By Omar Bah
Gambian teenager Gibbi Jallow survived a five-day pirogue journey from Senegal to the Canary Islands at 14. The Atlantic spared him. Weeks later, a wave on a beach in Fuerteventura broke his neck against the sand and left him tetraplegic.
His story is now told in ‘Waves like Mountains’, a book by Spanish journalist Loreto Gutiérrez Prats, presented Monday at Casa África in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Gutiérrez said she started researching 30 years of the Canary migratory route, but the project changed when she met Jallow through Calixto Herrera, a psychopedagogue at the General Directorate of Child and Family Protection.
“It was clear to me that it was a story that deserved to be told and that it had to be told,” Gutiérrez said, describing the work as “calm journalism,” far from the urgency of daily news.
The book intertwines Jallow’s childhood in The Gambia, his dreams, his family, the pirogue crossing and his medical recovery with key milestones of irregular migration to the Canaries — from the first boat in Fuerteventura in 1994 to the 2024 crisis when more than 43,000 people arrived in the archipelago.
“His story is not just one of personal tragedy. It is also the expression of many others: those who undertake the journey, those who survive, and those who, even reaching the shore, continue to face enormous difficulties,” Gutiérrez writes in the introduction.
Jallow arrived by pirogue in El Hierro and was later transferred to Fuerteventura, where he suffered the accident while playing on the beach with other minors from the reception centre.
He spent two years hospitalised at the Insular Hospital of Gran Canaria and now resides at the Ciudad San Juan de Dios comprehensive care center for people with special needs in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Herrera, who met him during an emotional support programme at the hospital, says Jallow is now part of his family.
Jallow considers him his father.
“As he himself says: ‘My life is not easy’, because he has to endure neuropathic pain that is chronic and there are times when the pain wins, wins the game and despair comes, sadness comes, but we are there. And there are moments when Gibbi’s bravery, generosity and strength win the game,” Herrera said.
Jallow, who due to difficulty speaking did not address the press Monday, says under one of the photographs in the book: “I know I will never walk again, but sometimes I have to try hard not to think about it.”
Deputy Counselor of the Cabinet of the President of the Canary Islands, Octavio Caraballo, said stories like Gibbi’s expose the realities migrants face.
“In his very dramatic case, because he becomes a quadriplegic in Fuerteventura, alone, without his family, although with a brother who lives here, and we thought it was appropriate for that story to be known,” he said.
Caraballo noted the book also links Jallow’s story to Canary Islanders’ own migration to America.
“We are proud of the epic of our grandparents’ journey and, on the other hand, when we refer to current migrations, we use another type of perspective, and we believe that perspective cannot be lost,” he said.
Gutiérrez said the title comes from Jallow himself, speaking from his bed at the Guttmann Institute of Neurorehabilitation in Barcelona, describing the sea walls on his crossing as waves “like mountains.”