A young asylum seeker has described his arduous journey to the UK after fleeing his troubled homeland. Melaku was just 12 when he left Ethiopia in 2015 after protests and resistance swept the streets. He endured almost a year of trying to find a new place to call home before ending up in Chichester in 2016.
Melaku, now 21, said: “When I left home, I really didn't think much about it. I thought about survival, just about getting somewhere, what our next meal would be and where we were going to spend the night.” He spent a month in Sudan, three months in Egypt and endured a month’s journey across Libya.
READ MORE: Hailsham: Asylum seeker 'killed himself' in Home Office hotel In Sudan, Melaku and others were held captive due to arguments over money with a human trafficking agency. He finally reached Europe after being lost at sea in the Mediterranean for a week. He was picked up by the Italian Coastguard and put into a camp.
He said: “This camp looked like a concentration camp. Not in the worst way, but I mean, they were trying to isolate people. So they had barbed wire around it because they didn’t want people running around their country.
“I understand that now, but back then it was a bit weird having two to three security guards and a big fence with barbed wire around it. “And then they had big, white shipping containers with a single bed in each one. They gave us three meals a day, but of course, it was always gruel in a bowl.
So for those few days, we felt lik.