V is for Variety

The refugee camps in mainland Greece have gradually been improved since the current crisis surged in 2015. The Greek Government has reorganized them, reshuffled people, put people temporarily in hotels, closed camps, opened camps and generally tried to manage the situation, or behaved capriciously, depending on how you look at it.  The camps on the Islands are another subject altogether, I’m told, but I have no experience of those.

On my first day back to work in Thessaloniki after a four-day break with a respiratory infection, I visited one of the mainland camps. As I was driving fellow volunteers Ken and Bro out to Sinatex camp, a place where they’d been teaching English and - mostly, I suspect – organizing soccer games for some time, Bro’s phone rang: “Oh,” he reported to us, “The camp’s closing tomorrow”.  Great, I thought, I just get assigned to something and it changes. But, after all, what’s so new about that in this volunteer game?  Variety is the spice, they say, of life.

 

The looming closure of the camp had been on the cards, but we’d expected a few days’ notice – and so had the refugees who lived there. But no, they’d only just been told, so when we arrived they were busy packing up to move next day.

 

We’d planned to give English lessons that afternoon, but we found ourselves without students, language lessons not being high priority in view of the impending move.  Ken quickly organized a well-supported soccer game: apparently that was a priority. Bro had brought his own guitar and two others to share so he launched into a three-hour lesson/jam session with some Kurdish men. It was difficult to pry him loose at the end of the day! I was left to find something useful to do. The trusty coloring pages and crayons in my backpack came into play as I rounded up a number of young children and staked out a corner of a bleak empty room where we sat on the concrete floor to amuse ourselves.  Three unplanned hours with a dozen small children can be a long time! We cut, colored, jumped rope, played running games and even danced the Hokey Cokey, which apparently everyone  in the world knows!

 

But those few hours could be my only experience of Sinatex Camp, for it is no more.

 

At Sinatex, about a hundred refugees, mostly Kurdish I believe,  lived in compartments inside an empty industrial building

 


Soccer game beside the camp. I guess someone just missed a goal.

Social center just outside the camp. This is where English lessons and children's
activities had usually been held. Its fate was unknown when I visited.



And there was a playground - all now abandoned

The organization I was working for in Thessaloniki has no projects of its own. It’s a labor pool, supplying volunteers to other NGOs as needed.  So any one volunteer might find herself working for a variety of different projects, one day at a time.  Over several days or weeks, of course, you might be consistently assigned to one particular project or type of project, depending on your skills. And once you’d learned the ropes somewhere, you’d be more useful in that place, so a certain amount of regularity would set in. But this system requires a lot of careful organization and leads to a lot of last-minute changes.

 And, in my case, I didn’t give it enough time for consistency to develop. In the five days I worked there I was assigned to five different places, each of them about 45 minutes away in various directions, mostly by public transportation. I spent one day sorting clothes at the warehouse; one day helping organize children’s activities at Intervolve, a well-equipped education center for female refugees; one afternoon at Sinatex camp and two days in two different kitchens helping to cook food and distribute it to homeless refugees.

 



Soul Food Kitchen cooks and distributes food to homeless people,
mostly refugees, living in abandoned buildings in Thessaloniki.
When I was there they were  temporarily homeless themselves
 and using kitchens belonging to different non-profits in the city.



Volunteers cleaned and chopped vegetables, cooked them with rice, pasta,
lentils or beans, and packed up about 60 meals twice a day.  




An abandoned multi-story car park,
 one of the buildings where homeless people live.




DocMobile joined us at the food distribution site - a very dirty
empty lot - to tackle health issues.




Nurse Susan examined a patient in an ad hoc privacy shelter.



We left a dozen meals at this place. We saw no one come to claim
them, but apparently they're picked up every day,



We left the meals on the window sills.
 

