When we were kids, we were always playing hide and seek with all the kids on the block and it was so much fun. We always choose some of the weirdest places to hide, thinking we will never be found.
A boy from Bangladesh, was playing with his friends around the shipyard and he thought one of the shipping containers would be a perfect hiding place. He fell asleep and the next thing you know, he found himself trapped in the shipping container with no way out. In the mean time, the shipping container he was in got loaded on a cargo ship in Bangladesh’s Chittagong on January 12th and travelled about 1600nm to Malaysia’s Port Klang. The vessel reached Malaysia on January 15th and started unloading on January 17th. The boy spent five days locked up in the shipping container before he was freed, without water or food. A port employee found the young man, when he heard the knocking sound as he was examining the containers being offloaded from the container vessel. The boy was weakened but still coherent. He was interviewed by the Police, he was stabilized at the hospital and is expected to make a full recovery. Malaysian authorities have confirmed that there is no reason to doubt the boy’s story and that there is no suspicion of human trafficking in this case.
This story would be the story of his life, that he would always remember and tell everyone. It seems to be funny but if you look from a different perspective it he was lucky to still be alive. Thankfully the new models of shipping containers have vents that let the boxes breathe, so if someone is trapped can at least breathe, and don’t be suffocated. Only issue is that if you get stuck in a container, there is no light, no food, no water and if the box is somewhere in the middle, nobody would hear you if you bang on the walls or doors, until it reaches a port. Most of the accidents, and fatalities, involving a shipping container, happen when people fall asleep inside, and find themselves locked, and traveling to an unknown location. So dear readers, if you ever plan to sleep in a shipping container, make sure is located in your back yard, transformed in a nice bedroom or living space.
The Bangladeshi boy can consider himself fortunate. Shipping vessels can spend weeks, even months at sea, and without any food and water, he would have surely perished. His case was handed over to the Malaysian government’s Immigration department, which will send the boy home on the same container vessel on which he had arrived, hopefully not in the same shipping container he got locked before, and with one of the crew members taking care of him.
