Born homeless: Youssouph, the child of a long journey

“- Are you Bintou? asked the delivery man, a paper bag in his hand filled with an Ivorian alloco braised chicken, and rice.

– Yes, it's me, said a man in his fifties who was there, at the entrance to the social center in Vigneux-sur-Seine.

– Here, from Mrs. Samra Seddik. »

This is how the chicken was stolen that night. It was July 21, between the two confinements. Certainly, the delivery man could not guess that Bintou was a woman's first name. Nor could he imagine that Bintou's neighbor was a man willing to steal to eat.

At the time, Bintou was not happy that her chicken was stolen. “It seems that he was very hungry, him! “, she says. Five months later, the story makes her smile. “Poor Mrs. Samira, she must have had a new chicken delivered to me! She said to me on the phone: “Bintou, don’t miss the delivery man this time, otherwise he will still deliver to someone else.” When the same delivery man came back, he was scared: “Are you really Bintou? Are you quite sure?” I said, "Yes, it's me, it's Bintou." »

A few days earlier, Samra Seddik, a midwife for twelve years in the Paris suburbs, had received an SMS from a health insurance advisor based in Évry: "Can you visit Bintou F. in Vigneux -on the Seine ? She's coming out of the maternity ward in a few days. »

For his part, Bintou, who had just given birth to Youssouph, received a message: “You will be accommodated from July 24 to 27 at the social hotel in Vigneux-sur-Seine. In the space of a week, barely out of the maternity ward, Bintou has changed her address three times.

Since August 4, she has not moved, but she knows that stability is fragile and that she will have to find a job and an apartment to be safe. It is said that these women change places regularly, it is a way of reminding them that they are always "in the system of 115", the Samu social de Paris.

They may receive an SMS: “In an hour, you have to be at this place. They must then pick up their luggage, their child and go from one city to another without being transported, in commercial areas that are often completely isolated.

→ INVESTIGATION. Several hundred migrants from Saint-Denis still on the street

Once behind closed doors in her room, Bintou confessed to "Ms. Samira", as she calls her, that she had not eaten since the day before. His last meal had been a piece of bread and water. Samra told her: “Bintou, I am a mother myself, and I know that a breastfeeding woman is very hungry. If you don't eat well, your milk isn't rich. »

In the evening, Samra ordered the famous Ivorian chicken from Bintou… Making not one, but two happy people! "Someone who offers you a meal when you're hungry, you can't forget that," Bintou recalls.

Right of asylum

Bintou is 21 years old. When she arrived in France, she obtained from the Ofpra (French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) the status of international protection as a refugee for the next ten years, because she is in danger of her life if she returns to Senegal. With a child or without, she would have been granted asylum, no matter what.

In her social hotel, between Mondial Tissus, Decathlon and Buffalo Grill, she watches her son who doesn't want to sleep. Youssouph is 5 months old. He is the child at the end of a long journey. The child of a rape, in the middle of the street, when she arrived in Paris. The child of a wound, of the irreparable. But above all, "you are the child of God", she whispers in her ear in the night. “Ite mou alla la deenaano lè ti. »

She lifts him gently above her head, both bare arms outstretched. They look at each other, silent, Youssouph purrs, his nose is taken. Youssouph means Joseph, it is the name of the prophet. The two stare at each other, eyes wide in the dark. Lit from afar by the TV on without sound. The laughter of the young woman pierces the cold in the early morning. It's early December. Youssouph tries to catch his toy with his mouth, grumbling. Her little pink tongue flicked back and forth over her ebony lips.

“Idea! (“Calm down!”), “Mou céta? (“What’s the matter with you?”) she asks him. "Hmm you're hungry…" she replies to herself. She grabs him under the armpit with one hand to lift him off the mattress and place him on his stomach. She gently grabs her little skull and wedges it under her breast.

He immediately grabs the nipple that presents itself to him. Breastfeeding has been hurting Bintou for a few days. She pinches her bottom lip, frowns. Her breath is deep, she concentrates, crosses her legs and cradles her son to forget her pain.

When he's finished, she lies down, her breast less swollen. "Mom is suffering, but he, Youssouph, he is happy," she says. He has dark eyes, swallow-shaped eyebrows. Abundant hair on the top of the skull, almost nothing at the temples. She lays him in the middle of the bed on the uncovered white duvet, massages his head for a moment, slowly moving her fingers on which floats a turquoise stone ring.

She sits up, lifts the window curtain. The parking lot is empty. Time passes slowly in this room. It's six o'clock in the morning. Outside, buses make rounds for students in the winter mist. It is far away, Senegal. Tar replaced clay. "If I close my eyes, I see a big river, if I open them, I see parking lots," she sits down.

