Okay. Before reading this blog, I want you to forget everything you think you know about Greece.
I want you to throw away all the things that pop into your head when you hear Lesvos, Moria, Syria, or Refugee Crisis.
Because I hate to tell you this, but everything you think you know about the Refugee Crisis is wrong. They are lying to you.
Let me begin by telling a story.
I am working at a refugee camp called Moria in Lesvos, Greece. If you have been listening to the news on the deal between Turkey and the EU, they will say it has been turned into a detention center, and at many times it can feel like a prison.
But Moria is not a place of darkness. I have found more light there than many parts of the world. It is a place of pain.
A few days ago, I was working in the information tent. It is a place where refugees can go to ask questions and also get diapers for their babies. Naturally, a lot goes on in the info tent.
I was playing with some little girls outside. They were drawing on my arms, braiding my hair, teaching me how to count in Farsi, and kissing my cheeks. I was letting them love me and use my body as a canvas because they matter.
In a world that is telling them they don’t matter, I was trying to tell them that they are seen and they are loved.
While I was playing with the girls, a couple boys came to join in on the fun. Because they are boys, they began pulling my hair and rough housing with me.
It was fun at first, but then one boy, about ten years old, began taking the game more seriously. He started to look angry, and he ran at my friend Lauren, another volunteer.
He put his hands around her neck and began to squeeze….hard. Beginning to realize this was no longer a game, she cried for help. I ran to her and pulled the boy off of her. The boy then turned on me and started going for my neck. I held him away.
Realizing he was not getting anywhere with me, he went after an older volunteer, and knocked her over. He stole her full water bottle and acted like he was going to hit us with it.
I was done. I asked one of the little girls to get his mom. The second he heard the word “mama,” he panicked and ran away.
We were all rattled. No amount of briefing can prepare you for a ten year old boy trying to hurt you. Those types of things are scary. My heart was pounding out of my chest as I realized the gravity of what just occurred.
And then my heart was broken for him.
Wait, what? A boy tries to strangle me and that is my reaction? How can my heart break for someone who meant me harm?
The sad part about the Refugee Crisis is that nothing is ever black or white. It is one huge gray area wrapped up in confusion that no one is able to escape.
As volunteers, we had training and we were told to expect this. Children, in an attempt to process the horrible things they have seen, will act things out and make a game out of it, even though it isn’t.
What I had just seen was like a movie screen, a direct representation of what was playing over and over again in this little boy’s mind.
Who had he seen strangled? How does he know what that means? How long will that video play in his head?
Not long after my encounter, I talked with an adorable Syrian boy, maybe twelve years old. The second I said the word Syria, his tone changed. He began talking to me in charades, as he had been. However, this time he made bombs flying from the sky and exploding with his hands, and then he made the motion of slitting his neck and death. He talked about the doctors giving up.
A 12 year old boy conjured up these images when you mentioned his home country. And yet, somehow he sits here smiling and laughing with me.
Somehow these boys find enough strength inside themselves to keep on fighting, no matter the horror that plays like a movie in their head. That is why my heart was broken.
I am not afraid of refugees, although sometimes they do scary things. I am not afraid when I walk into Moria, because all I see are thousands of people who have overcome insurmountable odds to secure a safer future for their family. They are heroes, not monsters.
The true horror is the story that lives in every one of them, and the things that play over and over in their heads. The true evil is the war and death they are running from, the pain and suffering that is so great that they would pack everything up and travel for months across multiple countries just so they might get a chance at asylum.
