“I’m building the house for my children”

After the Second World War Sine Plambech’s grandfather was unemployed mason. He saw an ad in the newspaper that a big American company was looking for labor in their cobber mine in Northern Rhodesia. So he and his family decided to try their luck in Africa. He brought his wife and two 2- and 13-year-old sons with him to Africa and lived and worked there for nine years. His hard work in the cobber mine made it possible for the family to save up enough money to buy a small, terraced house near Copenhagen. In 2013 Vivian Lyenemwgumena kissed her two 2- and 3-year-old boys goodbye and started her trip from Nigeria towards Europe. She crossed the Sahara Desert in a truck, she worked in a brothel in Libya for two years and then nine months pregnant she crossed the Mediterranean in an overfilled boat. The trip from Nigeria to Europe took almost three years and could easily have costed her her life. Vivian is one of the many Nigerian women that feel forced to leave their children to be able to secure them a better future. In this podcast we talk about how Vivian’s and Sine’s stories though very different are rooted in the same global inequalities and colonial legacies. Experts: Senior researcher Sine Plambech & Vivian Lyenemwgumena Host, editing and manuscript: Marie Barse