The window of his previous hotel overlooked a tire store. There, Bintou did not dare to wash once because the showers were mixed. Four days after giving birth, she was holding herself back for entire nights so she wouldn't have to go to the bathroom downstairs, because there was no toilet for women.

→ THE FACTS. ECHR: France condemned for the living conditions of asylum seekers

In his new room, Bintou has a bathroom and a toilet. The hotel where she is staying has long hosted exclusively men, it then depended on an NGO. For a little over a year, it has been attached to the emergency accommodation service of 115, it has become mixed and mainly welcomes single women with children; 134 adults live here.

At the entrance, an A4 sheet is attached to a few pieces of adhesive tape: “VISITES PROHIBITED”. Then another sheet, smaller: “Mandatory mask”. At the windows, the laundry is aired. On the edge of another, a pack of Badoit is balanced.

When Bintou stays too long in this room, she thinks about the past. She gets out of there whenever she can, but never at night. “When you are poor, you never know what you will do tomorrow, you spend your time thinking, you do nothing but worry. Youssouph grabs her chin as if to silence her.

"That little one is tiring me out", she hammers out each syllable, smiling and straightens it in the back of her neck. The son entwined around his mother's neck, they no longer move, it's an engraving against the light. "I'm going to make my dreams come true first, then I'll find her a daddy. »

→ PODCAST. "My meeting with Bintou, mother in exile"

She sleeps fully clothed, like every night. The button of her jeans undone, she takes off her thick woolen socks. Undo her black bra, her breast is healing. On the bed, the remote control rests on its large silver hoops. Her almond eyes are tired, dark circles, but her raised cheekbones make her look fit.

Once naked, she undresses her son. She enters the shower holding him in her arms. She's still afraid he'll slip against her wet skin, so she leaves a piece of fabric to grip better and slips an orange glove along his body. She then wraps the child in a towel and places him in his crib. A vanilla smell took over the entire bathroom.

It is the day of the great ablution, the "ghousl" according to Muslim tradition: Bintou is the day after the last day of her period. During menstruation, a Muslim woman does not perform the five daily prayers. She is always free to invoke God, but it is a period of rest, she no longer gets up in the morning to pray, nor to fast. "Without being disconnected from God for all that," says Bintou.

Protected by her faith

After washing, she begins the ritual of ablution. The lukewarm water flows and, step by step, the young woman rubs the right part of her body with a glove. Youssouph, on the other side of the steamy window, stares at the ceiling without saying anything. Bintou repeats the same gestures all over the left side of his body. To purify member after member. She ends with her feet. The right, then the left.

“When I take a shower, I reflect on past things. It makes me feel good. My mind breathes, it's like I'm washing it. I happen to cry. I mourn my sisters, my father, and my husband. With the sound of water, no one can tell you're crying. The tears come out and immediately mix with the water that washes you. »

A small wooden ladder leads to an attic under the bedroom ceiling. A kind of cabin with an extra bed. Up there rests her yellow and black prayer robe. Bintou climbs cautiously, puts on his djellaba and descends, gritting his teeth. “Before I was pregnant, I used to climb trees and run fast. Now that I have Youssouph, I'm dizzy, I'm out of breath, and I'm still afraid of dying. »

→ REPORT. In Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, the vibrant faith of migrants

She put the child on the bed. In two movements, she ties her purple scarf with white polka dots on her plaited braids on the very head. Bintou is ready. She unrolls her pink carpet from Senegal on the floor, bows and whispers in Arabic: "Bismillah ar rahman ar rahim/Al hamdou lillahi rabbi al alamine..." ("Praise be to Allah, Lord of the universe. The Most Merciful , the Most Merciful”). Her son's breathing accompanies her slow movements.

“Ms. Samira” says that it is because Bintou has faith that God protects her. “Whether it is Christian or Muslim religion, it helps these women to hold on. Samra often says that with each birth, the fate of the world is replayed. Before settling as a liberal, Samra did a humanitarian mission in Jordan, on the Syrian border, in 2013, where women gave birth under canvas tents.

They said to their wartime enemy: “As long as we give life, the victory is ours, Bashar (Bashar Al Assad, editor’s note). “The pregnant woman is already endowed with incredible power. But women in exile are even more so. They can move mountains. »

The profession of midwife made her a witness: “It’s incredible what a woman can make in nine months. All body mechanisms. The development of the fetus. Birth cannot be the result of chance, it is impossible. It only strengthens my faith. »

In addition to her job, in 2016 Samra founded the association A Little Baggage of Love, to help pregnant women who are refugees or in precariousness. When she weighs the little bodies of the babies she takes care of, she often thinks that the child she holds in her arms might be a great musician, a sportsman, an astronaut... And it will be her revenge on the life.

