In Italy, the choir of migrants and locals tell the story of Venice Arts and Culture

The prince, also known as his Dellyswagz, heard about the choir through a friend who was a member when he moved to Venice for the first time in 2017. He was a singer in Nigeria, and his friend told him that he was a good society, and that he could help him in stability. When he arrived for the first time, they gave him clothes, helped him find work and provided him with legal assistance to start a visa.

He is now 38 years old, a beast, but when he sings, he swings with a feeling, thwarts the lyrics of songs, his voice strains and almost explodes. It is worn with blue glasses in blue, a black leather news hat and a full jeans. “Like the king,” he says smiling.

Soon after his birth, his parents separated, and the main care presenter was his mother’s father, who was very close to him. When his grandfather died in 2011, the prince was no longer relations with the Lagos suburb where he grew up, and in 2015 he decided to cross the desert and the Mediterranean in search of a better life.

“I grew up a boy, your mother should pray a lot for you,” he explains. “Either you become a thug or a mafia.”

He lives in a joint apartment in Padua, 40 km (25 miles) outside the gun, where he moved after he lost his job in a factory and expelled because he had no papers yet. Its bedroom is doubled for recording, as it is based on a confusion with a large screen, and it records and produces the Africa songs for his first album.

In Nigeria, he was a professional dance teacher, through most successful novels, yet he felt that there was no future there. Friends and family had already left, including his father, who lived in the United Kingdom, yet he did not think about leaving until his uncle, who was living in Austria, called and suggested that the trip be made with his uncle’s wife and three cousins. The prince gave loudspeakers, clothes and sports shoes to his students. Along with his family, he saved thousands of dollars. He did not attend anything and told his parents that he had already decided.

He says in a dangerous expression: “The journey was fatal.” “My story comes with a lot of pain and loss.”

He spent the first three weeks on a large truck supported by dozens of people. They traveled across the desert and slept on the sand every night. Some had to drink their urine, and tell, because they did not bring enough water, and along the way, he saw bodies in the sand. “I cannot calculate the number of burial,” says without feelings, referring to the people who died on the trip. “We have used the sand to cover them. There are no details of a name or family to call it.”

From Libya, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean on a boat eight times. The entire trip took to Italy for two years. Once, they were kidnapped by pirates when they were on a boat and released two months later after paying a ransom. Once again, he was reservations in a Libyan prison for four months. At some point, the money ran out, and worked as a seven -month security guard in a complex carrying refugees and migrants.

Then, in October 2016, he and his family members tried to cross the Mediterranean. They gathered on a wooden boat with more than 200 passengers on the plane. In the middle of the night, the water began to enter the boat, and began to drown. As it turned, people fell into the water. The prince jumped to save his cousins. The sea was freezing, and everyone was screaming and screaming around it, and remembering the dark water that lit up from the stars. By the time when his 14 -year -old cousin was said, it was too late. She sank because she did not know how to swim.

He was carrying her margin, who was floating on his chest with a life jacket supported behind his neck when he was estimated that he was 25 hours before he and the other survivors, including the rest of his family, were saved by the fishermen and returned to Libya.

“I didn’t even know that I was rescued because I was very tired,” he says. “My eyes were white. I no longer see more because of the sea, salt. I was very tired.” The prince and his family were not able to bury Sandra because he says that her body was stolen by people’s smugglers.

In Libya, a fisherman from Gambia taught him how to use a compass, and on his last journey, the explorer was telling the boat commander in any direction. Their boat was intercepted by a rescue boat off the coast of Lambidosa. “The journey is not something I wish for the worst enemy of me,” he says, shaking his head. The rest of his family, who went forward separately, went to different parts of Italy and Austria.

The prince tried to live with his sister in Austria, but when the authorities threatened to deport him, he was returned to Italy, where the issue of asylum was suspended. His journey fell in Venice. The reason is not known.

Life in Italy was difficult, he says. His father had warned him against living as a migrant, and told him before leaving, “It is better to be a free man in your country than the servant abroad.” The prince started to agree with him. When he was expelled from his apartment, he was homeless for seven months, sleeping on friends of friends and in a garage.

For him, there is nothing special for the gun. “All I do is go to work and return home, go to work, and return home,” he says. If he could do everything again, he says, he would stay in Nigeria.

These days, he has a new function, but it is a stressful nightpiece with a long transition that reduces the time to make it in music. To save money, learn to live on one meal a day and stop drawing, another favorite hobby. The choir is the only time he enjoys himself. “When I sing with them, I always smile, because this is the only time I could be myself.”