 

The work was varied and interesting and I met some great volunteers, but it was exhausting, the weather was grim, and bearing in mind that I was still unwell and very low on energy, the labor pool system really wasn’t a good one for me. So I called Kitab, my ngo in Athens, ascertained that they had work and accommodation for me, and returned to the capital after a total of 12 days away. It was quite a relief to find myself once again on the comfortable train, then back in a reasonable apartment and weather five degrees (Celsius) warmer than Thessaloniki.



 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T is for Train

 

Pericles

The best thing about my train journey from Athens to Thessaloniki, the big city in the north of the country,  was the view of Mount Olympus. That’s the wonder of Greece: I just keep tripping across the stuff of the myths. For instance, I alight at the wrong metro station in Athens and wander up a hill only to find myself in the Pnyx, the very place where Pericles used to address the Athenians twenty-five hundred years ago. Should I be surprised? Probably not.

 

 





Mount Olympus

Olympus itself hove into view about four and a half hours into the six-hour train ride. Snow-clad, dominating the horizon, it was a fitting place for the gods to live.

 

Back on Earth, the train was comfortable, clean and had a restaurant car. My ticket cost 34 Euros, that’s because I’m an elder – under 65 it’s 45 Euros and at night it’s only 25 Euros for people of any age – but I was traveling by train specifically to see a bit more of Greece, so the night train was a non-starter for me.

And see Greece I did: the mountains north of Athens were riddled with tunnels; the great plain of Thessaly spread its winter colors of brown and pale green on either side; towns and villages were scattered across the plain.
 

I saw little stations like Sfendali and Inoi where we didn’t stop; small farms, white houses with red tiled roofs; mixed herds of sheep and goats; olive groves and snow-covered peaks - not just Olympus but Parnassus too!

Mount Parnassus

 

Announcements were in Greek and at the larger stations where we did stop, signage was rare so I had to guess where we were and how much further we had to go. Thessaloniki was the terminus so I had no fear of missing my stop.

 

Tunnel after tunnel through the mountains.

First class passengers get separate compartments.

Walking along the train I encountered doors
 between the carriages. The junctions were a
bit scary! But see how tourist-friendly
Greece is! The instructions are written
in English as well as Greek.




A very comfortable train

 

Arriving in Thessaloniki, events take a downward turn: the person who’s supposed to meet me isn’t there and after a three-hour comedy of missed communications and wrong station entrances I finally take a taxi to the volunteer apartment where I’ll be staying, in Diavata, a small nondescript town 10 kilometers outside the city.

 

It’s dark by now: the light in the apartment stairwell doesn’t work. Two kind young volunteers carry my luggage up two flights of stairs – there’s no elevator – and introduce me to the apartment.  

The room in the volunteer apartment  was carpeted with shag.

It’s dank and dismal and mold adorns the bedrooms walls. The heating doesn’t work. There’s no Wi-Fi; I’m sharing a room with the two kind volunteers, Ken from New Zealand and Bro from Germany. Kind they are, but also male, and no-one asked if this was OK with me. The volunteer coordinator is not happy with me because of the station snafu. I’ve had a bad cough for some time and suddenly feel a whole lot worse. This thing is migrating toward my lungs.

 



Sunset behind the warehouse.

I work all the next day in the warehouse, sorting clothes. This is the HelpRefugees warehouse in Thessaloniki and in a way, it’s the reason I came to Greece. When I volunteered at the HelpRefugees warehouse in Calais in the summer of 2016 (see blog post #1) I spent four days packing up children’s clothes not needed in the mainly adult Jungle camp to be sent to this very warehouse in Greece. In 2017 I planned to follow the clothes but ended up in Athens. This year, I’ve managed to see the warehouse, the clothes long gone, I hope!

 



After a day’s work, an unexpected evening meeting and narrowly avoiding getting sucked into a prolonged and noisy birthday party, my lungs were screaming, so next morning I spent two hours wandering round in the rain trying to find a doctor’s office. I eventually found a walk-in clinic just two minutes away from the apartment – why had no-one told me when I asked?

