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While the sun went over Lake Turkana, among other things, a mother and threw flowers in the greenish blue water to remember her teenage daughter who had drowned to reach Kenya via a new route used by people smugglers.
Senait Mebrehtu, a Pentecost Christian Eritrean who had searched asylum three years ago in Kenya, made the pilgrimage to Northwest-Kenia to see where the 14-year-old Hiyab had lost her life last year.
The girl had traveled with her sister, who survived the overhaul over the vast lake, where wind can be powerful.
“If the smugglers told me that there was such a big and dangerous more in Kenya, I wouldn’t let my daughters get that far,” Mrs. Senait said the BBC while she was sitting on the western coastline.
Mrs Senait had arrived by plane in the capital of Kenya, Nairobi, on a tourist visa with her two younger children, who fled religious persecution. But at that time she didn’t have to travel with her two other daughters because they were older and closer to the age of conscription.
Eritrea is a very militarized country with one party – and often the national service can continue for years and can include forced labor.
The teenagers begged to join her in Kenya, so they consult relatives who told her that they would pay smugglers to get the girls from Eritrea.
The fate of the two girls was brought into the hands of human traffickers who brought them one week on the road and foot from Eritrea to the neighboring northern Ethiopia-still to the south to Kenya to the northeastern coast of Lake Turkana, the largest permanent desert lake in the world.
A female smuggler in Kenya confirmed to the BBC that Lake Turkana was increasingly being used as an illegal intersection for the migrants.
“We call it the digital route because it is very new,” she said.
The Trafficker, who earns around $ 1,500 (£ 1,130) for every migrant in which she spoke with us in or via Kenya (four times the average monthly salary of a Kenyan employee), about her work at a secret location and on condition of anonymity.
For the past 15 years she has been part of a huge smuggling network that is active in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa – mainly moving those flights for Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Because Kenya has performed patroles on his roads, smugglers now turn to Lake Turkana to get migrants into the country.
“Agents” on the new route, she said, received the migrants in the Kenyan fishing village of Lomekthi, where road transport was organized to bring them to Nairobi – a journey of about 15 hours.
Warning for the dangers of traveling on the rickety wooden boats, she appealed to parents not to allow their children to make the intersection alone.
“I will not say that I love the money I earn – because as a mother I can’t be happy when I see bad things happening with other women’s children,” she told the BBC.
“I would like to advise migrants if they will listen to me. I would like to beg to stay in their country,” she said, further warn of the callige attitudes of many human traffickers.
Osman, an Eritrean migrant who did not want to give his real name for security reasons, made the intersection at the same time as Hiyab and her sister.
He remembered how Hiyab’s boat capsized in front of his eyes not long after leaving the fishing village of Ileret when it went to the southwest to Lomiek.
“Hiyab was in the boat for us – the engine did not work and it was pushed by a strong wind,” he said.
“They were about 300 meters (984ft) in the water when their boat canceled, which resulted in the death of seven people.”
Hiyab’s sister survived by holding on to the sinking boat until another ship – also managed by the smugglers – came to the rescue.
Mrs. Senait blamed the smugglers of the dead and said she overloaded the boat with more than 20 migrants.
“The cause of deaths was clear negligence. They put too many people in a small boat who couldn’t even wear five people,” she said.
During the visit of the BBC to Lomewki, two fishermen said they saw the bodies of migrants – who were believed to be Eritreans – floating in the lake, which is approximately 300 km (186 miles) long and 50 km wide, in July 2024.
“There were about four bodies on the coast. Then other bodies appeared a few days later,” said Brighton Lokaala.
Another fisherman, Joseph Lomuria, said he saw the bodies of two men and two women – one of whom seemed to be a teenager.
In June 2024, the UN refugee office registered 345,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in East Africa, of 580,000 worldwide.
Just like Mrs. Senait’s family, many flee to avoid military service in a country that is involved in countless wars in the region, and where free political and religious activity is not tolerated if the government tries to maintain a tight grip on power.
The Eritrean lawyer, Mula Berhan, based in Uganda, told the BBC that Kenya and Uganda increasingly became the preferred destination of these migrants due to conflicts in Ethiopia and Sudan, both of the neighbor Eritrea.
In her experience, the female smuggler said that some of the migrants settled in Kenya, but others used as the country as a transit point to reach Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa, because it was easier to get refugee status there.
The smuggling network works in all these countries and hands migrants to different “agents” until they reach their final destination, which – in some cases – can also be Europe or North -America.
Her task is to transfer those migrants in Nairobi to agents who keep them in “keep houses” until the next part of their journey is arranged and paid for.
In this phase, every migrant probably paid around $ 5,000 for the trip up to that moment.
The BBC saw a room in a pieces of flats that was used as a household house. Five Eritrean men were locked up in the room, which had one mattress.
In the house houses, migrants are expected to pay rent and also pay for their food – and the smuggler said she knew three men and a young woman who had died of hunger because they no longer had cash.
She said that the agents simply thrown the bodies away and called their death bad luck.
“Smugglers keep lying to the families who say their people live and they keep sending money,” she acknowledged.
Women’s migrants, she said, were often sexually abused or forced to marry male smugglers.
She said that she herself was not going to give up the lucrative trade, but thought that others should be aware of what they could walk for them.
It is little comfort for Mrs. Senait, who is still mourning the death of her 14-year-old while he expressed enlightenment that her older daughter survived and was unharmed by the smugglers.
“We have experienced what every Eritrean family is going through,” she said.
“May God heal our country and free us from all this.”
