Senegal mourns youth lost to dream of a better life abroad

As falling catches anda lack of jobs lay waste to fishing communities, growing numbers risk the deadly migrant trail to Spain. Tracy McVeigh meets those families left behind in Bargny

- Tracy McVeigh

The view from the plastic chair in which Fatou Samba sits, looking out to sea, takes in many of the elements of the sorry tale of Senegal's lost men. She can see the shapes of the industrial fishing ships and tankers from Europe and China strung across the horizon.

Closer to shore are dozens of pirogues, Senegalese wooden fishing boats, rocking idle on a sea mostly denuded of fish. On the beach, where the small waves break, bringing in their crust of plastic waste, is a heap of masonry rubble.

"That was the mosque," Samba says. The ends of her own house, a U-shape with the arms facing out to the beach, have crumbled. "On 19 August, the sea took it, the bed and the walls," she says, nodding at the rubble. "Soon the sea will take it all, this house my grandparents built."

The coastal erosion in Bargny, where generations have built lives around fishing, has been exacerbated by the dredging of a deep water port for international shipping along the coast. Samba says the homes of 17 families have washed away in the past six months, dragged out on rising tides.

The saddest sight Samba has seen was in November, when her son, Thierieno, 22, left for Spain. "I sat here watching him go, swimming out to the boat," she demonstrates a one-armed breast stroke, "one hand holding up his phone out of the water".

For Thierieno, getting a job was difficult. He couldn't follow his father into the dying fishing industry, but it was peer pressure that finally got to him, sending him overseas to join the mass migration of men - and increasingly women and children - leaving a Senegal where they cannot see a future.

"He didn't want to go. His father didn't want it but his friends were sending him messages, videos, from Madrid to come. It looked as though he had no courage if he stayed. It shamed Thierieno," Samba says.