On February 11, 2019, Bintou lost the man known as Ibou Diop. The renowned designer of Tambacounda was her husband. Five months after their marriage, in the district called "Depot", where they lived, in the heart of the presidential elections, a confrontation took place between activists.

“The young tailor who came out to inquire about the situation was stabbed by a group of hooded youths,” read the headlines the following day. We will never really know more about the circumstances of his death.

Fleeing Senegal

Bintou was returning from school where she was learning to sew, when she came across two men talking about an “Ibou” who had just been murdered in the middle of Street. Her heart started beating, before the last turn, she passed a child who was crying without saying anything. At the end of the thirty-minute walk, her heart filled with a bad intuition, she learned that her husband of 30 years had died. We hid the body from him, as tradition dictates.

“I wanted to know what clothes he was stabbed in, but I only saw his body the next day at the mosque. For Bintou, one of the great lessons of his life is the speed at which colors can change in a lifetime. From the blue sky under the humid sun of Tamba on a wedding day with murderous blood, mixed with the sandy earth, in front of the sewing workshop of a “good and generous” man reduced to nothing.

This piece of land, that day, seemed to rise to heaven, Bintou was inconsolable. “I refused to withdraw my complaint, I wanted justice to be done. Every day, those responsible for the crime offered him money. Resisting the threats, she now knew she was in mortal danger. After the four months and ten days of mourning imposed by the Muslim religion, locked up in her late husband's room, she decided to flee forever.

→ REPORT. The fathers of Senegalese migrants sentenced to an unprecedented sentence

She took off the blue and red mourning loincloth sewn by a designer friend, and she put on a T-shirt of all colors, short sleeves, a cardigan, and tight jeans. Her hair braided in dozens of thin loose braids. She left her country one evening in June. Just enough time to say goodbye to his sick father, bedridden, who told him to leave far from here: “Lay fana! " (" Be brave ! "). He added: “Ikana nyena ibodoulaakou” (“And don’t forget where you come from”).

Bintou is the last child of six siblings. “Often, the last of the siblings are freer and realize their dreams. The elders open a road, the last ones jump and dance on it. In a red backpack, she slipped a photo of Finda, her mother, whom she hardly knew. She added some skirts and dresses sewn by Ibou as well as a golden necklace offered by her sister on her wedding day.

Bintou's odyssey

At the age of 20, she made the perilous journey from Senegal to France so as not to be killed herself. Carrying nothing but the big red backpack she took for her sewing lessons in Tamba. Left by bus for Dakar, flew to Casablanca, then Tangier, from where she thought of boarding a makeshift boat for Spain. The smuggler stole the money from her, she never left. He probably saved her life without knowing it.

She then set sail for Algeria, on the advice of an unknown young woman. There, at the fish market in a port whose name she has forgotten – she has forgotten whole pieces of her past – she befriended a Marseille fisherman who agreed to take her with him on his boat. A big white boat.

→ LARGE FORMAT. “I was a slave in Libya”

“I was paralyzed, the trip lasted less than two days, but I did not sleep a wink. I was afraid of finding myself alone with a man in the middle of the sea.” They did not speak. He left her in peace. “He took pity on me, I believe. When he arrived in Marseille, he entrusted her to a friend who was taking a train to the capital.

“My trip was just that. Each time, a complete stranger helped me, held out his hand to me, put me on the path and said to me “we arrived” once at my destination, and then I never saw him again. You don't turn around, you look ahead. The present. Bintou arrived in the Paris region on September 1^st, 2019.

She has no idea the name of the town. She just remembers coming out of a train station and sleeping for days under boxes. Mr. Kabay has a very precise memory of the first time he saw Bintou. He is a VTC driver. He passed in front of the Saint-Michel-sur-Orge station to pick up customers at rush hour. It was still daylight, three men were prowling around her.

“I had the window open, I met her gaze in tears, when she saw that I was looking at her, she asked me for help. I approached, seeing me the three men left. “In this dark month of September, Bintou found herself pregnant, she did not know it yet.

Mr. Kabay got out of his car, he asked her where she was from. Since Tamba was his wife's hometown, he got her into his car and called Awa: "I have a sister from your village in the car, she was abused by a group of men in Saint- Michael. "Bring her here," his wife replied.

Mr. Kabay immediately asked Bintou to call his father in Tambacounda. He wanted to talk to her. The sick man confided to him: “They confiscated my daughter. Keep her as your daughter. Bintou's father passed away a few days later.

