The Long Road Home
Since 2003, the year that Jaime Sanchez left his country, his
sister Juana had been trying to get help so that her 43-year-old
brother could return home.
She approached the corresponding authorities at the time, but
her petition was not received. Then on 26 August 2007, Juana
managed to deliver a letter to President Rafael Correa asking for
his assistance, along with a photo of her brother and his
children.
"I found out that the President was going to be at the 28th of
May School in the Pascuales District promoting a programme to
prevent dengue fever, so I personally went there and handed him the
letter," recalls Juana.
On 13 September she received an official reply confirming that
her brother would receive assistance to return home from the
National Secretariat for Migrants (SENAMI, by its Spanish
acronym).
Before leaving Ecuador, Jaime Sanchez worked as a security guard
in the city of Esmeraldas, earning a meager monthly salary of USD
120, which he stretched as best he could in order to provide for
his wife Mirella and their three children.
Jaime left for South Africa on a ship as a stowaway in search of
economic opportunities and a better future for his family. A
friend had told him there was a lot of work in the diamond and gold
mines. "It was a long and difficult journey," Jaime
says. "I left Esmeraldas with my passport, but right after I
arrived in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, I was robbed and they
took my suitcase and my papers. From that moment, I wanted to
return to my country."
Once in Maputo, and later in South Africa, Jaime could not find
work because he was undocumented and because he did not speak the
language. He managed to get sporadic jobs as a mason, a
garbage collector, and as a mechanic's assistant, but because of
his lack of papers, the work was poorly paid and barely allowed him
to survive.
After receiving the letter from Juana, SENAMI contacted the IOM
Mission in Ecuador so that IOM's worldwide presence could assist in
locating Jaime who had been detained as an undocumented migrant by
South African authorities on 22 November 2007.
In two weeks, IOM managed to locate Jaime in a jail in Durban,
South Africa. Immediately, Ecuador's Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Trade and Integration, through its Permanent Mission in
Geneva, processed the necessary travel documents so that Jaime
could be liberated and return to Ecuador.
And on 3 January 2008, Jaime's family received the best New
Year's present: he was reunited with his family in Guayaquil.
Once back in his hometown, Jaime told IOM staff, "I left Ecuador
four years ago, full of hope and dreams, prepared to make money to
provide for my family, but everything went wrong. Things
aren't as they seem or as people tell you. I lost four
years. I lost the chance to see my children grow up, to be
with my wife and my family. Now I have learned that here, in
my country, I can still live well."
IOM Ecuador provided voluntary return assistance to Mr. Sanchez
through the IOM Stranded Migrant Facility.
IOM is frequently requested at very short notice by governments
and international agencies to provide humanitarian emergency
assistance to migrants, particularly those who find themselves in
difficult migratory circumstances for which funding is not readily
available. The IOM Stranded Migrant Facility, created in 2005,
provides a flexible and quick humanitarian assistance to stranded
migrants in difficult circumstances for whom support is not readily
available from existing programmes. The increasing demand for such
assistance is straining IOM's limited resources so that it
sometimes finds itself without sufficient funding to positively
respond to many requests – global, timely and effective
responses.