We pulled up to the factory gate in our team’s busted-up diesel van (dubbed the “waan”, mocking its owner’s Austrian accent) and started the walk up the long driveway. The mirrored windows of the guard post forced us to look at ourselves: plausibly unhinged in our filthy clothes and khaki NGO vests. The incredulous face of the factory guard, revealed as he slid the window aside, made us feel as crazy as we looked.
Mainly, our organization distributes the Greek army’s food to the 600 Syrian refugees stuck in the camp in rural Greece. But that’s actually not all we do. There are lots of problems in the camp: short-circuiting electronics, sickness, fire ― always the fear of fire. But in the nauseating heat and endless wait, it’s the boredom that really eats at the people.
Sometimes it overwhelms, what’s happening here, the insanity of it. A little thing, a screaming child, the hot smell of feces and urine, pierces the routine and it stops being normal and starts being … what it is. It makes me feel a little crazy to try and explain it. Maybe it’s clearer to say that many of the volunteers have nightmares or don’t sleep much at all. I sleep ok ― but I wake up almost every night and do not know where I am.
We keep our heads and our minds in our work. To think about the place for too long or too deeply is maddening. So we avoid it. And this aversion bleeds into the rest of our experience, crops up in little neglects of ourselves. Because what is our suffering to that of the refugees? In my hurry I’ll forget to drink water for hours. Pushing a window closed as some children tried to force their way in, I slipped. The steel frame, flying outwards, cut open my arm. My dry body didn’t bleed. I gulped water.
In one of the abandoned buildings on the military base that hosts the camp, some volunteers started a carpentry shop. Inside scrap wood, mostly pallets, is attacked with claw hammers, pry-bars and screwdrivers, torn apart into planks and furiously hammered back together. And all across camp you find rough and beautiful furniture, pallets reincarnated as benches, chairs, tables and beds.
After three tries it was clear no factory with a guard post was going to give us any pallets. But as we drove back, we spotted a pile of sun-blackened wood behind a smaller factory. Pulling closer to the red gate and cracked cement of the driveway, we saw a small garden planted in the soil in the corner of the factory lot. And then, an off couple – a very tiny Greek woman and an extremely tall, dark man.
Sofia and Manesh, we learned through a translator app, work in the factory, cutting cloth and elastic into children’s costumes. Manesh actually lives there, above the shop floor, and his family farms the cracked cement to supplement their food. He pointed towards the other factories nearby, and following his finger you could see that each hosted a tiny farm, and, Manesh explained, an Indian immigrant family like his own.
I typed an explanation of our work and a request for the waste wood into our translator app and handed it to Sofia. Her face tightened, I felt scared. Not everyone in Greece is happy that the refugees are here. But she grabbed my arm lightly and pulled us toward the wood, and looking up I could see she was teary-eyed.
We loaded the wood in silence, communicated that we would be back for more, and hurried back to the camp. A squad of young men helped us unload the wood, and then fell upon it with the usual creative violence. This was a windfall; I grabbed some paper and constructed a thank you note for Sofia and Manesh. In broken Arabic I asked nearby children and young men to sign it. My decoration (some “balloons” and a sort of frilly edge?) would’ve embarrassed a 4 year old, but after a dozen signatures I grabbed the thing and jumped back in the waan.
Sofia and Manesh opened the gate as we arrived. We jumped out, I handed the thank you note to Sofia, and reached into the pile of fractured pallets. Hefting one up, I turned around, and stopped. Sofia was weeping. Our silly thank you note shook in her hand. I reached for my phone – and realized how stupid I would seem typing into it. So, we just kind of hugged her. And she hugged us.
I promised last week that I would talk about the milk. I’d like to ― we won, we fought it out with the Greek military guys and we won. It’s a good story I think. But I’m struggling a little to keep my thoughts together. To spin a narrative out of this place in real time. Bear with me.
This piece is part 3 of a series:
