I don’t frequent 2p2 often anymore so I only just saw the other PCA thread now. I had a somewhat similar, but worse/different experience in some ways. It happened a while ago and I’ve moved on from poker and this experience so I’ve chosen to make a new screen name to tell it. If for some reason I need to verify I’m not just a troll, and need people to vouch for me, I can do so very easily in private. If you know who I am, please don’t write it in the thread, if I want to post it or want anyone to specifically to know who I am, I will do it myself.
Reading the other post made me a bit sad because it’s flooded with comments about the victims being idiots for not declaring their money, and overlooking the bigger, more important problems. My experience was different, and hopefully my story will highlight the bigger issues a little bit better. Bare with me, I haven’t thought about the full experience in depth like this in a long time so it’s going to be long, and I’m writing it as a stream of consciousness as chronologically as I can. I’ve never written my full experience so I’m sort of doing it for myself as well to let it all out there. Sorry if I get off track or dwell on trivial things… so much happened that it’s hard to decide what to keep or leave out.
I’m going to separate it into parts, so if it’s super TL;DR skip to the section about the camp.
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PART 1: Customs
So I was a pro-MTT player, I won my seat for the PCA online as most of us do, and I decided to make it more of a vacation planning to only play 1-2 days and bring a friend to tag along and take advantage of the free hotel and spending money. I’m not a live player, I play 95% online and have very little experience playing live. I ended up cashing in a side event for a modest amount of cash in the last day or 2 of the trip, just under $20k. Because of my inexperience, I asked some friends who are live pro’s and had a lot of experience travelling with sums of money like this what I should do. They pretty much all agreed that bank wire or any electronic means of transfer was out of the question because the fee would be too much, and that I should just bring it back. I asked about declaring it, and they said actually because I’m travelling with a friend and I have under $20k I can just give them a few thousand so that I’m under $10k and don’t have to declare. Sounds reasonable, I had declared goods in the past while travelling and I knew that customs security can be a hassle at times, and the law is that you only have to declare if you have $10k on you, so I should be all good.
Fast forward to the airport, my friend goes ahead of me in the customs line, they talk to the agent and go through all good. I go up, one of the first questions is:
“How much money do you have?”
Me: “About $8000 USD and some of my own currency”
“Ok come with us”
They take me back to secondary customs. It’s COMPLETELY packed back there. I looked around at the time and saw tons of poker players I recognized, pure poker pro’s. I’m standing their waiting to be called, and about 15 minutes later my friend comes in.
“Oh I thought they let you through?”
“Yea but some guys came and got me when I was sitting at the gate and told me to come back here.”
Hmm, kinda strange. Luckily we arrived way in advance being used to a lot larger airports, a bit more than 3 hours, so plenty of time to get to our flight still. After 15-20 minutes, they call both of us up, and they tell us to go to separate rooms. They ask how much money I had again,
“$8000 USD and some of my own currency”.
They get me to take it all out and count it. Then they ask:
“How much money does your friend have?”
“Not sure, about $6000-$7000.”
“Is any of that yours?”
“Yep some of it.”
“Ok thank you.” And he asks me to leave the money there and go back out and take a seat.
I go out, my friend comes out a bit later. Same thing happened. They also said that some of their money was mine. Why would we lie? We had under $10k on us, we assumed everything we were doing was fine, there was no reason to give an alibi. Before people reply “LOL WHY DID YOU TELL THEM THE TRUTH IDIOT?”, well, because generally when you think what you’re doing is fine, you don’t just lie about it by default. And, given how it played out it would have been worse if we lied and got caught.
So we’re sitting down waiting still. 1 hour passes. 2 hours. Out flight is getting close. It’s still packed in there, and I try to mention my flight is coming up and the officers just yell “SIT DOWN!” and are generally pretty angry if you try to approach them but also seem super under-staffed relative to the influx of people there. After being there for a couple hours I noticed a lot of familiar faces, tons of online and live pro’s. At first I was like oh cool it’s not just me. But after a bit I realized that nearly EVERYONE who went back to customs was a male aged 20-40. There were no girls, families, it was strictly dudes in this demographic. It seemed obvious that they were grabbing poker players (or people who looked like poker players) and sending them back. I heard A LOT of complaints from players saying:
“WTF I only have $500 on me, why am I back here? My flight’s about to leave” and
“I only have poker chips, why am I back here?”