 Armed with a bronchial inhaler and orders to rest for four days I took my leave of the squalid volunteer apartment and rented an Airbnb room from a very nice Palestinian man called Mohammed and his dog Lukas.

Four days of luxury ensued: the heating worked, the bed was comfortable and I had little need to stir outside. I binge-watched “Outlander” on Netflix, even though I cringed and fast-forwarded every time they launched into their grammatically strangulated travesty of the Skye Boat Song.



Street market seen from DocMobile apartment.

Following my break, I contrived to move out of the moldy volunteer apartment into one across the landing which was rented by a different NGO, DocMobile. This one offered heat, a female roomie and the companionship I found largely lacking among the youngsters in the other apartment. Decent accommodation put my Thessalonian adventure onto a more stable footing, while the challenges endured reminded me of how fortunate I am to be able to change my plans if something becomes too difficult – an option not usually available to the refugees I work with.

 Part two of my Thessalonian adventures follows soon.

 

 

 

 

L is for Light

I just never know what’s going to make a difference to people.

Julia and Marcus in Piraeus

One recent Saturday, I visited a refugee friend from Mauritania who’s living in Piraeus, the port of Athens, easily reachable by train. We spent several hours walking, talking and eating. During the afternoon we passed a beautiful Greek church which was open.  Having been raised Catholic I have no compunction about wandering in and out of churches, even those of other denominations, so, checking that Marcus was in agreement, I led him in. He’s from a Muslim background, so it was unfamiliar territory for him.

 

The church was, like all Greek churches I’ve been in, resplendent with icons of saints, some painted, some mosaic, some beaten silver. The dedication was Saint Nicholas, who's a very benign saint. Following my usual practice, I dropped coins in the box and lit three candles, inviting Marcus to help me. My standard candles are: one for the refugees, one for the volunteers and one for all our families.

Lighting church candles might seem an odd thing for an atheist like me to do, but it’s a carry-over from childhood and as a good Circle Dancer I appreciate the symbolism of the candle and the ability of that little flame to cheer and exalt our spirits.

We walked on. I went home.

Marcus and I spoke on the phone a couple of times that week but it wasn’t until the following Sunday, eight days later, that he said diffidently: “You remember what we did in the church – well, I’d like to do that thing again.”  “Lighting candles?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, “I didn’t tell you but I was feeling very bad that day because where I live they were saying I had to move out. The candles made me feel better. It was very good. I’d like to do that again.

“I walk past that church every day,” he continued “And I see many people going in and out.”

 

 

But he won’t go in by himself because he’s afraid that as a lone black man, walking into an unfamiliar environment, he would encounter rejection. His fear is not groundless. He’s also, as I would be, a bit shy of entering into a holy place of a tradition other than his own.  So I’m planning to go back to Piraeus later this week and take Marcus to visit St Nicholas again. Meanwhile, I told him I’d find a church in Athens where I can light some candles for him. I can message him a photo when I do. 

 

If you light candles, maybe you can include Marcus and his fellow refugees in your intentions.  Thank you.

 

www.kitabngo.org

 

 

K is for Kitab

During my first week in Athens volunteering with Kitab World Education I had very few students. (Kitab is pronounced Kit-aab with the emphasis on the aab)  Last term, when I wasn’t here,  Kitab offered regular daily English and Greek lessons but they became too popular and attracted so many and such a wide diversity of students that the neighbors complained. Our class size has now been limited to five. We don’t want to be evicted from this building where we rent both a classroom and a volunteer apartment, so we’re toeing the line.

Kitab classroom - quite nice,
especially now that we have electricity!

 

Yes, diversity was apparently part of the problem: I’m told that many Athenians, because of historic connections, have some sympathy with Syrians, but they’re less welcoming of people from Afghanistan and of black Africans.  We still bring in students of all ethnicities, but in small numbers.

Also, volunteers are becoming harder to find and we’re now short of teachers. I’m essentially the only one, and I’m not a qualified teacher, more of a seat-of-the-pants sort of person. It certainly pays to be flexible round here.



