Japa: Mercy Recounts How She Was Drained of Blood Monthly in Libya

A Nigerian migrant rescued from Libya, Mercy Olugbenga, has shared her harrowing experience in the North African country. She recounted being held captive for months, during which nurses repeatedly drew her blood to transfuse it into her employer’s ailing mother.

The rescued Nigerian migrant narrated her ordeal while speaking on the Channels Television Sunrise Daily programme on Wednesday.

Mercy, who dropped out of school at the age of 20 years, said that she decided to travel to Libya after selling family property to pay for her sick mother’s treatment.

She said she was lured to Libya with the promise of greener pastures to enable her to raise money to care for her sick mother.

She said:”My mum was sick. She had a kidney problem. So we had to sell all her properties, and there was nothing else. There is no family anywhere.”

Mercy, an indigene of Kabba in Kogi State, said she spent four years working in Libya, “For one year and six months, I worked without receiving a kobo, because I had to pay the agent who took me to Libya the sum of about two and a half million naira.

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“I was maltreated, I changed jobs, and at one point, locked up in a house where my blood was drawn without my consent.”

Mercy said, “What I experienced in Libya, not me alone, other Africans and other immigrants, other illegal migrants, those people they don’t like us.”

“Maybe they see us as rivals, or because they know wherever Nigerians are, they might take over. So they treat us like animals,” she added.

While revealing that her worst ordeal occured at the last place she worked, where she was locked in a room for a year, Mercy said she had originally been employed to care for the employer’s mother and do house chores, but became trapped in an exploitative situation once the woman’s medical needs emerged.

“They locked the door before going out. They locked the outside door, they locked the gate door,” she said.

During that confinement, Mercy said nurses visited monthly to take her blood.

“I thought it was their normal routine. But in this case, it is every month, which is not supposed to be so. So, later I got to know that they wanted my blood matches with their mum’s,” Mercy recounted.

She explained that her employer was transfusing her blood to cater for the medical needs of the mother she was employed to care for.

“I don’t want any young girl or boy to go through what I went through. Please don’t follow this route,” Mercy pleaded.