Seemingly they weren’t just grabbing people with a lot of money. At the time I didn’t really think about it, but in retrospect given how it played out and other information I learned, they were clearly tipped off about their being a poker tournament and trying harder than normal to catch people with money.
So our flight is about 20 minutes away. They finally call us, and split us into different rooms again. I go to a room with a customs agent and I quickly explain that my flight is pretty close and asked if I could do anything to speed up the process. He informed me that unfortunately I was going to miss my flight because I was under arrest. Now I’m like WTF and getting a bit freaked out. What am I under arrest for? False declaration. He then turns a small camera towards me and tells me he needs to record our conversation. He starts asking me questions about why I didn’t declare and everything. I told him the truth; I didn’t think I had to and I didn’t see a reason to declare if I thought I legitimately didn’t have to. He asked why I was travelling to the U.S., if I was trying to avoid paying taxes on my winnings. I explained that I just had a connecting flight in the U.S. and there are no taxes on poker winnings in my country. He said we committed a very serious offence by not declaring my winnings. He made me give an account of exactly what happened and why we each had some money and everything. Then he takes me to another room, and said he was turning me over to Bahamian authorities. There were two police officers there. The did a full strip search, and there was a weird moment where the two debated a cavity search but decided it wasn’t necessary. Little did I know this wasn’t the last time where I’d have authorities sort of deciding what to do as they want seemingly with a lack of set protocol.
PART 2: Jail and Court
We get taken to the airport jail in hand cuffs. They get us to testify about what we did. They asked a bunch of leading questions and kept changing the exact wording of what I said to make it a more clear admission of guilt, like we were intending to break the law and purposely split money to circumvent their customs system to avoid having to pay all of the taxes we didn’t have to pay. They said I’d have to show up to court in the morning, and they were going to put us in jail for the night. BUT they only had 1 free cell in the airport jail, so they’d have to split us up and take one of us to the bigger jail in Nassau. I really didn’t like the idea of being split up at this point, and I asked if we could post bail or something?
“Sure, do you have any cash?”
“You guys have it all in a ziploc bag there.”
“You can’t use that because it’s evidence.”
“I have a credit card.”
“What’s the limit?”
(I perhaps stupidly said) “$5000”
“Oh too bad, bail is $6000” (I feel like this was intentional but who knows)
“Can I get someone else to bring me money?”
“Sure about you have to get a hold of them in the next 15 minutes because it’s getting late”. - We arrived at the airport around 9am that morning and it was about 8PM at this point.
I frantically think of who I could call that might be in the Bahamas still and have $6000 cash. It was the last day of PCA and I knew most of my friends and acquaintances had left. But luckily one friend had stuck around because it was a Sunday and decided to stay and play the Sunday majors from there. I called them, they answered, I gave them the cliff notes quickly being sure to emphasize that it was a pretty big emergency and I would explain when I got back to the hotel. They said they had me no problem and came through with the money to bail us out. I was so damn thankful having dodged the bullet of not having to stay in a Bahamian jail. I was having nightmares of getting beat up or injured or something there, I had no idea what to expect but I’m sure it wouldn’t be a nice place to spend the night.
We get back to the hotel close to midnight. The court date was the next morning around 8am or something to see what was going to happen to us. I decided to google as much as I could about it. I found A LOT of cases of it happening to people. 1 case went into detail about someone who declared not guilty and their bail was set to $30k. I found information on a lawyer and decided I’d get up early and contact them.
Next morning, I do just that. The lawyer said he would speak to me so I take a taxi over, he goes over what paper work I had with me, and basically said my best bet is to plead guilty and explain that I’m a student and it was an innocent mistake and hopefully they’ll hit me with a small fine and no actual charge. If I plead not guilty I’d be sent back to jail until I was bailed out, and the bail would be mid-5 figures for both of us. Alright, easy decision I guess.
