The t-shirt worn by Fadi’s mother features a picture of his beaming face. The image shows the 20-year-old in Tunisia, standing by the Mediterranean Sea.
53-year-old Samia Jabloun has inscribed “Dove Sei?” (which translates to “Where are you?” in Italian) above her son’s picture in permanent marker.
Samia frequently carries a pink plastic folder filled with the fragments of IT student Fadi’s life and the evidence she has acquired about his disappearance.
She claims that she spends every waking minute in a frenzied search for her son: “I’ll spend my entire life looking for him. I’ll look everywhere for him. I’ll keep looking for him until I find out the truth.”
Samia claims that February 2021 was when she last saw Fadi. The family’s residence was in the seaside town of Kelibia, which is the closest part of Tunisia to Pantelleria, an Italian island that serves as a hub for migrants trying to enter Europe. Her son had made the trip.
She says, “For those few days he was acting abnormally.”
He told her he was taking his relatives fishing, but he never returned.
Samia’s last memories of Fadi are from a cell phone video shot at sea by another boat passenger. Fadi beams and cites a verse from the Quran as he looks out towards the rising Italian coast.
Each year, thousands of migrants travel the 700-mile-long Tunisian coast on the migrant trail in search of a better life just on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) claims that the central Mediterranean is the world’s most dangerous migration route, where more than 24,000 people have gone missing just since 2014.
Following a significant peak in 2015, the number of individuals crossing the Mediterranean was on the down, but the IOM reports that since 2021, the number of people trying to make the journey has been growing once more and that it is becoming more dangerous.
