Beni left home two years before he finally reached Morocco. By the age of 12, he had lost both of his parents and had no way of taking care of his younger siblings at home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — a nation ripped apart by decades of bloody civil war and political corruption and now struggling under the heavy weight of poverty. “My father was killed in the fighting when I was a boy, but for a while after, my mother and I took care of our family.” His mother worked the small patch of land beside their home, and they sold what little excess they had in the marketplace — just enough to supplement their diet of yams and cassava with some sugar and goat’s milk. “On special occasions, like if someone in the village got married, we ate some goat’s meat, too,” he remembered. Their home was constructed of mud bricks and a thatched roof, but it wasn’t set in a scenic landscape dotted with traditional huts. Instead, Beni describes a village overcrowded with homes, homes overcrowded with people, and struggling crops squeezed in the narrow alleyways between them. The crumbling infrastructure of his community led to failing irrigation and sewage systems. Spoiled harvests and sick residents soon followed. “We had no money for the hospital, no money for doctors or medicine, so we had to watch my mother die at home,” he said one early morning as we walked down the rocky path with empty water jugs in hand. “I tried to busy my little brother and sister with chores outside of the house, so they wouldn’t have to see her suffering.” Tears filled his eyes as he described his mother’s final days. After his mother died, Beni — just 12 years old — struggled to keep his younger siblings alive.

“I had no choice. I could stay at home and watch my little brother and sister starve to death, or I could leave my home and try to find work. First, I traveled to the bigger cities, but I couldn’t find any work, not even in Kinshasa. So, I traveled past my country’s borders. I had never left my village before, and suddenly, I was alone in a foreign country. I walked for days, and I hitched rides on passing trucks. I slept on the streets, and I begged for change. Sometimes, people would leave scraps of food for me, and I would find them at my feet when I woke up. I met many other boys on the streets who had also left their homes to find work. It seemed like no countries had any work to give us, so we kept traveling north. Now we are here at the final border. We have traveled so far, and if you ask any of us, we will tell you the same thing. We will make it to Europe or we will die trying. There is no other way home for us now.­”

In many ways, Beni’s story is a familiar one among African migrants and refugees situated along the southern borders to the European Union. He grew up in a small town, where families had once made their way on subsistence farming. As this way of life became increasingly difficult, women took their staple crops to the local markets to sell or trade, and men began venturing farther beyond the boundaries of their rural communities to seek labor in larger cities.

“When I was young,” explained one migrant from Mali, “mine was a small town full of families. Today, I hear it is a strange town full of women and children. The men have all left to find work.”

Dikembe came from a larger city in the DRC, and he explained how it is not only poverty, but also civil war that has devastated the surrounding villages like the one where Beni was born. For Dikembe, the choice to leave was the only way to avoid forced military inscription. At 18, he couldn’t envision himself becoming a soldier for the army that had killed his father and, as he sees it, ruined his country for future generations.

“The civil war broke out after one leader won the presidency in the Congo’s first democratic election. The former president took his position back, and the people split, some supporting the old leader and some the new. When there is civil war in a country, the citizens all start to take advantage of one another. There was looting everywhere. There were soldiers in the streets. The good people were terrorized by them every day. The state’s military was formed through forced service, because the government was too poor to pay the soldiers, and no man would choose to join. The army was young and inexperienced. They were children. Education was the only way out. If you had a good job, then you were left free to work, and if you had a high school diploma, then you were made an officer. I would have been a simple foot soldier. My mother always wanted better for me, but I couldn’t leave her alone in such a dangerous place. I decided to leave after she grew sick and died. I had no one left at home to protect.”

Thinking about the brother and sister he left behind, Beni grows serious. “I worry a lot about what has become of them.” He left them with a distant cousin, promising as so many departing migrants do that he would repay his cousin richly once he reached European shores. “I will get a good job, and I will send all of my money home to them. Then, my cousin will be happy.”

However, Beni knows that his cousin’s house already had too many hungry children to feed before he added to his burden. And he knows that every day, his siblings are a heavier burden to carry. Standing at a lanky 5 feet 6 inches tall, Beni keeps his black hair closely cropped with Dikembe’s razor blade. His face is round and full, his skin a smooth, deep ebony, his eyes amber and wide in the light. He looks at least two years younger than his 14 years and better suited for beginning middle school in the fall than crossing international borders on his own. Yet, I know from all of my time spent listening to the stories of other migrants who traveled before him that Beni has been aged by his last two years. Extortion and abuse always accompany long journeys like the one he took — paying smugglers to help him cross into Mali or Mauritania, then making the treacherous passage across the Sahara Desert and into Morocco by way of Algeria, where gangs armed with dogs and machetes hide out waiting to attack those who enter.

“Once I have a good job in Europe,” he continued, “I will buy my brother and sister plane tickets, so they won’t have to do the crossing like me. Someday, I will tell them my stories, and they won’t believe them all, but they will be so thankful for me.”

When you have sacrificed everything you have to get to where you are standing, when you have no place to return to, and when the people who you call home are depending on your success for their very survival, the stakes are high. At 14 and 25, Beni and Dikembe speak about their lives like a game of chance. Their pasts toughened them. Their present tortures them. And they hide their fierce determination for a future beneath faces that give way a little too easily to a smile. “We have suffered great things,” Beni said. “But we know that someday the suffering will end.” Standing at the northern look-out point of their camp, his eyes are focused on the waters of the Mediterranean just below. Mainland Spain is a glimmering shore in the distance, and the Spanish enclave of Melilla is a lush green pasture almost reachable past the razor-wire.

THE CROSSING