Go to court, did exactly what he said, plead my case, and the judge said:
“Alright I understand it was a mistake, but it was still a serious crime so I can’t just do nothing about it. So I’m going to give you a warning, and a fine of “$XX,XXX” [100% of the money].”
I was like WTF the fine is ALL of the money? I tried to get some sympathy saying I was a student, which I was, and he basically just said too bad you learned a tough lesson today. I didn’t push it any further because in the end it was just money, and I was more than happy just to GTFO of the Bahamas at that point.
So we finalize what we needed to do, get our passports back, and the bail money that my friend posted for me, and we had our taxi still waiting at the courthouse doors. We went to leave, relieved that it was finally over with even though I knew the fine would maybe sting a bit later. Just as we get to the door, literally 20 feet from our taxi, someone grabs my arm. It’s a woman in a suit. She explains that she’s an immigration officer, and that we’re free to leave but we just have to take care of a few things.
PART 3: Jail again?
She takes us across the street to a jailhouse. She explained she just had to talk to the head guy there and make sure there wasn’t anything else we needed to do. She takes us in there and this place is ROWDY. There’s about 50-60 Bahamian men in a pretty small cell yelling and being belligerent. The immigration officer takes us into the “office” where a fat Jabba the Hutt looking police officer was sitting, apparently the man in charge of the jailhouse. She explained our situation, how we got off with a warning and paid our fine, and we had no outstanding charges, and asked if there was anything else we needed to do before we left. He looks us up and down and says,
“I don’t know, I’m pretty busy right now. Put them in the cell and we’ll figure it out later.”
WTF?? I just went to court, got a warning, paid my fine, the judge said we were free to go. Why are we going back to a cell? I’m start to lightweight freak out, and I’m like,
“no no, PLEASE, I’ve already paid my fine I just want to go home, I’m going to go straight to the airport”
He didn’t care about my pleas and reiterated for the other officers to put us in the cell. The immigrations officer seemed to sense the urgency in my voice, and maybe sensed that it wouldn’t be a good situation for us as foreigners stuck in one big cell with a bunch of Bahamian criminals with nothing separating us, and had some pity on us so she piped up,
Immigration woman - “Actually, let me talk to my partners, maybe we can escort them”
Jabba - “No we can take care of them, just leave them here”
Immigration woman - “No I insist, let me talk to them and I’ll be right back”
Jabba seemed to not take her seriously and asked a couple of the other officers to start taking our finger prints. As they’re processing us to take us in, the immigration officer comes back and informs us they could take us. We thanked her profusely as she lead us out. Jabba seemed a bit disappointed that we were leaving. One last observation, it struck me as very weird that they were just kind of making up what to do with us, and that there didn’t seem to be a legit protocol for the situation. It kind of drilled home that even though it was a beautiful country and they have a decent economy, I wasn’t in exactly in a first world country anymore.
PART 4: Immigration
The immigration officers helped us get out stuff from the taxi that had been waiting there for over an hour and thankfully didn’t just drive off with our luggage, and loaded us into their van. They said we just had to stop by their HQ first to tell them they were driving us to the airport. They asked if we were hungry and truthfully we were a bit too shook up to have an appetite but we only ate once in over 24 hours at that point so we said yes, and they took us to get Chinese food takeout with them. Finally some nice people. We finish eating and head to their HQ, chatted it up with the 3 immigration officers who actually were really chill and asked us a bunch about poker and where we were from and stuff. We got to immigration HQ and one of them jumped out and went to tell them they were escorting us to the airport. They went in, and we talked to the other two immigration officers. 10 minutes passed, 20 minutes passed. The other officers were commenting how long it was taking and speculating as to what was taking so long. Then finally the other officer came out and came back in the vehicle…
“So… I’ve got some bad news.”
My heart sunk. “Uh oh, what is it?”
“So they said we’re not allowed to take you to the airport today. They only let us escort people to the airport on Fridays.”
“Umm, ok… so do we have to get a hotel until then or what?”
“No, we have to keep you in our custody. We have a place you can stay though.”
“Ok… where is it?”
“It’s just on the outskirts of town, it’s like a dorm, you can buy food and stuff there it’s not so bad.”
