit them.

Their parents paid $3,600 US via wire transfer per girl for a spot on the boat. It left in May with 700 people on board, towing a second boat with 400 people. The second boat capsized and Bhana and her friends watched as nearly everyone drowned.

When asked if she is glad to have made it to Italy, she says flatly, "I don't like Italy."

And the migrant camp here? Is it OK? She frowns. "The camp is bad."

"Stressed," she says, several times. The police and all the people staying there stress her. She just wants to reach her sister in Germany.

A dozen or so centres have been set up for unaccompanied minors who make it to Italy. The Casa della Cultura centre, run by Mediterranean Hope, a project of the Protestant Church Association of Italy, is one.

Iollo, a shy, skinny 17-year-old from Guinea, has a gaze that betrays deep hurt. His father, he says, abandoned his mother and brothers when he was young.

As a teen, he went to live with an uncle, who made Iollo skip class to work for him.

"He wouldn't give me enough food and I fell sick."

He lifts up his T-shirt to show a stomach covered with marks. At 16, he escaped from his uncle and crossed Mali to Libya.

In the Libya desert, the pickup had an accident.

"There was no road and the driver got lost and swerved and several of us fell off the back but the truck just kept on going.

"We followed the truck and found it later. It broke down. If it hadn't broken down, it would have left us in the desert to die."

When he reached the central Libyan town of Saba, he was kidnapped with others and held in a compound, where captors forced those held to phone relatives to send money.

'In a bad way'

"I called my grandparents and said I'm in Libya in prison and they said, 'What did we tell you about Libya!' My mother had to send $500.

"I stayed in there three weeks. I was in a bad way because when I fell off the truck, I got burned by the hot sand. But my fellow Africans helped me a lot they cooked food for me."

Later, he says, he and friends were attacked by a rival group of smugglers.

"It was a co-ordinated attack, the men shot at our feet, from all sides we were jumping up and down, they even shot my friend in the leg. If the Arabs see a group of black people near the shore, they attack you. That's how they treat immigrants there."

"I knew that if I didn't get out of there, soon, I was going to die."