Well. A child’s tale? A child’s nightmare is more like it.

Mansour left Afghanistan and entered Peshawar with 5 siblings and their mother. Behind them laid a past destroyed; ahead, a future unknown. But they were lucky. They made it out.

Their father was already waiting for them in Peshawar, having arranged for a trafficker to send them out as a family. Towards peace. Or so they thought.

On the eve of their departure the trafficker arrived at the house they were staying. Out front, he told them, waited a bus with one vacant seat. None of his buses left with vacant seats. It was up to the family to figure out who would go alone on this bus, to be joined later somewhere else by the rest of the family. Mansour, at age 12, was the “natural” choice for this. Off he went. Alone. Into uncertainty with the certainty of separation.

Traveling for months – no one is sure how many – by foot, train, plane, bus and so on, Mansour even spent 3-4 weeks beneath the floor boards of a trafficker’s hideout waiting for a new bus somewhere in Russia. 23 hours a day spent with 10 inches of “space” above him. 20 men lying next to him. I shudder to think what thoughts have crept through the stale air.

Inching his way through the wilderness of a new world without help, Mansour was finally placed on a train from the German border with Denmark, headed for Copenhagen. Disembarking CPH central station, Mansour was truly lost and alone. Spinning around in despair, he finally recognized the dialect of an Iranian man speaking on the phone and sought him out for assistance.

Mansour was brought to the immigration authorities and transferred to the local center for unaccompanied minors.

Best,

David and Christopher