View from classroom window

Yesterday, for instance. I had scheduled a 9:30 English session with staff at the Hope Café. The café’s a meeting place for refugees that offers a free lunch, coffee and by-appointment clothing distribution. The staff are mainly Syrian teenage boys who volunteer their time to make and serve coffee, clean tables, and do other café jobs. They, like most of the refugees here, want to learn English because the language is seen as - probably is - the door to a new life in a European country. They begin work at 11am, so I’m offering 9:30 lessons several days a week.

Volunteers at Hope Café

Art at Hope Cafe

Five kilos of lentils cleaned by Julia at Hope café

The first day, eight people attended, not all of them staff, but who cares? Adnan, my advanced student, joined us, despite having said he wouldn’t. None of the others was a complete beginner but the range was huge!  We had fun. The second day there were three and the third day, one.

The third day was yesterday, which is the day I’m trying to describe.

 

So I have this one guy from the staff, Radi, for an English lesson and we talk about the parts of the body.  Perhaps the main achievement is getting him to understand the difference between “write” and “draw”. He wanders off after a while.  All this time the early morning business of the café – cleaning, organizing, food prep – is going on around us and at another table my colleague Mary Ellen is conducting a lesson with half a dozen Kurdish people.  What are they doing in the café before opening time? Well, Mary Ellen met them here a few days ago and arranged these lessons. She’s focusing on the vocabulary of cooking, because they’re right beside the kitchen, which is open to the café.

 

Radi’s disappeared but some new people have appeared at my table: the café’s not really open but Sam is letting people in and I’ve been joined by a Syrian woman in hijab and long gown, and her three young children.  The mother doesn’t reply to my greeting, just smiles; then the oldest child turns to her and signs rapidly. “Oh” I say, and touch my hands to my ears questioningly. “Yes” says the little girl – we’ll call her Amanda – “she doesn’t hear or speak.”

 

Amanda, at 9 years old, has an excellent command of English. I predict for her a job as a translator. But today she’s interested in coloring: I have coloring pages of Dora the Explorer and Ben Ten, both of whom Amanda knows from pre-war Syria. This reminds me of my motivation to come and volunteer: I realized  that these people had lives just like ours until one day the bombs came. It could happen anywhere.

 

Back from the café, at 12 noon I have a session in the Kitab classroom with Karwan, an Iraqi Kurd of about 26 years old who’s here in Athens with his wife and three children. This is his third lesson. He speaks little English but today he asks for something specific. He gives me to understand that he knows how to write the capital letters of the English alphabet, and he demonstrates this for me, but he’s unsure of writing the small letters. So that’s what we do, or rather, he does and I encourage, for an hour and a half, writing whole lines of each letter very carefully. He’s really dedicated. We get to Q before time is up and he takes the rest home to do before his next lesson.  I admire his persistence, it’s a good way to learn!

I think that’s the day’s last lesson but I’m wrong. Just after three the doorbell goes. “That’ll be your pizza” I say to colleague Deena who’s cleaning the kitchen. “I’ll run down and get it.”  No pizza. Instead, there’s a young man and woman with a baby in a pram (baby carriage).   “English lesson,” she says “I’m here for English lesson, 3 o’clock.”  I’m mystified. “Kitab?” I ask “Aida? Barbara?” naming the organizers.

The young woman smiles and walks in.  Hmm, I wonder what’s going on here.  I take them into the classroom, leave them there and run upstairs (in the elevator/lift) to ask in the volunteer apartment  “Anyone expecting students for a lesson?” No one is.   We decide that they were probably coming at this time last term and were expecting the schedule to be the same, which it isn’t, as there is no schedule (or timetable if you’re British). Never mind, I can, so I do: I go back to the classroom and start a lesson.

