Amine and Yassir

Rabat, Morocco.
Between February 16, 2023, when the first two frames were captured, and December 18, 2024, the faces of Amine and Yassir grew older, but their world did not grow any larger.
I first met them one biting evening at Rabat Beach. They had just come out of the water, shivering yet smiling, their spirits seemingly untouched by the weight pressing upon their lives. They told me they were alone, having fled a foster care system where they had suffered abuse. To them, the street felt safer than the institutions meant to protect them. Their plan was simple and desperate: sell tissues, save coins, go North, and attempt to cross the sea to Europe on their own.
Nearly two years later, a chance encounter through a friend reunited us. The boys had grown taller, their features sharper, but their story remained the same. They had reached the North. They had tried the border. They had failed. Sent back to the foster care system they once fled, they escaped it again, and when I met them in Rabat, they slept on flattened cardboard, in the city’s shadows.

They should be in classrooms, not calculating the risk of a clandestine boat crossing. They should be protected by the institutions designed to catch them, not run from them. As they wait for a future that feels a continent away, they remain caught in a cycle of survival, dreaming of a shore that stays just out of reach.

Amine and Yassir, your names deserve to be spoken. Your faces deserve to be seen. I do not know where tomorrow will take you. But today, you are here.