BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — The children sometimes won’t stop crying. Health workers dealing with migrants arriving on Spain’s Canary Islands try to understand if the tears are from illness, injury or, as is often the case, from pure shock.
One young Senegalese boy who disembarked recently kept fainting every few minutes, troubling doctors who couldn’t determine the cause. Other migrants finally explained: the boy had witnessed both parents die during the arduous boat voyage from West Africa. Their bodies were thrown overboard into the Atlantic Ocean.
“There’s no medicine for that,” said Inmaculada Mora Peces, a 54-year-old emergency doctor who treats migrants arriving on the island of El Hierro.
Mora Peces is among a growing number of people sounding the alarm as the archipelago struggles to deal with thousands of teenagers and children traveling alone to the European Union territory from Senegal, Mali, and other African nations,…