Alright… This is a bit of a set back. Up until this point I had told my parents back home that we just missed our flight and had to stay an extra night. I didn’t want to worry them, but I had no idea it was going to get as bad as it did either. My friend already missed their first day back to work, so they were freaking out because they were going to miss the whole week now, and for whatever reason it was at the time they couldn’t contact their boss to tell them, and didn’t know how to begin making an excuse for missing 5 days in a row unannounced.
So immigration starts taking us to where we’re staying. My friend is still freaking out about work. I’m asking questions about the place we’re staying at, and the immigration officers were a bit more quiet than they were and giving me sort of weird advice.
“When you check in, they’re going to take your phone, luggage, money, and passports for safety reasons.”
“Safety reasons…? What?” Alarm bells are going off.
“Yep. But make sure you keep a bit of money on you so you can buy stuff in there. They won’t let you have access to it again until you leave. And take all the clothes and books and stuff if you have them for the next 4 nights to entertain yourself.”
Ok, this is really strange. Why are they taking our stuff and why can’t I have access to it for the next few days? At first I was picturing a dorm, with some sort of cafeteria when they said you could buy stuff. Now I don’t know what to expect. I’m beginning to get a little worried and when we got close they pointed it out to us. I couldn’t make out exactly what it was but I saw barbed wire fences and lots of dirt… it clearly wasn’t Atlantis. Just as we were pulling in, luckily I went with my gut and decided to fire off a single text to my mom, probably the scariest one she has ever received. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote but it was something like… “Mom, I have an emergency, we problems at the border and can’t leave, I’ll explain later but contact I’m going to [X address], contact the embassy”. I tried to simultaneously express how serious the **** was that we had gotten into, while trying not to give her a full on heart attack.
PART 5: The Camp
Alright, the whole story basically leads up to this. So if you skipped everything else, please read this part.
So we get to this building and park. From where we are I can’t see the fences anymore. We go inside and it looks like a doctor’s office sort of, I felt a bit better about the situation. As the immigration officers said, the people there asked us for our phones, passports, and belongings, and told us to take what we needed out of our luggage for the next 5 days. I shoved as much as I could into my carry on, and made sure to keep $200 from the bail money on me to buy stuff at whatever shop was here. After we filled out our forms, they asked us to come with them to where we were staying. We walked outside and around the building, through a weird mini-maze of barbed wire fences/and walls. Then we turned a corner and I got a clear view of where we were staying. It was one of the scariest single moments of my life.
I looked and saw what seemed like sort of a prison yard. Multiple guards in camp with shotguns patrolling. A couple raised lookout tower type things with guards with guns in those as well. There was what looked like around 100 men all standing up holding the fence and watching as we walked in. It looked like a movie where inmates in a jail stand and watch as new blood comes in. There were 2 rows of ~15 foot tall barbed wire fence that all of the men were in, and a big rectangular concrete bunker looking thing with no doors or windows. The only thing I could reference it looking like, although it’s pretty obscure, is the Panamanian jail from the one season of Prison Break. My mind was racing and a part of me was a bit scared for my well being. I’m going into this fenced in area with over 100 rough looking people, as the only Caucasian and clearly pretty clean/well off looking… I clearly didn’t fit in. I half expected I was going to have to fight or something.
We get to the doors of the fenced in area, the guards yell “HEAD COUNT!” and everyone started organizing themselves in the dirt floor area in front of the bunker thing. A lot more people started coming out from inside so it was closer to 200 people that 100. It was super crowded. They told me to stand away from people and then they started calling out countries, which I realize is how people had organized where they were standing. They counted each person of each country then told them to go back inside. Over half were from Haiti, probably a quarter from Cuba, then there were some from Guana, Jamaica, Sri Lanka… I can’t remember the rest but those were the countries with at least a small group.
As soon as the finished the head count, a Cuban guy who looked to be in his early 30s came up and introduced himself in very broken english and a lot of hand gestures. He offered to show me around. He took me inside the building/bunker/compound type of thing first. Inside there were about 15 single bunk beds along each wall with tons of holes, springs popping out, and ripped up bedding. Stuff nobody would regularly ever keep or sleep on. In total there were about 60-70 mattresses, not nearly enough for the 170-180ish people in there. He took me to a bunk and told me to put my stuff on top. It seemed like I was lucky enough to get a bed to myself unlike a lot of people there but I didn’t think too much into it yet.
