How I Ended Up a Modern Slave in Libya

My father died when I was eight.

After that, his family vanished — as if grief had erased them from the map. My mother, a woman carved thin by sorrow and survival, became our entire world. We were six children — two brothers ahead of me, three sisters behind — and every meal, every school fee, every stitch of clothing was wrestled from poverty’s clenched fist.

I learned early that love doesn’t feed hunger. So after school, I hawked roasted groundnuts and bottled water on the dusty streets, my small hands trembling not from exhaustion, but from fear — fear that if I stopped, my siblings would go to bed with empty stomachs.

When I began menstruating, there were no pads. No money for them. So I cut strips from my mother’s old tarpaulin — the kind used to cover market goods — and folded them into crude, leaking shields. I walked to school with blood seeping through my skirt, praying no one would notice. No one ever did. Not because I was invisible — but because the world had already decided I didn’t matter.

In SS1, my English teacher — a man with a gentle voice and eyes that never smiled — took notice of my poor grades. My mother, desperate for me to pass WASSCE, handed me over to him like a sacrifice. “He’ll help you,” she said. “He’s kind.” She didn’t know kindness could wear the mask of power.

He began with extra lessons. Then came the closed doors. Then the silence. Then the pain.

It happened again. And again. And again.

Four times I became pregnant. Four times I was taken to a back-alley clinic where a woman with tired hands and no anesthesia made me bleed into a bucket. I never told my mother. How could I? She was already carrying the weight of four children, a dead husband, and a life that had broken her before her time. I carried my shame alone — a secret stitched into my bones.

When I finally sat for WASSCE, I passed — barely. But I passed.

Six years after my father’s death, a woman appeared at our door.

She was my father’s sister — Auntie Ifeoma — returned from Europe after more than a decade. She had searched for us, they said. Traveled across towns, asked strangers, followed whispers. When she saw me — thin, quiet, eyes too old for my face — she didn’t cry. She took my hand.

“I’m taking you to Europe,” she said. “I’ll pay for your education. You’ll have a future.”

I believed her.

I believed it was my escape.

Not just from poverty — but from the shame that clung to me like a second skin. From the man who called it “teaching.” From the silence that had become my mother’s only language.

I packed one bag. Kissed my mother goodbye. Told her I’d send for her soon.

She smiled through tears and whispered, “Don’t forget us.”

I didn’t.

But I didn’t know then — as the plane lifted above the clouds, as Auntie Ifeoma smiled with too-white teeth and handed me a phone with a new number — that I was trading one cage for another.

Europe wasn’t waiting.

Libya was.

And what came after…  
…is a story I still can’t bring myself to tell out loud.

*To be continued…*