14th of December, 2017.
The truck stops. I check the guy and he looks nice. He put my backpack in a compartment outside the truck. We leave.
A few kilometres further, we stop in a small and isolated place to have tea and breakfast with some of his friends: two other truck drivers. One of them, the passenger, does not look bad but in the driver I do not trust at all. Something weird happens after we finish the tea: Mohamed says directly to me “Leilane, go to the truck”. It is rude. It is the first sign.
We keep going on the road and since both of us speak just a little of French, the conversation is reduced. But even so, he is always trying to say something.
Then he starts to ask me, all the time, if I am OK, trying to make me feel comfortable offering for me to lie down in one of the beds, giving me biscuits and juice, and in everyone those things he starts to looks like that piece of shit from Bilbao in Spain.
He is talking with his friends often in the phone, and for some reason, I feel that something is not right. So when they get stuck in one of the police barrier, I thought that finally would be OK. But of course Mohamed keep talking to then and waiting for then.
After we take some pictures and he shows some pictures of his family, when his friends call again, I have the feeling that they are talking about how Mohamed is making me trust in him with all those things. If I can understand Arabic? Not at all. But I can easily, at least more than other people, to get the point of a conversation in other language. And I also have my instinct.
At lunch, we stop in a small village an he does not even have the respect of asking me what I would like to eat. He order some fried fish and since I am in a weird situation, I eat. Now I feel so odd about it. After how everything happened. I should simply told him that I am vegetarian! I have to start to act more like Martinha, the Portuguese lady I hitchhiked together in Spain. She says that just because we are going with someone for free, as a favor, we do not supposed to submit to anything. If they accepted to help us they have to accepted how we are completely. Anyway, I eat that thing and still offered to pay my part.
At the end of the afternoon, Mohamed is delaying our arrival so much that I am pretty sure he is trying to travel at night. Just when we are over one hour from Layoune, he stop the truck and take a rest. What? What a fuck, man? If you want to rest you do in the middle of your journey, not when you are almost there. Of course he is also waiting for his friends and when they arrive, he basically say to me stay on the truck, show me how I could sleep on the bed, and go to have tea with them. His behavior with the other drive is telling me that there is something wrong. And after a few minutes, when I se a car arriving to the same place and a couple of a man and a woman getting out, I decide to ask for help.
I walk until there and would use the excuse I needed go to the bathroom. And you know what? When Mohamed sees me trying to leave the truck he starts to make gestures that I should stay.
When I get in the car the woman is around. She just speak Spanish. After I explain everything to her, she says she could not help me and she leaves. What? Yeah. Then the guy came and he looks nicer than her. He says they are waiting for other friends and he would try to talk with her but if she says no there is nothing he could do. I walk in, go to the bathroom and go back to the truck to take my stuff. I decide I am leaving does not matter what.
Back in the truck, the second guy from the other truck, the passenger, help me taking out my bag. And here came something that really intrigues me: when I tell him I am leaving, the first thing he say is “Yeah, I know sometimes (a name that I could not understand) can be not that friendly”. At the moment I do not realize, but when it hit me, and I ask what is that about it, he just say something about his English being so bad. For me that is a kind of proof that I am right.
It is when I notice also that the mother fuck had broken the waist clips of my backpack. And I have a huge Dèjá Vú about it. At that moment, they are coming back and realize I am leaving. Again, their reaction show me that something is wrong: they do not say one single thing. Do not insiste for me to stay, do not say they are just trying to help, a natural thing that every good heart person had done to me since I started to hitchhike. So I shake their hands and walk to the place where the couple are.
After I explain everything again for both, the woman says, again, that there is nothing she could do for me. That breaks my heart and I start to cry. Now, I am not crying because what happened, as I said, I left the mother fucker truck drivers with no excitation but when that woman refuse to help me, knowing that I could be in serious dangerous, knowing that the only thing she needed to do to save me, it was drive me for over an hour, knowing that as a woman you should always help another woman, she refused.
I decide I am not let her leave without tell her that. So I walk to the car and tell her I wish she never need help of anyone because otherwise she would feel so bad as I was feeling at that moment. So they try to explain to me that they are also foreigners and they could put themselves in danger. Yeah, because the truck drivers would risk theirs lives kidnapping three foreigners and not just with an alone hitchhiker girl who one of them picked up in the middle of nowhere and could make her disappear.
The truck drivers are still there, waiting for Loki knows what. So the couple tells me there are some policeman around. I start to look for them.
I find a very old man who just speaks in French and Arabic. He asks me to go inside the coffee place. Nobody speaks a little of English, just French. And even that all of then are trying to help, with no communication they could not.
So the old man come with someone on the phone who speaks English. I explain everything to him and he says he would try find someone to drive me to Layoune and find a place where I could spend the night over there. After that, another man arrives, who also speaks English, and I explain everything to him also. He is pretty serious and looks like a spy.
At the end, the owner of the coffee place brings me a coffee. I walk with the policemen to the Station where they make some copies of my passport and I get in a car with another three other man going to Layoune.
In the middle of the road, something weird happens: when two trucks are coming, the driver turn off the car and we stay for like three seconds completely invisible in the middle of the road. I have no idea why he did that. Maybe it is because what Jean Claude explained to me in Marrakesh about some extremist Islamic people: they believe so much that their lives are in Ala’s hands that they can drive the car in the opposite direction of the road, or with the lights off, just to “prove” that they are right. If they die, it is because it was the time. Well, they should not do that when in company of someone who is not Islamic.