As with all first sessions, I try to figure out where they are with English. The woman, Mary, is Afghan and she’s at an advanced level; the baby, Leo, is four months old and speaks only the universal language of the very young; the man, Zoran, is Iranian and speaks barely a word of English but is very loud and wants to dominate the proceedings. We talk about family: simple sentences about mother, father, brother, sister and so on. I invite them to come back at 3pm the next day. Teaching two such different levels in one lesson will be a challenge but since they’re a couple it should work, with her helping him.

Now I really have finished work for the day. My Greek volunteer friend Vera calls round at 5. We drink tea on the balcony, then go out to eat.   I unload some of my multifaceted day on her and she listens patiently. The food is mediocre, but the wine and the company are good.

And that’s a Kitab day!

 

Hi-tech: Mary Ellen has her grandchildren in Minnesota
talk with the refugee children here in Athens.

 

 

 

January 2018: A is for Athens

A is for Athens, and A is for Aleppo. We’re in Athens and my student is from Aleppo. He’s constructing sentences: “Athens is a beautiful city” he says.  He pauses, thinks: “Aleppo is not beautiful.”  No, it isn’t, not any more.



Kitab classroom in action: some younger students here today,
especially the one in the pram!

I’m back in Greece, this time working with Kitab World Classroom, an ngo (non-governmental organization) that’s helping young refugees - high school/college age - get their disrupted education back on course. My role is to help them with English. I’ve been mentoring one of the students long distance for the past nine months and I finally met her and her family two days ago. I learned a little more about the story of their struggle to reach Greece from Turkey after they fled Syria: it took many  -  she said 20 -  attempts and disasters involving coastguards, a detention center, a floundering boat and roping the family together before they managed to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Because the mother was pregnant they spent just two months in a refugee camp on the island of Chios before being cleared to move to Athens. That’s probably good. The camps on the Islands are now heavily overcrowded and are very unpleasant places to live.

But the problems don’t end with arrival in Greece: like many refugees from Syria and elsewhere, they’re now trapped in this impoverished country, unable to support themselves, and not yet, perhaps not ever, among those privately sponsored, or referred by the UNHCR (the United Nations Refugee Agencv) for resettlement elsewhere, those being the two avenues out. Seeing the desperation in their faces I begin to wonder if another avenue will open up: one of return. With the apparent decrease in hostilities in Syria, will people be able to go back? Will they want to go back? Aleppo is no longer beautiful.

Outside the Hope Café: the key hasn't arrived yet so
volunteer Mary Ellen is conducting a lesson on
the sidewalk (British: pavement)

My student today - let’s call him Adnan – is an unaccompanied minor. He’s bright, sassy and funny. He spends his days volunteering, helping to run a small café on a side street in Athens that provides food and a social space for refugees.  I’ve been asked to help some of his colleagues with their English before they start work a few days a week. I ask Adnan if he’s going to come along to that lesson. “Maybe” he says, smiling. I think he has something more to say, so I wait: “You know, they don’t speak English,” he says coyly. Oh, I get his meaning: unlike him, they are complete beginners, they will not be constructing sentences.  I laugh: we both laugh. “Oh well,” I say: “It’s going to be A, B, C then!” Forewarned is forearmed. Thank you, Adnan.

 

 

Find Kitab at:  http://www.kitabngo.org/

 

Hope Café at:  https://www.facebook.com/soulfoodforrefugees/

 

Please support these organizations if possible.

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Writing, in Arabic,  a notice about English lessons

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Conclusion

It took me a long time to write a conclusion to this blog - in fact, I haven't. But someone asked me about that yesterday so I thought I'd explain.

I left Athens and my work at the Orange House early in April 2017, and headed for Crete where I enjoyed a glorious vacation, first seeking out wild flowers (one of my life's great passions) then hiking alone along the south west coast.  The weather, food, people, scenery and flowers were incomparable. It was all such a contrast to what I had experienced in Athens, and what my friends there continue to experience,  that I found myself at a loss for words.

The End 

Post 6: Who are these people?

