Stranger gives his life to save mother and baby after MV Barima disaster

In the darkness of the Atlantic Ocean, as terrified passengers fought desperately for anything that would keep them afloat when the MV Barima capsized, one man made a split-second decision to save a mother and her baby. In making that decision, he sacrificed his own life.

We don’t know who he is.

But to Alisha Atkinson, that stranger will forever be the man who gave her and her 10-month-old son, Tristan, a second chance at life.

Alisha had been travelling aboard the MV Barima with Tristan in her arms and her three-year-old daughter, Alicia, asleep beside her when the passenger vessel suddenly capsized on Saturday night.

From Kairuni on the Linden/Soesdyke highway, she was returning home “after a long time” to visit relatives friends.

Within moments, she was thrown into the sea.

Driven by instinct, she grabbed both of her children and fought her way to the surface, holding one child in each hand as she struggled for air.

All around her, people screamed, cried for help and clawed at anything they could find to stay
alive.

Then, in the chaos, someone pulled Alicia from her grasp.

Unable to see in the darkness, Alisha desperately searched for her daughter while trying to keep her infant son above the water. Every passing second drained her strength, and with no lifeline in sight, hope was slipping away.

Then came an act of extraordinary selflessness.

A stranger, who was himself clinging to a roll of vinolay saw the young mother struggling with her baby.

He handed it to her.

Alisha wrapped one arm around the vinolay roll and held Tristan tightly with the other.

Seconds later, she watched the man disappear beneath the waves.

“Suddenly he drowned in front of me… gone down.”

For the rest of the night, Alisha drifted in the open sea, clutching the roll of vinolay that had become the difference between life and death.

“The whole night I held on to that vinolay with my son.”

When rescuers finally found them at daybreak, Alisha and Tristan were alive.

The stranger who had made their survival possible was not.

His identity may never be known. His family may never know how he spent his final moments.

But amid one of Guyana’s worst maritime disasters, his last act was not to save himself. It was to save a complete stranger and her child.

In a night filled with unimaginable fear and heartbreaking loss, the unknown man’s sacrifice stands as one of the tragedy’s most powerful stories.