Mr. Kabay kept his promise. With his wife Awa and their five children, they welcomed Bintou as their own daughter for nine months. Mr. Kabay sees existence as a great chain of solidarity. He was given a helping hand when he was 29, even as he was fleeing the civil war in Sierra Leone 20 years ago. He thought that France would only be a step towards America. He finally adopted this country.

What will she say to her child when he asks her who her father is? “He is the child of a rape but he is the child of God. That's what I'll tell him. I will tell my child the truth. Sooner or later, if he asks me, I will tell him my whole story. It's my son. I don't want to hide where he comes from. In our religion, Maryam, daughter of Imra and Hannah, gave birth to a fatherless child, a child of God. The truth, even when it is difficult to understand, is the best way to build oneself. »

Bintou prays the name of Mary, Maryam, that of Jesus is less familiar to her, she does not know that it is this birth that Christians celebrate at Christmas time. She considers memory as the place where our identity is transmitted. What we choose to tell is what makes sense for eternity. It is the tenacity and endurance of memory that together celebrate existence.

Before leaving for the maternity ward, after sleeping for nine months on their sofa, Bintou knew that Mr. Kabay and Awa would not be able to keep her in their living room with a newborn baby. She took steps to be taken care of in emergency accommodation.

When she left the maternity ward, she discovered the loneliness of a hotel room. She discovered waiting for administrative appointments, French lessons, meetings with "Ms. Samira", the collection, every Thursday, of foodstuffs at the solidarity grocery store L'Escale de "Sainte-Gen'" , as they say.

Choose life

The verdict of her husband's trial was handed down on July 2 by the first criminal chamber of the Tambacounda High Court, which is handling the case. Thirteen defendants were seen at the bar. While Bintou gave birth to her child in a hospital in the Paris suburbs, the murderer of Ibou Diop was imprisoned for the next fifteen years. She does not know this verdict. She doesn't want to know anything about this past.

Bintou “chooses life in the full, strong and diverse sense”, in the words of jurist and political scientist Raphaël Draï. She has thus chosen "a life" in the "great life" that we do not choose. She took charge of her destiny and gave it meaning. At the crossroads of what she chooses to tell and what she chooses to keep quiet.

A carton of milk rests on the sill of his window which serves as his refrigerator in winter. She writes an SMS to Awa. They have an appointment tonight at the Kabays to cook a fataya paste, a kind of Senegalese donuts with minced meat. These people saved his life. She writes to him in phonetic diakhanke. The benches of the Koranic school, she did not spend much time there. She learned the alphabet on a yellow wall, a few words of French and Arabic.

→ GRANDSTAND. From the “migrant crisis” to the reception crisis

At 11, she left school and was forcibly married to a 45-year-old man. Bintou's family was poor, his mother was no longer there, his father thought he was doing well. Pregnant by this man at 16, she fled. When the child was born, her older sister helped her get a divorce and raised little Mohammed as her son, among her own children.

Bintou was too young to be a mother. "The child I had four years ago calls my sister 'mom' and considers me his aunt. Even if I gave birth to him, I was not able, by leaving the country, to tear him away from those he considers his closest family. »

At the L’Escale social and solidarity grocery store, a few bus stations from the hotel where she lives, a dozen volunteers and social workers employed by the municipality are bustling about, filling boxes, welcoming. Their names are Martine, Jessie, Saïd… In three hours of opening each afternoon, they see about sixty people pass by whose faces they know well.

Beneficiaries are called on a strict time slot. Since the start of the health crisis, they can no longer enter the store. They then stay at the entrance, at the foot of the HLM where the premises are located. They make their choice on the other side of a plexiglass where dozens of women find themselves alone with their child in single file. Bintou blends into the crowd with her stroller. She becomes one of them.

Maternities

“What will become of all these women? Dominique, 70, is the president of the association. “I was appointed to the presidency the worst year, I have the same problem as Macron. She goes out to smoke her cigarette, a sleeveless jacket over a big sweater. The store will close soon, the pace has calmed down.

She has been a volunteer here for nine years. “Normally, we are a crutch, we are called L’Escale, we should relieve the families for a month or two. In fact, some have been coming back every week for a year. Each beneficiary, depending on the nature of their home, is entitled to a maximum budget established by the social worker.

When filling the back of the stroller, Bintou swaps a can of peas for the two cartons of milk she had taken. Dominique looks at her: “They are all there with their misery, their debts, their mistakes. But what worries me is that we have never seen so many women alone with a child. »

→ INVESTIGATION. Families on the street in Paris, the breaking point

The rays of the sun play with the wheels of the stroller and the panels of the signs. In recent days, the sunsets are flamboyant. In the daily life in France which is hers now, Bintou accomplishes this time her motherhood.

