Feature: A refugee mother hopes for "something good"

Surprisingly, crossing the Mediterranean Sea on a migrant boat was not Aisha's worst memory.

In her long journey from Africa to Europe, the desert was the most dangerous part, and the smugglers, the most terrifying.

The young mother left her homeland Eritrea with her 19-month-old daughter Miracle earlier this year: she was trafficked into Sudan, travelled for days through the Sahara desert, and was finally brought to an unknown place somewhere on the Libyan coast.

"The desert crossing was the hardest part of the trip, because we suffered from the great heat and had so little water," Aisha (not her real name) told Xinhua.

"Our vehicles were stuffed with people, and we were unable to move for hours."

The men leading the trip would become quite aggressive any time, if someone dared to move or complained about the heat, she explained.

"They always yelled at us: 'sit down, sit down'."

They would also beat people with canes, if any of them were too slow in changing from one vehicle to another, she added.

Aisha and her daughter were not the only vulnerable ones in the group. Several other mothers with young children were travelling with them, according to her testimony.

Once they arrived in Libya, the situation became even worse.

The woman described how the smugglers held her and her daughter captive, asking their relatives at home for more money. She was not entirely sure how long this lasted, but believed it was some four months before the traffickers -- both Libyan and Eritrean men -- allowed them to leave.

Aisha did not look comfortable telling this part of her story.

And yet, she made it. She arrived in Sicily, southern Italy, on Oct. 5, and is now living in a Red Cross refugee shelter in an eastern district of Rome.

Here, she was reunited with her husband, who had left before her, and she agreed to speak with Xinhua with the help of a cultural mediator from the Red Cross.

She said she felt safe.

"After all, the sea crossing was not too bad. We left Libya, and sailed for about four hours, then the Italians came and rescued us," the woman explained.

The facility where she is now living officially offers 85 places. But at the time of the interview, it was hosting 105 refugees.

The country's capital city is in fact struggling to cope with unstoppable migration to Italy, which has not decreased despite the winter and worsening weather conditions in the Mediterranean.

Some 13,581 sea arrivals were registered in November and 27,384 in October, compared to 3,218 and 8,916 in the same months of 2015, according to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.

Overall, 175,244 people have reached Italy by sea this year up to Dec. 11. The figure exceeded the record high of 170,100 registered in 2014, and was well ahead of the 152,000 of 2015.

All of the people hosted in the Rome Red Cross facility were Eritreans, and all applied for the relocation scheme of the European Union (EU), which means the chance to be transferred legally and under humanitarian protection to live in another EU country.

Their requests were all accepted, Red Cross officials confirmed, since the Eritrean is one of the nationalities currently eligible for EU relocation.

Aisha and her husband do not yet know in which European country they will start a new life.

"I hope for something good for me and my daughter...that she will be able to attend school somewhere in Europe," Aisha said.

"Here I feel protected, but I would like to send her to the nursery school as soon as possible, since she misses playing with other children. As for me and my husband, we just want a quiet life with our children." Endit