Feature: Listening to the ordinary, special story of an Eritrean migrant in Italy

Ali, 28, an Eritrean national, is just one among the thousands of migrants who successfully attempted the Mediterranean crossing into Italy as a gate of Europe. Yet his story is a special one, like the ones of many young Africans escaping from conflict and poverty.

When recently asked by Xinhua to give an interview at an Italian Red Cross camp in Rome, Ali refused at first.

"Here I feel that I have started to live again, I feel like I am in paradise," he said only after he was convinced by his interpreter, an Eritrean too, that telling his story would help raise awareness about the drama faced by a lot of migrants like him.

Ali told Xinhua he was forced to do the military service for 15 years in his home country.

"I knew that I would have to continue for my entire life and soon or later I would be killed. So I though I'd better try to fulfill my dream and rather die on my path," he said.

Ali said he first went to Sudan and then he took six days to reach Libya, where the traffickers that handle the business of human desperation are based. But then he remained in Libya for almost one year before he was finally able to leave for Italy on a packed boat carrying more than 700 people.

The young Eritrean paid as many as 2,200 euros (about 2,492 U.S. dollars) for a journey that he defined as "terrifying."

"It was raining and we were threatened to death when the engine of our boat broke in the middle of the sea. Then we were rescued by a ship of Doctors Without Borders," Ali recalled.

As usual, the smugglers were not directly involved in the dangerous crossing.

"Their network is very articulated so that it is impossible to know who is at the helm of it," Ali explained to Xinhua.

The migrants do not even know about how their boat looks like until they are forced to leave.

"And once you leave, you are not allowed to go back. Traffickers do not mind whether you will arrive at the destination or die at sea. They just care about your payment," he underlined.

The deepening issue of the migrant crisis has become central in Europe over the last months.

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), more than half a million migrants have made the sea crossing to Europe since the start of 2015, of which 131,431 have arrived in Italy. A total of 2,887 people have been registered to be dead or missing to date.

"I have some brothers in Eritrea and I know that if they had the possibility to escape, they would try too," Ali said.

He said his only desire now is peace and calmness.

"For 15 years, other people have decided about my life. From now on I will decide what I want to do," he told Xinhua. He said that his next objective will be reaching the Netherlands, where he will start his new life.

Ali's dream was made possible also by an Italian Red Cross camp in Rome which hosts those migrants wanting to move to other European countries without being identified in Italy.

"The existing Dublin Regulation requires European states of first entry to register asylum seekers. Many, however, have relatives or friends in other parts of Europe, where they can also find better working chances," said Giorgio De Acutis of the Italian Red Cross.

"For this reason we do not check their identities, just give them hospitality to avoid that they sleep at the station or in the streets. They are free to leave whenever they like to attempt the border crossing into other European countries," De Acutis explained to Xinhua.

He said some 90 percent of the migrants at the camp are Eritreans and the rest from other troubled areas including Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Libya or Western Africa.

"They usually stop here no more than three or four nights, just to have a rest after months of terrible journey in which they are often persecuted and tortured," De Acutis went on saying.

The camp can host a maximum of 200 migrants, but whoever is in need is welcome so that it also happened to host as many as 260 people, he added.

De Acutis told Xinhua it is a wonderful emotion every day to listen to the diverse stories of the migrants. And it is particularly touching to meet "so many youngsters in their twenties, talented and often cultured, who are looking forward to living a vivid life, full of hope and dreams," he highlighted. Endit