To prevent young people from his country, Nigeria, from risking dying at sea, like those who died when he made the boat trip from Morocco to Tarifa with the idea of ??reaching the United Kingdom and becoming a lawyer. Avoid being deceived by the mafias, from being imprisoned, as happened to him on two occasions, first in Rabat, where the lack of space forced him to sleep sitting up, and then in Tarifa, where when he was released he was given 48 hours to leave Spain. This is the purpose of Kenneth Chukwuka Iloabuchi, the priest of the Cristo Rey de Lorca parish and chaplain of the Rafael Méndez University Hospital in the Murcian city. The priest has started a foundation that has started building a trade training center and dispensary in his village, Adazi Nnukwu, Anaocha, Anambra State. While the project progresses, the association has begun to send medical supplies to the area.
On the cold night when the boat that sailed alongside his sank, watching friends and acquaintances die, Chukwuka made a promise: to do something for his people if he survived. So he did not think of being a priest. “In my boat we were 96 people, and in another boat, 132. In ours nothing happened, but in the other they all died. When you see this and you can’t do anything, you realize that it can happen to you too. We made promises asking God for life, ”he explains.
He asked for money and managed to leave Algeciras. “It was the time of the pesetas, with 2,000 I was able to get to Murcia”, he recounts. There she met other immigrants who went to church and, following her mother’s advice, she began to go there and she met the priest who brought her to the seminary. The most difficult thing was telling her girlfriend that she wanted to be a seminarian.
Before being ordained a priest, he had worked in agricultural fields, in construction and in warehouses and had always kept his boat in mind: “It broke my heart to see the suffering of some boys who arrive in Spain and of the people who lost their lives.” In his memory he has in mind a boy, the only male in a family, who told him in Tangier that if he died, his parents would think that he had arrived in Europe and that he had abandoned them. “The boy got into the boat and died in the sea. Perhaps – the priest continues – the parents are waiting for his son to return home. I realized that we can do something. And with the help of my colleagues, friends that I have here and who are Spanish, we decided to create the Hope Emeka association”. His goal is to train nurses, electricians or carpenters in Africa so that young people do not suffer the same hardships that he has had to go through.
The vice president of the association, Isabel Carpena, says that the name of the entity is Hope, hope in English, and Emeka, which in the Kennet dialect means “what God wants”. Emeka is also the name of a Kennet brother.
The priest is determined that young Nigerians know first-hand the risks of giving strangers all their money to embark on a boat. He frequently travels to his country to give conferences and speak with young people. He explains to them that it is not true that it is easy to enter Spain, that it is a lie that at the time of prayers the Moroccan guard does not watch, that the Civil Guard handed over the Moroccan guard. He tells them about the famine in prison in Morocco, about the deportation announcement that was not fulfilled because the police took them in a truck to the desert…
“I am fighting evil and at the same time asking you not to risk your life. If they stay in Nigeria, trained in a trade, they bring more to their families,” she says. And he adds that, even if fences are put up, many immigrants will continue to leave Africa. “The story continues: many are going to lose their lives and others will make it inside.”