"It's the day your mom is gone that you know her value," she confides, returning from the bus stop with Youssouph, the stroller loaded. The day you give birth, you only begin to understand what she has suffered. We all have a mom. »

Bintou dries her tears. "You're tired pregnant. Then your child cries, then cries, then cries. If your son sleeps, you sleep. If he wakes up, you wake up. In the morning you wash it before you wash. One day, your child grows up, and after everything you gave him, he says 'no' looking you in the eye,” she yawns and bursts out laughing at the same time.

The other night, she dreamed of her mom. In her dream, she had just been born. Her mother, sitting cross-legged, had put her on her ankle. “My mom stroked my hair and sang me songs to make me fall asleep. “While taking her son out of the stroller, she breaks any misunderstanding: “It’s not a true story, huh! It was a dream. I don't remember my mom. »

She goes back to her room. Takes off her hoop earrings which she throws on the duvet. “When you are a single mother with a child, your son only has you, your shoulder, your finger and your breast. For me, Youssouph is my first son. He's the one who sticks with me all the time. No one is seconding me. No one wants to take care of him for me. I am his mother. »

INTERVIEWWith Christine Laconde, Director General of Samu social de Paris

La Croix l’Hebdo: How do you explain the growing number of migrant women in France?

Christine Laconde: The migratory flows of isolated people have become largely feminized over the past ten years. From the 1960s to the 1990s, we spoke of an almost exclusively male migration. In 1993, when the Samu social de Paris was created, there were hardly any women.

Today, the figures show that more and more people are fleeing their country because they are women. The flight is due to a yearning for freedom for the woman and her future children. These people who leave their country flee irrepressibly. For fear that their daughter will be circumcised, for fear of undergoing a forced marriage. They flee without knowing what happens next.

The phenomenon seems to have been poorly appreciated in its consequences.

C. L.: Badly appreciated and therefore badly accompanied. The exiled women managed and continue to manage as best they can. Before calling 115, for years, they try to manage. We observe more or less friendly community support, accommodation with third parties can reflect both a very beautiful community solidarity and an incredible modern slavery.

These women become pregnant, whether they want to or not. And often, the arrival of the child turns everything upside down. They come out of the maternity ward, and no longer have a home. And we know that a homeless woman is prey.

Is this how families are born on the street?

C. L.: Fifteen years ago, families, and especially women on the street or wandering, began to call 115. The public evolved in a dazzling way, the actors prepared for the most urgent. Everything that was in place was intended for isolated men. We then entered the trap of the hotel.

I'm talking about a trap, I should be talking about hard drugs. Not only have hotel places become a major resource, which we can no longer do without, but in addition these places are not suitable, and people in great precariousness settle there.

At the beginning, it was a few hundred cases, then it went to a few thousand, today it is counted in tens of thousands. The concentration in the Paris region is logical. It is the capital, the city of arrival. But the hotels found are further and further away from Paris, on the outskirts of towns, in places where you go by car during the day to do your shopping, but which are not suitable for living.

And things are stagnating. People find themselves waiting longer and longer for residency rights. It takes six to seven years to obtain a residence permit today, and having a child on French soil does not help at all as it once did.

What can we do at our level?

C. L.: Our capacity for indignation is already a good driving force. There are things that are not acceptable and we must continue to keep our eyes open, to be indignant. During the first lockdown, for the first time in such an acute way, we were exposed to people who were hungry. Who had gone three, sometimes four days without eating. Neither they nor their children. It's not acceptable.

It is also not normal to live with third parties who ask you for sexual services. It is wrong to think that this is the price to pay for a form of modernity. In a country like France, which has its difficulties but which is not a poor country, we cannot accept that people are in tents with rats eating their feet. The debate on the migration issue is too often sterilized by extreme ideologies.

I'm hardly exaggerating: on the one hand, those who have the impression of a wave of submersion, with a draft effect – helping one migrant is letting three others arrive – treating the camp opposite irresponsible, unrealistic. On the other, a camp which accuses the first of being fascist. I observe that we do not want to lay down the terms in a pragmatic and mature way, we refuse consensus. What is at stake with the migration issue is the mirror of the ills of society.

We are confronted with a very great hypocrisy of the system which leads to the hyper assistance of entire populations. Our challenge is to be capable of pragmatism. We must not negotiate with the quality of the answers we provide, the challenge is not just to provide assistance, the challenge is to give back to these individuals the power to choose and to act on their lives.