Back home in Gambia, Amadou Jallow was, at 22, a lover of reggae who had just finished college and had landed a job teaching science in a high school. But Europe beckoned.
In his West African homeland, Mr. Jallow's salary was the equivalent of just 50 euros a month, barely enough for the necessities, he said. And everywhere in his neighborhood in Sere kunda, Gambia's largest city, there was talk of easy money to be made in Europe.
Now he laughs bitterly about all that talk. He lives in a patch of woods here in southern Spain, just outside the village of Palos de la Frontera, with hundreds of other immigrants. They have built their homes out of plastic sheeting and cardboard, unsure if the water they drink from an open pipe is safe. After six years on the continent, Mr.
Jallow is rail thin, and his eyes have a yellow tinge.
"We are not bush people,‖ he said recently as he gathered twigs to start a fire.
"You think you are civilized. But this is how we live here. We suffer here.‖
The political upheaval in Libya in North Africa has opened the way for thousands of new migrants to make their way to Europe across the Mediterranean. But for Mr. Jallow and for many others who arrived before them, often after days at sea without food or water, Europe has offered hardships they never imagined. These days
Mr. Jallow survives on two meals a day, mostly a leaden paste made from flour and oil, which he stirs with a branch. "It keeps the hunger away,‖ he said.
The authorities estimate that there are perhaps 10,000 immigrants living in the woods in the southern Spanish province of Andalusia, a region known for its crops of strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, and there are thousands more migrants in areas that produce olives, oranges and vegetables. Most of them have stories that echo
Mr. Jallow's.
From the road, their encampments look like igloos tucked among the trees. Up close, the squalor is clear. Piles of garbage and flies are everywhere. Old clothes stiff from dirt and rain, hang from branches. "There is everything in there,‖ said Diego
Cañamero, the leader of the farm workers‟ union in Andalusia, which tries to advocate for the men. "You have rats and snakes and mice and fleas.‖
The men in the woods do not call home with the truth, though. They send pictures of themselves posing next to Mercedes cars parked on the street, the kind of pictures that Mr. Jallow says he fell for so many years ago. Now he shakes his head toward his neighbors, who will not talk to reporters. "So many lies,‖ he said. "It is terrible what they are doing. But they are embarrassed.‖
Even now, though, Mr. Jallow will not consider going back to Gambia. "I would prefer to die here,‖ he said. "I cannot go home empty-handed. If I went home, they would be saying, "What have you been doing with yourself, Amadou?‖ They think in
Europe there is money all over.
The immigrants --- virtually all of them are men --- cluster by nationality and look for work on the farms. But Mr. Cañamero says they are offered only the least desirable work, like handling pesticides, and little of it at that. Most have no working papers. Occasionally, the police bring bulldozers to tear down the shelters. But the men, who have usually used their family's life savings to get here, are mostly left alone --- the conditions they live under are an open secret in the nearby villages.
请将在上方英文材料翻译成中文,完成后选择自评: