Heading into month four we knew we would be working with refugees, we weren’t sure what that would look like. Teams before us had been at the camp(s) for 12 hour shifts, night shifts and some had even been separated from their teams to work in smaller teams with NGOs.
Our two teams staying in Thessaloniki are working in a refugee camp located at the Greece, Macedonia boarder near a town called Idomeni. This is nearly an hour drive each way from Thessaloniki. We had our teams split up into an early shift that leaves at about 8am leaves the camp around 2pm then the late shift leaves for the camp around 10am and heads back to the city around 4pm. This was not a perfect set up and wasn’t always the case.
This is actually not an organized camp, people were heading for Macedonia but the boarder was closed to refugees so the people kind of settled there. Not knowing if the boarders would open again or where to turn back to.
The thing about the camp is that at some points during the day, depending on where we were or who we were with, one could could almost forget the situation that all of these people are living in. There is a children’s tent, a tea tent, a couple of different food distribution spots, language tent (teaching English and German), a clothing distribution spot, port-a-pottys, shipping containers that have been made into shower stations, the Red Cross is there, Doctors Without Boarders, Samaritans purse, and some other NGOs as well. The majority of the people I have spoken to have been incredibly kind, generous, well mannered. At first glance this might look like a weekend music festival with tents everywhere. There are even food trucks.
Then something would happen, each day the severity of this situation would hit me. Most of the people here have been there for over two months, there isn’t a nightly headliner. The food at the food trucks is severely over priced, trying to take advantage of people in a difficult situation.There are children running around with what used to be rain boots that have been cut down to clogs as the weather changed from chilly and rainy to warm, windy and dusty or their feet have grown so now their heel is sticking out the back of the ‘clog’. There are tents that are showing signs of two months or more of daily wear and tear. During our time there the people running the children’s tent decided to pack it all up and leave. There seems to be a revolving door of volunteers, each week new people and the people who have been there since the beginning have a whole new crew to train.
Tensions can be high, the first weekend after we were there there was a ‘riot’ and authorities counteracted with tear gas and rubber bullets. This did not occur while any of our teams were there, we are all safe. This camp is on railroad tracks, one day I saw a large group of men taking a flatbed car and trying to get it past the police bus barricade to get through the boarder fence. Another day I saw a man running after another man, when the second was caught it was revealed that he had struck the first man’s wife. There was a citizen’s arrest, when they took the second man away they had a large stick with them. My last day at the camp there were two men in a scuffle near the tea tent, over what, I can’t be sure but another man intervened and made them hug to make up.
In all of this there is so much good. One of the food distribution places allows a 12 year old Syrian refugee to help with prep work, you can see it gives him purpose and he loves it. There is a man who was a barber at home so he gives haircuts near the tracks almost daily. A man we met helped us find other families with babies that could use the things we were distributing. I saw the Doctors Without Boarders come to tents to check on patients they had seen a few days earlier. I saw fathers take their children to play in the grass fields that surround the camp, which is dry, dirty and bare. The last week we were there, children came up with cries of “Hello, my friend” and bouquets of poppies or other flowers they had found. Ally even got a bouquet of snakes! You can hear laughter and joy most of the time. There are daily additions to the camp, one new friend added an arbor above the ground between his families tents for shade.
Even though the future is unknown for many of these lovely people, the majority have hope that I can barely begin to understand.
Another team was at Idomeni as well, my friend Mike Ward writes much better than myself and has some links in his latest blog that I found extremely informational and helpful. Please check it out www.mikeward.theworldrace.org
I’ve got another blog coming that will be about a family I met who are now friends, keep an eye out.
