A VOICE IN THE NIGHT
IT IS ALMOST COMPLETELY DARK in Ángeles De Andrés’s sixth-floor apartment. A nightlight reflects off a 3-foot statue of the Madonna, which is flanked by porcelain angels. A red kilim covers the wooden floor.
Dressed in sweatpants and a blue shirt, De Andrés sits on her living room couch beside her fluffy white dog, Lana. The lights of the Galician port city of Vigo glow in the distance, though it is hard to make out the harbor through the diaphanous curtains. The massive wooden coffee table in front of her is covered with maps of the Aegean Sea; it takes up so much space that it is difficult to navigate the room.
She flicks her tablet with the little finger of her right hand, and her gaze intensifies in the light of the screen. Messages have been coming in throughout the day, via the instant messaging service WhatsApp, from refugees in Europe, Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. A Syrian man named Kawa Horo, who is currently living in Sweden, has sent photographs of a Syrian refugee in Turkey who is injured. “This young man has a broken neck and needs a device for treatment,” he wrote to De Andrés. “Can we help him[?]”
Many people reach out to De Andrés this way, all of them seeking help and in varying stages of distress—a group of 30 Syrians lost on a raft in the Aegean, an Iraqi family without a place to stay in Erbil. Nearly 1.5 million refugees and migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere have arrived in Europe by boat since 2015, according to the U.N. refugee agency; more than 11,000 have perished on the high seas in the attempt. Though the flow of migrants making the crossing has consistently declined since 2016, thousands are