He took my outside to the yard again. He pointed to a rubber hose sticking out of the dirt with a bunch of mud around it, he told me it was our water, but don’t drink it, it will make me sick. We walked around back to a smaller building that was the bathroom/shower area. It smelled awful. There were a bunch of dirty water buckets with clothes hanging up, I guess that’s where people did laundry. We walked into the bathroom and I had to hold my breath because of the smell. It was pitch black with no lights. I noticed the floors had tons of water on them. He told me always keep my shoes on in the bathroom. I looked around and realized why it smelt so bad. The toilets were all plugged/over flowing, and there was a huge pile of literal **** in the corner… apparently people just squatted and defecated there now because the toilets we plugged. The water on the ground was a mixture of dirty toilet water, piss, and feces. I wanted to puke. That was pretty much it for the grand tour.
I didn’t want to go back inside the building so I just sat outside and talked with my friend, both of us were freaking out, trying to figure out how we can leave sooner, what we were going to drink now that the Cuban man told us the water wasn’t safe, how we were going to shower in the toxic wasteland of a bathroom. Needless to say, we were pretty rock bottom.
The entire time there was sort of a blur so it’s hard to chronologically say when all of this stuff happened, but I’ll just go over point form things I remember as I remember them:
-I didn’t really know where I was at first because I had no concept of a place like this even existing, but it turned out to be a refugee camp, as I was initially told by an older Cuban man who spoke pretty decent English. 90% of the people there were caught overstaying or in boats fleeing their country. 10% of the people had different issues, like lost passports or other things. No one was a criminal or had outstanding charges, because in that case they would be in the jail instead.
-Night 1. The sun starts to go down, and we see/hear animal outside around the bunker. They are jumping around, I thought they were rabbits at first. They turned out to be rats, huge disgusting rats, who were coming close because of all the trash and **** and everything around that they were eating. I stayed outside until they were coming way too close for comfort and headed back inside. I went to my bunk for the first time, and realized why I had a bed to myself when it was apparent most other beds had 2-3 to a bed. There was a bunch of dried blood on it. No idea why, but I just put pants and a sweater on and tried not to touch it. I didn’t fall asleep until 4am maybe. Lights out seemed to be whenever people wanted (the guards didn’t tell people to sleep or turn off the lights or anything). There was a tiny 13 inch TV there that they seemed to blare until about 3am and then they turned it down a bit but it stayed on all night.
When I finally got to sleep I woke up to something moving. Something was touching my head. I was freaked out thinking someone was touching my/attacking me in my sleep, I started swatting and something left my bunk and hit the ground. I looked when I heard it and saw it scurry away quickly. It was a rat, crawling on me in my sleep. I was on the top bunk as well, I can only imagine how many were crawling on lower people. A lot of the bunks had sheets tied from bottom bunk to top bunk making sort of walls/a tent. I guess now they were to keep the rats out.
-There were some kids there, from around ages 8 to 12 I would guess. A few with their dad, and a few for some reason didn’t have their parents there but were being taken care of by other people from their country.
-We were fed twice a day, morning and evening. Both times we would get a tiny styrofoam container (the one that’s like 1/4 the size of a normal take out container… like one you would get spring rolls in or something). Sometimes we would get a styrofoam cup of lemonade or some other kool aid type of drink. I would guess we were fed ~700-800 calories per day or something, total. A typical meal was a scoop or something… grits, oatmeal, mashed potatoes, and then some sort of canned protein like fish or canned ham or something. I remember the best meal out of the 8ish I got was a peanut butter sandwich (just 1), and the worst meal was 1 lump of mashed potatoes with anchovies (juice and all) poured on it.
