As the sun sets over Lake Turkana, my mother throws flowers into the greenish blue water and remembers my teenage daughter who owns as she tries to arrive in Kenya via a new route used by smugglers.
Senite Mebrev, a Pentecostal Christian Eritrea, who had sought asylum in Kenya three years ago, made a pilgrimage to northwestern Kenya to see the 14-year-old Hiyab lost his life last year.
The girl was traveling with her sister. My sister survived the late night crossing a vast lake where the wind could become powerful.
“If smugglers had told us there was such a large and dangerous lake in Kenya, their daughters would never have come this far,” Senite told the BBC, sitting on the west coastline.
Ms. Senite arrived on a plane in the capital of Kenya Nairobi on a tourist visa with two younger children and fled from religious persecution. However, she did not allow them to travel with their two other daughters as they were old and approaching the age of conscription.
Eritrea is a highly militarized, one-party country, and in many cases national service can last for years and include forced labor.
The teenager begged Kenya to join her, so she consulted her relatives and said she would pay the smugglers to drive the girl out of Eritrea.
The fate of the two girls was brought to the hands of human traffickers and took them on a few weeks’ trip from Eritrea to nearby Ethiopia on roads and feet. Then head south to Kenya to the northeast coast of Lake Turkana, the world’s largest permanent desert lake.
A female smuggler in Kenya confirmed with the BBC that Lake Turkana is increasingly being used as an illegal intersection for immigration.
“We call it the digital route, because it’s so new,” she said.
The trafficker (four times the average monthly salary for Kenyan workers) who earns about $1,500 (£1,130) for each immigrant she goes to and from Kenya, spoke to us on the condition of work in secret locations and anonymity.
For the past 15 years she has been part of a huge smuggling network operating in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa. It mainly drives people fleeing Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia.
As Kenya has stepped up patrols on roads, smugglers are now turning their eyes to Lake Turkana to guide immigrants into the country.
The new route’s “agents” said they received immigrants from the Kenyan fishing village of Lomekwi. There, road transport was organized to take you to Nairobi.
Warning the dangers of traveling on rattle wooden boats, she pleaded with her parents not to allow children to create intersections on their own.
“I don’t say I love the money I earn because as a mother, I can’t be happy to see something bad happening to other women’s children,” she told the BBC.
“I would like to advise if immigrants listen to me. I would like to ask them to stay in their country,” she said.
Osman, an Eritrea immigrant who doesn’t want to give a real name for security reasons, created an intersection at the same time as Hiyab and her sister.
He recalled how the Hiyab boat quickly capsized right in front of him after leaving the fishing village of Irelet as he was heading southwest towards Lomekwi.
“The Hiyab was on the boat in front of us. The motor was not working and was being propelled by strong winds,” he said.
“They were about 300m. [984ft] Seven people died in the water when their boat was overturned. ”
Hiyabu’s sister survived by clung to the sinking boat until another container (also run by smugglers) came to rescue.
Ms. Senite said she blamed smugglers on the deaths and overloaded the boats with more than 20 immigrants.
“The cause of the death was obvious negligence. They put a lot of people in a small boat that couldn’t even carry five people,” she said.
During a visit to the BBC’s Lomeuki, two fishermen said they saw the bodies of migrants floating in a lake that was about 300km (186 miles) long (186 miles) and 50km wide.
“There were about four bodies on the coast, and then a few days later, other bodies appeared,” Brighton Rocara said.
Another fisherman, Joseph Romuria, said he saw the bodies of two men and two women. One of them looked like a teenager.
In June 2024, UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, recorded 345,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in East Africa out of 580,000 people worldwide.
Like Ms. Senite’s family, many flee to avoid military conscription in a country that has been caught up in numerous wars in the area. Additionally, free political and religious activities are not tolerated as governments seek to grasp power tightly.
Mura Belhan, an Eritrea lawyer based in Uganda, told the BBC that the conflict in Ethiopia and Sudan is beginning to make Kenya and Uganda a favourable destination for these migrants.
The female smuggler said in her experience that some of the migrants had settled in Kenya while others believed it was easy to use as a transport point to reach Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa where they could gain refugee status.
Smuggling networks operate in all these countries, handing over immigrants to different “agents” until they reach their final destination.
Her job is to hand over immigrants in transit in Nairobi to agents who “have home” until the next leg of the trip is arranged and paid.
At this stage, each immigrant would likely have paid about $5,000 for his journey to that point.
The BBC saw the room on the block of the flat, which was used as a holding house. Five Eritrea men were locked in the room and had one mattress.
With belongings, immigrants are expected to pay rent and pay for the food. And the smuggler said he knew three men and young women who died hungry as if they had run out of cash.
She said the agents simply disposed of the bodies and called their deaths bad luck.
“Smugglers keep lying to their families saying their people are alive and they keep sending money,” she admitted.
She said female immigrants were often sexually abused or forced to marry male smugglers.
She said she didn’t intend to give up any favorable trade herself, but she felt that others should know what was ahead of them.
It is a bit of comfort for Ms. Senite, who mourns her 14-year-old death, while expressing her relief that her older daughter survives and is unharmed by the smuggler.
“We went through what every Eritrea family is going through,” she said.
“May God heal our land and save us from all this.”
