Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Anna Badkin is a writer and essayist who has spent most of her life in the global south.

Her books include Fisherman's Blues,

a West African community at sea, and Walking with Abel,

journeys with the nomads of the African Savannah.

She has written about a dozen wars on three continents.

In this essay for our ongoing series of migration, Anna asks, when does a journey begin?

As she encounters climate refugees traveling north of the Ethiopian capital, she considers

the impossibility of escape when the forces of climate catastrophe and colonial greed combined to trap the world's

most vulnerable populations.

He didn't catch the name of the Saudi town where he was headed, where he had hoped to find work in a foundry. Then again, he never did reach it. First, he said,

the smugglers beat him, where he clung to the bulwarks of their open fishing boat. They ordered him

and the other passengers to spit out the balance of the smuggling fee for their illicit voyage across the Gulf of

Adon. $1,400 a head. Fourteen hundred dollars his whole family had raised over several meager

harvests of tomatoes and sorghum and teff, or else they would be made fodder for the heavy

stacked waves that mawed and

slobbered at the boat over the five-hour passage across the toppling seas.

Then they threshed out the pitiable viatacum he had saved for the journey.

At last, he and the other seasick travelers slammed ashore in Yemen and bordered the

trucks that drove them across the desert to Saudi Arabia. But hardly had they crossed the border

...