Filmon Ande fled Eritrea in 2007. Escaping death in the Sahara with his family, he now lives in Belgium with EU help. MEPs want to help more refugees like Filmon.

A refugee's tale

Filmon Ande knows he's lucky to be alive.

in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Sudan,  he tried to cross to Libya.

Smuggled in a Land Cruiser across  the Sahara desert with dozens of refugees,

Can you see the car?  Can you see the blood?

We dug out my wife  from underneath this car.

I thought it was  the last moment of our lives.

Two people were dead.  We buried them in the sand.

Escaping death in the desert  and the Libyan civil war,

he reached Tunisia, where Belgium  accepted his refugee application in 2011.

Living near Antwerp, he's benefitted from  the EU refugee resettlement programme.

It funds different organisations  to help integrate refugees.

We helped them to find a house  here in Deurne.

and we gave them a basic installation kit

to make sure they could survive  the first four weeks here in Belgium.

Filmon describes his move to Belgium  as a turning point.

Previously he feared for his life,  now he fears grammar.

Any new language is not easy for anybody.

I find Dutch is a little bit 'moeilijk', difficult.

The EU only resettles 5,000  of 200,000 refugees in the world per year.

MEPs want to double or treble that number.

When we started this work only 10  out of 27 countries resettled refugees.

Now there are 13 countries,  but we want more.

So we're giving money to those pledging  their own resettlement programmes.

All of this costs money,  but what price can you put on a life?

how much we paid  to cross the Sahara desert.

I didn't tell him the amount of money,  but replied, 'We paid lives.'