Refugees come in all shapes and sizes, with all sorts of stories. My job is not to ask a lot of questions about their past, their escape, the war or other traumatic events, but to help with whatever’s needed in the present moment. If someone wishes to share part of their story with me I lend a sympathetic ear but don’t probe. Our volunteer training tells us that it’s not appropriate to encourage people to re-live traumas with us.

So the stories I hear are partial, and many of them are simple.  These are ordinary people, whom you could meet on the street in any country in the world. The one factor, of course, that ties them all together and is always present as a sub-text, is that for one reason or another, each one of them has had to flee their home, taking little or nothing with them. Each one of them, too, is trying to create a new life for themselves, and often for their family as well. They come to the Orange House mostly for language lessons, sometimes to use the Wi-Fi, sometimes to hang out or help out.



Making zaatar, the Middle Eastern spice mix our organization is named for.

Here are some of the stories: I’ve changed names and some details to protect privacy. Any photos I drop into this post will be generic.

 

·         One of the first conversations I had on arriving at the Orange House was with Yaman, a Syrian man in his twenties who was being re-settled in Dublin and would be leaving in a few weeks for his new life. He had been studying architecture in Syria and hopes to continue in Ireland but he’s also a musician: he plays piano and oud (a traditional stringed instrument). He showed me photos of himself teaching a group of students. He hasn’t played for years and doesn’t want to. He said he’d lost family members, two cousins and others, in the war and it didn’t feel right to play music.  I said I hoped he’d play again someday.

 

Yaman speaks quite good English: he wanted to improve his reading and writing skills, so we began to think of and write down words that begin with different letters of the alphabet, starting with A. I asked him to suggest words and we took off from there, as each word prompted a conversation. It’s a useful technique. I used it again later with Sayid, a Palestinian former soccer player. I suggested we pick words to do with sport. He didn’t really stick to the theme: I’m not sure he understood, but it was something for me to come back to if the conversation flagged. Sayid lapsed into silence after the letter “D” for which he picked “dangerous” - “like the boat journey from Turkey” he said.

Volunteers greet visitors.

 

·         I spent some time with Maren, a young Eritrean mother who had lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia. She has two young children, Ali and Sara.  She wanted to study past, present and future so we worked with regular and irregular verbs. Her English is very good. She’s not well, doesn’t sleep and feels sad and ill. She’s seeing the doctor at Medecins sans Frontiers and seems to have some supports in place but is very down. She says she left Saudi Arabia because life is so difficult there (for foreigners, I believe she meant, although as I know from my nephew who spent a couple of years in luxury there, not for all foreigners). Maren told me that she had escaped to Turkey where she was raped (I think that’s what she said) and then to one of the Greek islands.  I sat and listened and sympathized, made tea, and tried to work back into conversation. Then her children who had gone out with a group led by the American teachers Mary and Laura came back and she re-collected herself.

 

·         Abas is surprised himself at how easily he got asylum in Greece; he’s 25, short and small, very soft spoken and engagingly polite – he touches his heart whenever he greets or leaves me (and no doubt others too). He speaks good English, worked in Kabul as an interpreter and was threatened because of his work. He flew to Teheran, got into Turkey somehow – it included running – then took a bus into Greece and was welcomed, although thoroughly searched, by the Greek police who gave him food and water and something to smoke! He made his way to Athens and is living here looking for work, volunteering at Orange House while he does so. Abas is not sure what his next move will be. He left his whole family – he has parents and siblings - in Afghanistan and as his father is old and he’s the oldest son he believes he is sorely missed. He showed me pictures of his family’s feast for Naw Ruz, the Persian new year, with an empty place set for him.  He’s discovered the OH and is very glad of it. Not only can he attend English lessons – he finds Alia’s very useful – but he can teach English to Farsi speakers and he’s become a regular shift volunteer as well. He sat beside me one recent evening and asked if we could talk for a while, as he misses his mother! 

 



Naw Ruz (Persian New Year) feast prepared by Orange House residents.