-The time we got the anchovy meal, it was actually really scary because there was some tension between the staff and the other people. At most meals the Haitian people would rush to line up first and get the first serving of food, then actually in up again at the end and get seconds, until there was no food left. Someone explained that the situation in Haiti was much worse, and they weren’t guaranteed food where they were, so they ate as much as they could in the Refugee camp. They kept being deported because the Bahamas wouldn’t let them stay, and they would be back there next we, because they were TRYING to get put in the refugee camp so they got fed. They were the only ones there who actually liked it there though, everyone else wanted to leave but weren’t allowed. Anyways, when we go the anchovy meal, even the Haitian people wouldn’t eat it, people were spitting it out and throwing it on the ground. The Jamaican people were really loud/outspoken and started cursing the guards, “You devil men! You wouldn’t even feed this to your dogs! Why do you give us this garbage?”. There was a bit of unrest and the guards all lined up like they were going to do something about it. And like I said, they had shotguns and probably other weapons. Luckily it died down, but there was an hour or so of yelling and some fence shaking and threats from the guards. Scary.
-One Jamaican fellow asked how long I was staying on day 2. I said they told me I’d be gone in a few days, he told me not to shower. I said how come? He took off his shoe, and showed me his foot… It had a bunch of black spots, like small holes/scabs, like his foot was rotting sort of. I was like “WTF IS THAT??” he said he took a shower without wearing shoes and his foot got infected (presumably from walking in **** piss water) with ring worm. I don’t actually know if it was ring worm, or if that was just his guess.
-The “shop” that I was told you could buy stuff at was actually just the corner of the bunker where the Sri Lankans had set up a water boiler and gotten various snacks… Mr. Noodle, crackers, some chocolate, hot chocolate. You could buy most stuff for $2 if you had money there. I discovered they got the stuff by paying the guards to get it for them when they went on break.
-Out of desperation, I decided to do that myself. I spoke to a guard and asked if he could grab me stuff. 2 gallons of bottled water, soap, tooth paste, hand towel, big box of granola bars. Everything x2 for me and my friend. I think that was it. Probably around $30 of stuff max. I gave him $100 because I only had $100 bills. He asked if I had any more money. Inside I rolled my eyes, but I had no choice, so I gave him another $100. He brought me the stuff that night and $40 change.
-There were a lot of people who had been there for months, a few for over a year, the most was 19 months of anyone that I spoke to.
-The ones who had been the for a while seemed to have written off leaving any time soon, so they were mostly giving me advice. They kept telling me to remind the guards every day that I was to leave, and to ask to talk to the immigration officers frequently for updates. They said they often “forgot” to take people to the airport when it was time, and told a story about some Chinese people who weren’t taken to the airport when they were supposed to go twice, so they ended up being the for months and having to book their flight home 3 times. They told me to ask to contact my embassy and see what they could do. I asked if I could use the phone to call my Embassy. Usually they would say “yes but not right now, we’ll come get you in a bit”, and keep saying that until 7PM when they would say “no more calls after 7PM”. One time I was allowed to use the pay phones they had there and I borrowed a quarter from one of the refugees. They had 8 pay phones. I went to the first one, picked it up… no dial tone. 2nd one, same. 3rd and 4th both dead. I went to the other group of 4. Got a dial tone, tried to dial, none of the buttons were working. In the end, all 8 pay phones were broken and when I told the immigration officer (not the ones who took me there), they scolded me and told me I wasted their time and sent me back into the fenced in area.
-Luckily the text I shot my mom just before getting my phone confiscated got to her. She somehow figured out where I was, got a hold of the Embassy herself, and then relentlessly called the refugee camp office thing over and over until they let me talk to her. They took me back in the office I was in when I arrived, and I basically was bawling my eyes out but trying to keep it together so she could understand me so I could tell her what she could try to do and what to tell the embassy and everything. I was trying to stress how bad conditions were while being in the presence of the staff and guards so not feeling comfortable explaining all the ways they were violating peoples’ basic human rights here. After like 5 minutes the staff said my time was up and sent me back.
-Another thing that happened early on is I saw some poor guy being carried out of the bunker to the water area. He had toilet paper all around his legs like some sort of mummy and clearly couldn’t walk on his own, and he was agonizing in pain as the other guys helped him. When they got to the water hose, they helped him take off the toilet paper, and I saw that his legs were burnt horribly from like his calves all the way up his thighs. They used the drinking water hose to wash off his wounds, which was probably another reason why the Cuban guy told me not to drink that water, and then they helped him back to his bed after and wrapped more toilet paper around his legs. Basically there was no proper medical attention whatsoever for people in there. I found out later his burns were caused when him and his friends were taking a home made boat away from their country (not sure where, but they looked latin), and the motor caught fire.
