Patricia is sobbing by phone.
On a boxes, the Tunisian police arrived at their camp this morning to tell her the other refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants who lived rough in the olive fields outside Sfax, a coastal city in Tunisia, who had to leave.
They cool them 48 hours.
The Police did not tell them where to go, only that they could not move to any of the approximately 15 camps that have grown out of the city police first expelled their refugee population in September 2023.
Patricia, a nurse, had legs working for months since her improvised clinic at kilometer 33, named, like all temporary settlement outside Sfax, for her distance from the city.
Now he does not know where she, or the old man, the sick or the infant children and mothers who congregate around her clinic, Iran. No one has illusions about what will happen at the end of the deadline.
Other camps swept in the three -week police operation to clear the olive fields that have been demolished with heavy and burned equipment. Any person who resisted has been arrested.
“I don’t know what I will do,” she says. “I don’t know where I will go.”
Patricia and others expected their camp to be safe. The other place, or “interested parties”, which resolve disputes between the residents of the camp, had contacted security officials, imploring them forgive the relatively quiet kilometer 33.
It has worked.
Now, you must wait for help or the arrival of the police.
A few months ago, he asked the International Migration Organization (IIM) to go home to Sierra Leone.
She is still waiting for an answer.
Life as a midwife
Speaking to Al Jazeera a few days before, in the midst of the clamor of his clinic, Patricia had described wanting to be a nurse, since she was a girl who lived with her parents and her younger sister in the Makei in the northern Sierra Leone.
He remembered his father, a driver of a mobile phone network, taking it to trips from the family village, where he would look that other children lived.
“It would take water and medicine to children and tell them how important their medicine was to take,” he said.
“There was a nurse there, Aisha, that would help.
Patricia described as a nurse and finally decided to focus on midwifery.
“I am still a nurse here. I have my license with me,” he said, describing how he carries his qualifications with her to accumulate nearby pharmacies so that medications were treating others in the settlement.
“My dad was so happy when I graduated [in 2020]. He thought everything was going well. I especially wanted to be a midwife. I liked deliveries and work with children, “he said.
However, Patricia’s world ended on April 22, 2022, when her father had a car accident.
Without the funds to pay his treatment, the hospital where Patricia had worked for years refused to treat him, simply offering him a bed where, a few days later, he died.
Walking for days without water
A friend’s phone call after her father’s death changed the course of her life.
The unidentified man, since his family’s village, had made the trip through Tunisia to Europe seven years ago and ready to help.
Patricia recalled the conversation. “Hey, he said:” You have nothing, how can you survive? “And he asked me if I would like to follow this trip [to Europe]. I said, I have no money, and he said it was fine. I would pay the payment, but I could not fly. I would have to take transport and walk. “
Finding transport to take Patricia through Guinea and Malí was simple. But in Algeria, she had to walk.
“Sometimes we walked for days, we didn’t have water. I saw people at that. Sometimes my friend called me and gave me courage. He said:” You have to continue. “But it was very difficult.”
Potal, in April 2024, the young woman who had never left her country of origin crossed Tunisia and with the smugglers, or “Bogan”, who touched her at kilometer 33, then three failed crosses to Europe and, now, total uncertainty.
“[When I arrived] They said we’ll leave tomorrow, “he recalls.” I looked around and saw all people without food or refuge, and I thought, if they can do it, I can do it for one night. “
But “then [a smuggler] He brought the plastic [to set up a shelter] And I thought, why do we need this if it’s just for one night? “
“The next day, he said that the weather was bad … every time, there was an excuse.”
Patricia and her friend made more calls, and more smugglers contacted. In June, little months after arriving, he tried the first of the three failed crosses to Europe.
The third, last month after a second attempt in October, saw it and others to reach international waters, only to be removed by the Tunisian security forces and thrown without phones, money or addresses, in the desert.
“We were there for 16 days. I felt how to die. There were no rescue signs.
“Around us there were bad people; the police, the tunisian mafia [robbers who attacked, hoping they had something to steal]”She says.
There will be no fourth cross, she says.
Uncle ‘how they respected human rights’
Through their time in Tunisia, the authorities have harassed people who live in camps outside SFAX.
Now, according to reports, under the personal direction of President Kais Saied, they have promised to clarify them all, justifying it as a response to the complaints of Tunisian farmers that they cannot access their olive trees.
Announcing the program in early April, a national guard spokesman said that the camps in the areas of Al-Amra and Jebeniana, north of Sfax, had already cleared “peacefully”, with the support of Red Crum, the Ministry of Health and the civist.
They said that around 4,000 people of various nationalities had left a camp, with an un specified number “dispersed in the countryside” and the health authorities took over pregnant and sick women.
However, none of the refugees that Al Jazeera spoke after the operation knew of any help for vulnerable.
The Interior Ministry of Tunisia, which covers both the Police and the National Guard, has not yet responded to the request for comments from Al Jazeera.
“[Authorities are] Trying to frame his last operation, which was aggression for a propaganda campaign, such as … supposedly respecting human rights, “said Romdhane Ben Amor, of the Tunisian forum of Economic and Social Rights (FTDES).
“It is not clear how human rights are respected with excavators, heavy machinery and actions such as burning the small fabric or plastic tents of migrants,” he said.
Unknown destiny
The current location of many of the people expelled from the camps is still an uncle.
Al Jazeera spoke with some who say they are still wandering through the olive fields, hidden from the police.
Ben Amor suspects that others have been transported to the border with Algeria and abandoned in the desert, something that has happened before.
The question of where these people may have finished, or where Patricia can go, has not been raised by the national press, which focuses more on what Ben Amor describes as “propaganda” that justifies excavation camps.
In statements to a radio station earlier this month, the member of the Parliament Tarek Mahdi channeled the president’s claims that Tunisia was in “imminent danger”, made in February 2023, since “the births between the migrant waves reached 6,000 births.”
Patricia, on the other hand, just wants to know where she and her patients will sleep in two nights.
He cannot face his trip to Europe, and officials have not yet contacted her to return home.
“Why do they want to hurt us?” She asked. “We are also human.
“Everything that is different is the color of our skin.”