Moria 2019
Rather than staying on the original route, these last 6+ weeks, myself and a team journeyed over to Greece to volunteer at a refugee camp on the island of Lesbos. I’ve never been to a refugee camp and neither had I any idea what it would be like. To give an idea of what I walked into every day would be to rob you of the full impact that the environment of Moria had on my heart.
Basically an average day in my boots consisted of taking the public bus in to camp starting at 8am. Once arriving I walked through the gates of camp, there was a tall fence with barbed wire that surrounded and divided the different zones. I walked past zone A,B, C and D where the more vulnerable refugees would stay. There was added guarding and protection but as you can imagine there were plenty of ways to get around and cheat the system. In some of these zones were minor boys, single women, women with young children and no male counterpart and on the occasion a family with severe trauma.
I would continue walking through camp to get to the main hub where I worked. Down the main road, passing self-made structures on my left, ISO boxes given by the government on the right, little tarp coffee shops selling coffee for half a Euro, people selling used shoes and hats on the road side, plenty of people sitting outside chatting with friends and smoking the day off. I’d make a turn and ascend a fourth of the way up the massive hill through camp and turn into my organization’s home-base. I set my bag down, lunch into the fridge, neon-orange vest over the same outfit I wore the day before, tossed the walkie talkie around my neck and stood ready for my first commands for the day. Often it would consist of census which took up most of my mornings. Followed by housing jobs for the rest of the day. Census would be going tent to tent, box to box, asking every person to show identification and proving they lived where they did. This was so that we could track where we needed to deliver appointments or paperwork and/or if there was any available space to move more people into that structure. Not the worst job for me because often people would invite you in for tea. I loved sitting down, trying to understand each-other through the language barrier, and getting a better insight into the realities of the people staying at camp. This is where I would often hear the hard stories of how a family fled their home country, traveled illegally across the waters between Turkey and Greece, and have been stuck at Moria camp for anywhere from several months to up to 3 years! It was such an honor to be invited in and have the opportunity to be a listening ear to hear the pain, frustrations, and hopelessness that many felt. The worst part was upon finishing my cup of tea I would have to ask for their identification papers to ensure they were who they said they were. I checked them off on my census sheet as they corresponded to the house number written in spray paint of the outside of their structure and then had to move to their neighbor to repeat the process. Door by door I made my way through camp checking a zone. It didn’t take long to become a familiar face to these people. We did census almost every day, so whether it was me or one of the other volunteers, homes would get the early morning census knock on the door almost every day. While often I was greeted with tea, sometimes I was met with the building frustration of having to always be home in order for us to simply check to make sure they lived where they said they did. People said they felt like they were in prison. They wanted to leave Moria to go to the city to have a regular day but if they left and we came then they could get miss housed or even worse, miss one of the necessary tickets we delivered to get them out of Moria and to the mainland. After finishing a row of structures and being filled to the brim with morning tea, I would head back to our hub explain any big news from census and be ready for the next task. Housing. Probably one of the most paradoxical jobs in camp. In a nutshell, the purpose of housing was to find space for new families who had arrived on boats from Turkey the night before. This was an exciting job! But in order to find housing for more people when the camp only has space for 3,000 and we already have over 5,000….you have to get really creative. The worst part of housing was being sent to a structure to tell a family you had to divide their space in order to fit another family. The response would land anywhere on the spectrum, you can use your imagination on that. Just imagine how you would react if someone knocked on your door and said I have to hang a blanket down the center of your 8×10 ft tent so that a new family can sleep somewhere tonight. Most of the rest of my day would be picking and choosing these battles to try and house new families. Of course there would be the added difficulties of having to get police involved, people trying steal each-other’s space, people requesting a different space, people refusing to move into their new space, people building illegal structures, etc. But housing placed me in the most intimate position to see first-hand the struggles of refugees. Around 5pm we would try and wrap up our tasks to start heading home for the day. Many days there were things that had to be completed before leaving and so our team would stay after dark in order to finish the jobs. Once finally relieved of our duties we would exit the barbed wire fence camp, wait for the bus, and go back to our apartment which was well removed from the camp. Throw some food together, try to squeeze time in to hit the gym, shower, sleep, repeat.
This month stretched me thin in so many ways. It’s not possible to even fully process what we experienced. This was the most basic of days without the details of the trauma I witnessed or heaviness I felt. Is it possible to put to words the tension you feel of the intense political, racial, and religious differences of the people living in camp? Is it possible to describe the spiritual warfare you feel that grips the attitude of the thousands of people who often describe their life at camp as prisoners? Is it possible to tell the countless stories I heard of people describing what it was like to watch a family member be shot directly in front of them? Or the bomb they saw dropped on their home? Is it possible to explain what it feels like to have to divide a family’s 6×6 ft tent in half because another family would be moving into the other side of this blanket I will now hang to separate your living space? Is it possible to describe what it’s like to look up from the phone screen of a father showing you the video of losing his daughter in a capsized boat and ask him how many children arrived with him so I can bring enough food and clothes?
“Emily do you copy” – from the yellow walkie talkie hanging around my neck
“Emily do you copy”
“Emily, Emily, Emily”
Yes, I’m here but I’ve got no more Emily to offer.
It took only 2 days to realize the strength I thought I had was my own self-made strength and wouldn’t last a day longer. I tittered back and forth trying to learn how to lean entirely on the Lord for strength. On top of that, I realized that I was surrounded by some of the most obviously love hungry people I’ve ever encountered. It didn’t take much to have a huge impact on someone in camp. Whether it be to let a group of elementary girls drag on my orange work vest while I walked around camp or stop for 2 minutes on my venture out to the Olive grove to speak broken Farsi to the woman pushing her stroller up the hill or smile at the Syrian grandma who has similar glasses frames as me and point to my own while giving a thumps up or remembering the names of the minors trying to pass through my section B gate. The need and desire to be loved was so obvious. The thing I think is even more valuable is that its not just refugees at Moria who are love hungry. It’s every single human I’ll ever encounter. We are all love hungry. We all seek to be loved by someone and shown the care and kindness that was so easily noticed among the people at Moria. I think we all just hide our love hunger under something different. We cope and push away and turn to someone else or something else and fill the void with our own creative ideas.
“Emily do you copy” – from the yellow walkie talkie hanging around my neck
“Emily do you copy”
“Emily, Emily, Emily”
Yes, I’m here and I know where the abundant source of love you’re looking for is.
Moria helped transform my heart. And it helped open my eyes to see that our God is our strength and our true source of love. He loves my love hungry heart and He can love yours too.
