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Desperate Dreams | |||||||
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Every year, thousands of young people from sub-Saharan Africa set off across the desert dreaming of a better life in Europe. Many fall prey to ruthless smugglers or find themselves stranded in a foreign country without the means to continue or return home. In this series produced for the BBC World Service, Jenny Cuffe meets the people involved - those who facilitate the human trade and those who gamble all in pursuit of their dreams. | |
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FIRST HALF  |
Bus loads of travelers from West Africa arrive each day in Agadez, a desert town in Niger. Under the eye of local police, a network of middlemen and smugglers compete for trade, offering to take illegal migrants across the Sahara to Libya or Algeria. |
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SECOND HALF |
On the edge of the Sahara, Alfred Kofi is among a group of young men waiting nervously to set out across the sand to North Africa. They'll be traveling in the back of an overloaded truck, with no protection from the sun. Two months later, we meet Alfred again in Libya and he tells the story of his journey, describing the moment when he was robbed at gunpoint in the desert and when his childhood friend died, begging him for water. |
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| Click here to listen to the conclusion of “Desperate Dreams.” A Nigerian teenager, Fereinatu Amedu, dreams of studying at a university in Europe. Her trafficker has another plan for her. | ||||||||
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| THE CHANGING WORLD is the sister documentary series of PRI's The World. Each week, we offer American radio listeners two in-depth documentaries from the BBC World Service that probe issues critical to our understanding of our evolving world. |
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