On the night of September 21^nd, 2022, 17 men, women and children from the southern Tunisian harbor town of Zarzis boarded a boat in the hope of reaching Europe. Their family soon lost contact with them. Although the parents of the missing raised the alarm, the local government did not attempt to search for their bodies. Later it turned out that a number of bodies were found but had been quickly buried without forensic examination. The question »where are our children« became louder. The protesters were asking the government for responsibility for the socio-economic situation of the country and the moral responsibility to bring the dead home. In absence of any response, they decided to occupy the port of Zarzis. As if to say, if the movement of our children is stopped, the movements of goods that Europe covets, and which enter the EU so easily, will also be stopped here. In this paper, we take this drama of what in Tunisia had come to be called 18/18 as the starting point to explore based on ethnographic research the movements and stops of humans and things. We introduce the concept of neglect to understand the chronicity of the problems that the people of Zarzis faced and to relate these to a state that is not response-able and to ongoing colonial extractivist relations.