16 Saman

Saman. 26 years old. Iraqi Kurdish. | Although he is usually smiling and very friendly, Saman is silent today and his eyes are empty. The previous day, with other migrants, he left the Linière camp around 2 a.m. to take a bus that dropped them off at a motorway rest stop controlled by smugglers. They crouched in the bushes waiting for a truck to be pointed out. Eight of them got into a trailer. The truck went to park somewhere else. There, they waited for thirteen hours; then the truck parked in another parking lot. The driver then shouted at them to come down. This was Saman’s forty-eighth attempt since he arrived in Grande-Synthe ten months ago. Saman shows the keys to the house he lived in with his parents. He didn’t have time to say goodbye to them. He dreams of going back one day and opening the door with these keys.| Grande-Synthe, France 2016