An unnamed 11-year-old girl from Sierra Leone survived a shipwreck off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa. She was adrift for three days and was only kept afloat by a makeshift flotation device.
The girl was a part of a migrant ship that departed from Sfax, Tunisia. The boat was destroyed after getting hit by an 8-foot-tall wave that killed all but one of the 46 people on board. Compass Collective, a German humanitarian group, was conducting a humanitarian mission nearby. They heard her faint cries in the distance in the early morning hours.
Videos by VICE
The group managed to locate the girl, who was desperately clinging to a life raft she made from inner tubes and a life jacket. When Compass Collective found her, she was suffering from hypothermia, starvation, and dehydration — but somehow still alive.
The young girl was taken to Lampedusa for medical treatment. She told her rescuers that there were at least two other passengers in the water that she had been communicating with two days earlier but had not seen or heard from them since.
The International Organization for Migration says that the central Mediterranean route between Malta, Italy, Tunisia, and Libya is one of the deadliest migration corridors in the world. That passage is responsible for over 30,000 migrants either going missing or reported dead since 2014.
