Cemetery for unlucky strangers

This year 462 people have already died while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to start a new life in Europe (a total of 33,761 in the past 18 years). Most of these refugees and migrants took small smuggling boats between Libya and Italy. Some of the drowned wash ashore on Tunisian beaches.

In this video, an Al Jazeera reporter talks to Chamseddine Marzoug, a fisherman and volunteer at the Tunisian Red Crescent. He has buried around 400 drowned strangers at a cemetery in Southern Tunisia. The cemetery, a former garbage dump, looks messy. The graves are unmarked and there are no facilities for collecting DNA.

After my visit to this same cemetery about 1.5 years ago and my article about it for Al Jazeera, a large number of international and local media have covered this story in various languages. Despite all this interest and Marzoug's efforts to seek help from the international community, the cemetery is still in a bad shape and there is still no way to identify the bodies. In the meantime, the cemetery has started filling up and Marzoug and other volunteers are trying to raise money to buy another plot of land.

Right now, only one of the deceased is known by name: Rose-Marie, a 28-year-old Nigerian teacher, whose husband identified her. Marzoug would like to be able to test the people's DNA and have a room to keep people's belongings. 

If their relatives come looking for them one day, they can find them and the things they have left behind.

Marzoug's sons recently migrated illegally to Europe. Knowing how dangerous it is to cross the sea, he would have stopped them had he known about their plans beforehand, he told the BBC last month.

At the same time, it's a bit of a dilemma. In Africa, including my home country here, there is not much hope for young people. They can't see a future.

He told Al Jazeera: "Maybe the work I'm doing for the dead helps my sons in some way. Maybe the spirits of the deceased prayed for them to reach Europe safely."