-Also on the lack of medical attention front, there was an Iranian guy there who was clearly schizophrenic, talking to himself and the sky a lot and wandering around. He did come talk to me once and surprisingly spoke English (he wasn’t speaking English when he was talking to himself, which was most of the time). When talking to me he seemed pretty coherent and explained that he had a psychological disorder and he was on medication but he lost his passport and what was put in the Refugee camp a month before, and since then his medication had ran out and they wouldn’t let him get more. After we stopped talking, he went back to talking to himself/the sky.
-Another health issue. Many people there, almost half, and seemingly the people who had been there the longest, had something weird going on with their eyes. The whites were yellowy/brownish, and a bit watery. I’m assuming it had to be a health issue. When I returned home I explained it to a doctor, and he seemed kind of upset by it and fathomed that there was a good chance there was a hepatitis outbreak or something there. I had to get a bunch of blood tests and things done to make sure I was all good. Until I got the results I was pretty distraught at the possibility that this might have given me long term health problems, but thankfully everything came back good.
-I kept bugging the staff a few times per day about having to leave like the refugees told me to, so they didn’t forget. They were becoming visibly annoyed with me, but on the 3rd morning they brought a form and told me and my friend we were leaving that afternoon. They said we just had to sign it so they could get our passports. We were ecstatic! Signed the forms, they left, and we waited. And waited. Afternoon came. Still waited. Sun started to go down… “I think flight back home stop soon, they better hurry”… Night time came and it was obvious we weren’t going home. And we don’t go back the next day either. This part seems pretty minor all things considered, but honestly this was one of the worst things emotionally/psychologically. Were they ****ing with us on purpose? If they said we were were getting out yesterday, and we didn’t, are we even going to get out when they say we are? How long will we be here?
-I have to leave out some details here. But I saw evidence of abuse of people staying there by guards. I know they place was “raided” at some point because they were looking for something. Apparently that’s why all of the beds were ripped open with springs popping out. They apparently broke/took belongings of people staying there. They pushed/hit some people. There were 170ish people and 60 beds when I was there (less near the end because they took a bunch of Haitians home on a bus), but there were closer to 300 people there at one point. People sleeping outside on the ground, basically in a pile huddled with each other (the Bahamas is warm during the day but SO cold at night). What makes it even more absurd is there were 2 other bunkers of the identical size there, with beds, with NO ONE in them. Other refugees who had been there a while said they never used them, and said there was no electricity or something (as if that was really necessary). The refugees thought they were just too lazy to look after 3 separate areas so they just stuffed everyone in 1. A hunger strike had just ended not long before I got there. I don’t know 100% why, but I know it was health related, and the refugees needed doctors’ attention desperately and weren’t getting it. Apparently even more desperately than when I was there. I’m guessing some sort of disease of virus outbreak was happening. The did get doctors to come, and so things were relatively calm when I was there compared to other times.
-One night one of the guards was talking loudly, and sort of egging on the refugees. He was saying he found some nice rum in one of their luggages, and he was saying he wished someone would try climbing over the fence so he “could blow their head off” with his gun. I probably would have thought he was just being a dick and wasn’t actually drunk with a shotgun in his hand, but when I finally got out I checked my luggage and the full bottle of Don Julio I had was indeed gone.
Ok that’s all I can think of for that stuff on that front. I do have a couple positive things from it
PART 6: THE LIGHT
-There wasn’t much to do there, but some people did have cards. One night a few guys came up to me and asked if I wanted to play poker haha. So I went over and they explained the rules in really broken english. Basically there were no poker chips or anything. All they had were these stiff clothes pins. It was like Texas hold em, and you could fold pre-flop, but if you’re in and you lose the hand, you have stick it on your ear, and it hurt. And if you won a hand, you could take a clothes pin off your ear. Basically you’re out totally if you have so many clothes pins on your ears that you can’t stand the pain anymore, so you quit OR you have all the clothes pins on your ears, which doesn’t happen because they hurt too damn much. Needless to say, it was the most high stakes game of poker I ever played. It actually looked so painful when the other guys put the clothes pins on their ear that I took the game super seriously haha. I think I only had 1 or 2 on my ears by the end, and I ended up winning. The prize was a blow pop, which I actually kept for ages after I got back before being like “What am I doing…” and throwing it out LOL.
