This update is a bit scattered and late, forgive me. I’ve spent the week arguing ― mostly with the Greek army that is responsible for providing sustenance to the 600 folks who live in this refugee camp. We’ve argued over plenty: their new substitution coffee creamer for milk in children’s meals, delivery of rotten fruit and omission of hundreds of juice-boxes. We are approaching crisis. But I’ll write about that early next week.
In the morning, we can’t fit in the seats of the car so we stack. Sitting on each others laps, tangled and crammed into the back and front, we hurtle down the two-lane highway in rural Greece. The abused little rental car wheezes up hills and shudders on the winding turns. It’s already hot at 7:45am. There’s no A/C, and the early morning sea breeze rips through the open windows so loudly that we couldn’t talk if we wanted to.
At 8:00am, when our car stuffed with volunteers arrives, the refugees are mostly asleep. Around 600 of them ― Syrian Arabs, Yazidis, Kurds, and more ― are marooned in a patch of pine in an otherwise agricultural and industrial valley, and cannot provide for themselves. They sit and wait. They wait for breakfast, wait for lunch, wait for water, wait for medicine, wait to know if the near-weekly small fires in the valley’s fields will be carried by the sea breeze to their tents. Above all they wait for news of the asylum process, which for many has hardly advanced.
The refugee camp is like a body on life support. It can provide none of its own basic needs. Instead of hospital machinery, it is surrounded by NGOs that each provide some vital service. The NGO I am with provides the nutrition ― about 2000 calories per day, per person in the camp and provided by the army… if it arrives.
The migrants’ well-deserved rage is often vented towards our warehouse, where they imagine that we hide resources, food or clothes. Last week a group of men, angry at another resident assisting our distribution, pushed their way into the warehouse, screaming at volunteers and grabbing materials from the shelves.
As the men stormed into our warehouse, one of our volunteers locked herself in another room and called this administrator’s phone, demanding that the police be sent. The police, as a rule, do not come to this camp. But apparently frightened that foreign volunteers may actually get hurt, the administrator surprisingly obeyed. Police arrived momentarily. They did a loop of the camp, waved off refugees running up to their car to ask them to please return to the previous policy of guarding them permanently, and then the police drove off.
While I’ve encountered unbelievable compassion and generosity from local Greek individuals (more about that next week), generally relations between the refugees and the communal institutions aren’t good. The refugees’ demands and desires are often misunderstood, deflected or ignored. At a recent meeting between administrators of the NGOs and the army, a Yazidi representative from the camp residents prepared to speak. One of a group of Yazidi families in the camp, they’ve fled genocide, forced conversion, and sexual slavery. Their entire culture is now scattered across the world’s refugee camps. They fear that in disarray their Yazidi society will disappear from the Earth.
And while the Yazidi man voiced concern over the unhealthy and monotonous food in the camp, a Greek army representative (responsible for a food contract negotiated over his head) yelled at the Yazidi man that, “if you don’t like the food, you can go back to your home country.”
Elsewhere it’s worse. Last week on Leros, an island hotspot, fascist activists attacked migrants attempting to leave the island. Volunteers were attacked and threatened as well. Soon after, NGOs were told by local officials that their safety could no longer be guaranteed, and they were put on an emergency chartered speedboat an hour later.
Interactions with the outside world at our camp are less violent, but … maybe a little more unusual.
Every few weeks the refugees are treated to a vegan meal from the Quan Yin Method vegan community. Founded by Ching Hai, a Vietnamese national once called the Buddhist Martha Stewart, she controls businesses and ventures across the world, including the Loving Hut vegan cuisine chain. Their extremely enthusiastic volunteers hand out rainbow menus, copies of Ching Hai’s manifesto, and very good food.
The local Communists as well have taken a special interest in our camp’s residents. During last week’s Eid celebration at the end of Ramadan, a mysterious bus appeared outside of camp. Refugees, mostly secular ones, streamed towards it. I grabbed a kid I know, Hamza, and asked him where he was going. “To the strike!” I blinked, “What?” and he ran off.
I looked up to see a local Communist organizer herding refugees into the bus, taking a moment to scream victoriously at a camp director that (in translation) her Capitalist plot to distract the migrants with an Eid celebration would not derail their protest. And with that the organizer slammed the bus door and whisked off with the refugees. I asked Hamza the next day how the strike was and he said boring, it was all in Greek.
Eid carried on, and each ethnicity and group took a turn dancing in the public space. The Kurds from Kobani, Syrians, women and men sometimes together and sometimes apart. A number of us were yanked from the crowd by celebrating friends and thrown into the circle of dancers where we whirled and lurched, trying to watch and learn the steps.
But for many it was not a real Eid ― away from their homes and food and families. And one of our own number was leaving as well, a volunteer who’d managed the food. As we’d driven to the camp for Eid he’d started to cry. “It’s pathetic that this is what we can do, hand out f*****g croissants.” I gulped. It’s true. He looked out the window. “I never should have come.” And now I was crying too. “No, no, someone has to. Someone has to be here. To see. To do the food.” And I know I sounded so stupid. None of us know what else to do.
As for the camp being destroyed; we still don’t know. But what we do know is that the military has for the last week provided us coffee creamer instead of milk, rotten fruit and inadequate bread. We’ve been told they’re working on it. But while the camp closing could change things for many, the immediate task ― getting the food out of the distribution window and into the hands of the residents ― may itself be at risk.
