Solomon has a simple ambition: “I would like to know what life is.” The 15-year-old has faced so much horror that he has spent his entire childhood just surviving.
Now for the first time in years he is safe. He is one of the latest refugees to arrive in Italy, desperate, poor, and traumatised after fleeing a life of incomprehensible brutality.
More than 5,000 unaccompanied children have arrived by sea at Italy’s southern border already this year. By the end of 2015 Solomon and his young friends are expected to push that number to 15,000.
The Italian authorities and a coalition of charities including Save the Children are trying to provide for these vulnerable young people, but the numbers are overwhelming. Despite arriving on European soil, the children are easy prey for people smugglers, pimps, drug dealers and the Mafia.
But for Solomon nothing could be worse than the life he left behind in Africa. He wants to make Italy his permanent home. “They are nice people, wonderful people who value life. They know what life is.”
Solomon did not have a choice but to flee his home town in northern Nigeria at the age of 12. One Sunday morning a group he believes to be Boko Haram stormed into his house and demanded that his Christian father convert to Islam. He watched from behind a window as his father refused.
Drawing his fingers across his throat, Solomon said quietly: “They took my older brother, tied his legs and hands and slaughtered him like a goat.
“My dad was crying. They started cutting my father with a dagger.” From his hiding place Solomon watched the group go on to kill his father and another brother. His mother, who is deaf and dumb, gestured to him to run away. He jumped out of a window and has not seen any of his family since.
Hiding in a truck full of sheep he travelled by road to Niger where he begged on the streets and washed clothes for three weeks. He met a man who persuaded him that Libya was better than Niger and arranged a place on a truck full of migrants on a treacherous journey across the Sahara.
When he arrived in Libya the horrors intensified. In a story all too familiar to Save the Children staff, who work with migrants arriving from the war-torn country every day, Solomon said he was “arrested” by an unknown group and imprisoned in a room for two years. “They beat me day and night,” he said. They hung him upside down, put chains on his feet and flogged him with a pipe.
Because he had been carrying a Bible his tormentors tried to crucify him. “It was the worst two years. I was not myself,” he said, pointing to scars on his arms. “People lost their minds. I lost my mind. My brain was not normal.”
To add to his humiliation his food was thrown on the floor and he had to eat “like a dog” on his hands and knees while the men patted his head and beat his body.
He was eventually “sold” to a work camp. He spent four months carrying blocks, washing cars and being beaten when he did not make enough money for his “owner”.
One night the camp was raided and in the chaos he and other migrants ran for their lives. It was 2am and people were being shot around him.
“Many of us fled to the sea. I saw a boat going to Italy, I didn’t have an idea what Italy was. I prayed to my God because I believe in God.”
HE said someone lifted him onto the overcrowded boat, which set out onto the vast sea cemetery of the Mediterranean with no food or water for two days. “It was just between me and God then,” he said.
On April 15 this year his boat was rescued and he was taken to the Italian island of Lampedusa and finally to Sicily. He now lives in a temporary reception centre for child migrants run by the Italian authorities in Messina, the third largest city in Sicily, while awaiting a precious place in an oversubscribed children’s home.
The centre’s child psychologist Anna Lisa Pino said it was not unusual to hear such brutal stories from children arriving via Libya. To avoid making them relive their raw experiences immediately, she asks them to answer yes or no to a series of questions: have you been imprisoned? Have you been physically abused? Have you been sexually abused? Have you witnessed a homicide?
Many of the 182 boys who live at the Centro Ahmed experience bad dreams, recurring negative thoughts and anxiety. Those with more serious problems such as flashbacks and hearing voices are fast-tracked for psychological help to the nearby hospital.
Ms Pino said: “They haven’t had a chance to live an adolescence. Teenagers in Italy in general have a free spiritedness. They don’t think about the future. But these teenagers think about the future every day. They grow up straight away.”
Some of the children have seen such abominable violence they may never fully recover, she said.
That trauma can surface in startling ways. In a class run by Save the Children, which provides activities for the boys at the centre, a group of 13 to 17-year-olds were asked to draw the things that are most important to them from their home country.
The activity was designed to restore their sense of identity. But many of the boys — who arrived by sea in the past few weeks — ignored the brief and drew boats crowded with people on turbulent seas instead.
Psychologists from Save the Children also work with children as soon as they step off boats at Sicilian ports. They create “child-friendly spaces” with toys and games at the dock while their parents are processed by the Italian authorities.
Gloria Vitaioli assesses children for signs of trauma as they play. Speaking from the port Augusta in Sicily she told the Standard she was concerned about an eight-month-old girl from Ivory Coast who had just arrived from Libya with her mother.
She was extremely wary of adults and despite her hunger was throwing away food she was offered. Save the Children’s “cultural mediators” also work with teenagers at ports who are not with their parents.
They show them maps of where in the world they are, give them legal advice and try to make the teenagers trust them rather than the people smugglers who are giving them different information.
Working on the front line at the ports, the team lobbies the Italian authorities to place the unaccompanied children into specialist children’s reception centres such as Centro Ahmed, rather than adult centres. Across the country there are just 16 children’s reception centres run by the Italian authorities.
If they are lucky, teenagers stay for about three months before going into a children’s home from where they can apply for asylum. In Messina the locals appear to have taken the children at Centro Ahmed to their hearts. When it opened in November people living in the building opposite hung a huge banner with a drawing of a heart and “welcome” written in English. Perhaps in this part of Sicily, the front line of Europe’s battle with immigration, it is harder to view migrants as an abstract concept. Here they have a human face, like that of Solomon.
He plans to go to school and find a job. But at the moment, while his life is still in limbo, he loves simply staying in the safety of the room he shares with eight other boys and talking to them. “We say, ‘Wow. How did you cross the sea? How did you make it? How was your life?’ We start talking, we have many ideas. Sometimes we will start crying.”
Solomon’s name has been changed