-I went in being scared super scared of the people I saw hanging off the fence. I was scared for the first time in my life of being the victim of racism as a caucasian… that I was going to half to fight people. I didn’t know really what a refugee camp was. I probably thought these people were criminals and didn’t really understand the difference between a jail and this type of place. But being in there, strangely, gave me a lot of faith in humanity. Before if I had guessed how people would treat each other in such desperate circumstances, I figured it would be sort of anarchy, every man for himself, selfishness. But after being there… the other refugees there showed me around, told me what I needed to know, gave me a bed. They had a tiny amount of drinking water and gave me 1 of the last cups. A group of 8 of them had 4-5 crackers and the split one and gave it to me. Like they had NOTHING and they take their last water and crackers and share them with someone they don’t know at all and who they owe nothing. It chokes me up so hard thinking about it. But because of that I saw something about people and humans that I may have never seen otherwise.
PART 7: Aftermath
So it turned out they did actually take us back when they initially promised. So the whole thing all said and done was only 5 days, even though, as cliche as it sounds, it felt like a lifetime. I remember when I got on the plane I was trembling and gritting my teeth, half expecting something to go wrong, and when the plane actually took off I was bawling my eyes out for like an hour and people were staring at me and I wanted to tell them so bad but I was just so happy to leave. When I got home I got a bottle of water from the airport as soon as I could and for the first time in my life I think I actually appreciated clean water. I was so used to carrying my gallon of water around the refugee camp 24/7 that I kept clutching the bottle of water for ages after it was empty. Went straight to a hospital, explained what happened, got tests and stuff done (I think, it’s a bit of a blur, I also saw my family doctor the next week and he did some things too).
When I got home I dropped all of my courses for that semester of university and stayed with my parents for a couple months for the first time in years. Went to lawyers trying to figure out if there was anything I could do, by the time I found out I could have gotten some money back it was too late. I also found out what they did was illegal, the maximum they’re allowed to seize for what happened was X%, not 100% of the money. But how do you hold some foreign government accountable for scamming you?
In the weeks after I came back, a bunch of my facial hair started falling out, because of stress I guess. Luckily it came back a year or so later.
I spent a ton of time talking to embassies, human rights organizations, refugee organizations, United Nations, telling them what happened and seeing what I could do. Unfortunately I could do much, and I was met with the harsh reality that a lot of these organizations aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The UN called me back multiple times and seemed to do the most. A lot of other organization just left me hanging, pointed me to somewhere else, or asked me to donate to them, sigh…
I e-mailed Pokerstars when it happened. They phoned me for the first/only time in my life. I told them everything, asked if they could help somehow or if I could do something to try to stop this from happening to other players. They were aware of people getting popped at the border, and I found out it wasn’t all that uncommon (multiple people every year). I got the vibe that their call was basically just to cover their ass and make sure I wasn’t going to try to sue them or something, I don’t know, but it was kind of insincere. Not that I expected anything, but I’m not sure why they called. I tried to follow up with them via e-mails and for the first time Pokerstars support wasn’t very responsive and they kinda put me in limbo until I just gave up there.
So I put a lot of energy in trying to help people still in there after I got back. I kept in contact with some of the refugees. I couldn’t help them get out, but I at least found out they did get out, eventually. Eventually I had to sort of move on and get back to regular life because it really shook me up and I couldn’t just dwell on it.
Fast forward a bit, and now I’m vomiting my entire experience here for all of you to read. I did have to leave certain parts out because they affect people who aren’t me, such as my friend who I was with, but probably 95% of it is here, as detailed as I can remember. I wrote this all in 1 go, so there's some chance I forgot some stuff too.
TL;DR… I don’t really want to cliff notes it. At least read from Part 5 to the end.
