Patricia is sobbing over the phone.
About a dozen Tunisian policemen came to her camp this morning to tell her and the other refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants living rough in the olive fields outside of Sfax, a coastal city in Tunisia, that they had to leave.
They gave them 48 hours.
The police didn’t tell them where to go, only that they couldn’t move to any of the 15 or so camps that have grown outside of the city since police first expelled its refugee population in September 2023.
Patricia, a nurse, had been working for months from her makeshift clinic at Kilometre 33 – named, like all the temporary settlements outside of Sfax, for its distance from the city.
Now she doesn’t know where she, or the old, the infirm, or the children and the nursing mothers who congregate around her clinic, will go. No one has any illusions about what will happen at the end of the deadline.
Other camps swept up in the three-week-old police operation to clear the olive fields have been demolished with heavy equipment and burned. Anyone resisting has been arrested.
“I don’t know what I will do,” she says. “I don’t know where I will go.”
Patricia and others had hoped their camp might be safe. The elders, or “stakeholders”, who settle disputes between camp residents, had contacted security officials, imploring them to spare the relatively quiet Kilometre 33.
It hasn’t worked.
Now, she must wait for either help or the arrival of the police.
A few months ago, she applied to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to go home to Sierra Leone.
She is still waiting for a response.
Life as a midwife
Speaking to Al Jazeera a few days earlier, amid the clamour of her clinic, Patricia had described wanting to be a nurse since she was a girl living with her parents and younger sister in northern Sierra Leone’s Makeni.
She remembered her father, a driver for a mobile telephone network, taking her on trips from Makeni to the family’s village, where she would see how other children lived.
“I would take water and medicine to the children and tell them how important it was to take their medicine,” she said.
“There was a nurse there, Aisha, who I would help. She told my daddy: ‘Watch her. This one will be a nurse.’”
Patricia qualified as a nurse and ultimately decided to focus on midwifery.
“I’m still a nurse here. I have my licence with me,” she said, describing how she takes her qualifications with her to plead at nearby pharmacies for the medicines she needs to treat others at the settlement.
“My daddy was so happy when I graduated [in 2020]. He thought everything was going to be OK. I wanted especially to be a midwife. I liked the deliveries and working with children,” she said.
However, Patricia’s world ended on April 22, 2022, when her father was in a car accident.
Without the funds to pay for his treatment, the hospital where Patricia had worked for years refused to treat him, simply offering him a bed where, a few days later, he died.
Walking for days without water
A phone call from a friend after her father’s death changed her life’s course.
The unnamed man, from her family’s village, had made the journey through Tunisia to Europe seven years ago and was ready to help.
Patricia recalled the conversation. “He said: ‘You have nothing, how can you survive?’ and asked me if I would like to go on this journey [to Europe]. I said, I have no money, and he said it was OK. He would pay, but I could not fly. I would have to take transport and walk.”
Finding transport to take Patricia through Guinea and Mali was straightforward. But in Algeria, she had to walk.
“Sometimes we would walk for days, we had no water. I saw people die. Sometimes my friend would call me and give me courage. He would say: ‘You have to go on.’ But it was so hard.”
Eventually, in April 2024, the young woman who had never left her home country crossed into Tunisia and met the smugglers, or “bogan”, who took her to Kilometre 33, then to three failed crossings to Europe and, now, total uncertainty.
“[When I arrived] They said we’ll leave tomorrow,” she recalls. “I looked around and saw all the people with no food or shelter, and thought, if they can do it, I can do it for one night.”
But “then [a smuggler] brought the plastic [to set up a shelter] and I thought, why do we need this if it’s only for one night?”
“The next day, he said the weather was bad … every time, there was an excuse.”
More calls were made by Patricia and her friend, and more smugglers were contacted. In June, a little over two months after she arrived, she attempted the first of three failed crossings to Europe.
The third, just last month after a second attempt in October, saw her and others reach international waters, only to be pulled back by Tunisian security forces and dumped without phones, money or directions, in the desert.
“We were there for 16 days. I often felt like dying. There was no sign of rescue.
“All around us were bad people; the police, the Tunisian mafia [robbers who attacked, hoping they had something to steal],” she says.
There will not be a fourth crossing, she says.
Unclear ‘how human rights respected’
Throughout her time in Tunisia, the authorities have harassed people living in the camps outside Sfax.
Now, reportedly under the personal direction of President Kais Saied, they have promised to clear them all, justifying it as a response to Tunisian farmers’ complaints that they are unable to access their olive groves.
Announcing the programme in early April, a National Guard spokesperson said camps in the al-Amra and Jebeniana areas, north of Sfax, had already been cleared “peacefully”, with the support of the Red Crescent, the Health Ministry and the Civil Protection agency.
About 4,000 people of various nationalities had left one camp, they said, with an unspecified number “dispersed into the countryside” and health authorities taking charge of pregnant women and the infirm.
However, none of the refugees Al Jazeera spoke to after the operation knew of any assistance being offered to the vulnerable.
Tunisia’s Ministry of the Interior, which oversees both the police and the National Guard, has yet to respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
“[Authorities are] trying to frame their latest operation, which was accompanied by a propaganda campaign, as … supposedly respecting human rights,” Romdhane Ben Amor, of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES), said.
“It’s unclear how human rights are being respected with bulldozers, heavy machinery and actions like burning the small cloth or plastic tents of migrants,” he said.
Destination unknown
The current location of many of the people expelled from the camps remains unclear.
Al Jazeera spoke to some who say they are still wandering the olive fields, hiding from the police.
Ben Amor suspects others have been bussed to the border with Algeria and abandoned in the desert, something that has happened before.
The question of where these people may have ended up, or where Patricia may go, has not been posed by the national press, which is more focused on what Ben Amor describes as “propaganda” justifying bulldozing camps.
Speaking to a radio station earlier this month, Member of Parliament Tarek Mahdi channelled the president’s claims that Tunisia was in “imminent danger”, made in February 2023, as “births among migrant women have reached 6,000 births in a short time”.
Patricia, on the other hand, just wants to know where she and her patients will sleep in two nights’ time.
She cannot face continuing her journey to Europe, and officials have yet to contact her about returning home.
“Why do they want to hurt us?” she asked. “We are humans, too.
“All that is different is the colour of our skin.”
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