“The first time I saw the sea was at night; and I, on board a raft with 124 people”. Born in a village in the interior of Senegal, Mamadou Sow (Tambacounda, 1991) landed in the summer of 2007 in El Hierro, in the Canary Islands, thanks to a tourist boat that spotted his adrift raft. He traveled from the capital, Dakar, with the help of an older brother, without the permission of his mother, the widow of his father. “In my village, everyone who had a house or a car had migrated to Europe or the United States”.