 

 

·         Adnan is a 15-year-old Syrian boy.  He seems to be a bit intellectually delayed. Some of the other volunteers – Arabic speaking males -  say he steals and they don’t like him. He’s had some conflict with one of the boys who lives in the OH.   I established a rapport with Adnan from the outset. He kept asking every day for something, I thought it was trousers. I passed on the request but no one seemed to take any notice. At last, after about two weeks, I happened to be on shift at distribution time on a very quiet day and it turned out that he was asking for diapers for his baby brothers – also socks. I gave him what I could and he doesn’t seem to have asked again since.  He attended “school” with the two American teachers even though he was much older than the others, but he won’t go to any of the adult lessons. Rana, a newly minted volunteer, a young Syrian refugee, is going to offer an English alphabet class and I think I’ll try to direct him to that.  I’ve been told that Adnan is illiterate in Arabic and is from a family of shepherds in a rural area. He apparently first came to OH with his family, about the time I arrived in early February, but has come alone ever since.



Adnan

·         Sadia is from Afghanistan. She’s here with her daughter Vida (18), and her son, Hafez (15) (ages approximate).  Her husband and older son (21) are in Sweden and she hopes they can all go there soon to be reunited. Her husband worked as a car mechanic in Afghanistan and lost a foot in a bomb blast. She worked at a government project on women’s rights. It might be because of that that they had to leave, I don’t know. She and the children spent a year in Elleniki camp, south of Athens, before finding a place to live in a refugee project in the city.



·         Usman is a Pakistani who told me he had escaped to Turkey where he was attacked by other Pakistanis who were trying to kill him. He was badly injured, has had several operations and I think his condition helped him get into Greece. But he left his 19-year-old brother behind in Turkey. The brother was in the same fight but not injured. The brother had managed to get to Kos and was trying to get to Athens, Usman had to take some papers in the next day. I really felt helpless as I know nothing about the system but I looked at them and told him what the English bits said. Two weeks later he had managed to get his brother safely to Athens with him -  although Athens is not very safe for Pakistanis; many of them apparently sleep rough.

 

(Some volunteers go out to help the rough sleepers. Working at Orange House I see only one aspect of the international effort in Athens. There are many organizations and hundreds of volunteers working  to address the different needs of refugees.)

 

 Athens

·         Joram is an adult from Syria, late twenties in age. He was a carpenter back in Aleppo, a skill which he learned from his father.   When Joram speaks of Aleppo now he just makes a dismissive gesture – it’s gone.  He’s obtained permission to settle in Ireland and will be moving to Dublin soon. His father and mother also fled Aleppo but remain in Syria, in a village near the Turkish border.  He’d like eventually to bring them to live with him in Ireland. He doesn’t like to go to Alia’s English lessons because her accent is American. He likes to talk with me because mine is English (almost).  He sometimes helps me with the washing up in the basement kitchen and we “do” English conversation that way. He has some attention deficit I think, always wants to finish my sentences for me even though he has no idea what I’m going to say. He’s made me think that “Listen” would be a really good theme for a dance camp.



·         Karim is a young North African man whose sexual orientation and atheism led to persecution in his home country. Eventually he fled to Turkey. He took a boat across to Samos and because he had no money had to pay by giving his cellphone. It seems the smuggler’s girlfriend particularly wanted his phone.  He said that the Greek police treated the arriving refugees "kindly". Karim has been volunteering at OH but has just secured a job as an interpreter with an ngo (non-governmental organization) working with refugees here in Athens. He speaks French, Arabic and English: valuable skills in the ngo job market!

·         Lili became distressed when we drove out of Athens towards the national park for an outing. That was because we passed a hotel where she’d lived for a month before moving to a refugee residence in the city. It was a nice hotel, she said, but she was there because she was negotiating with people smugglers to obtain a passport that would get her to London and they swindled her out of 10,000 Euros.

 

 So, those are some of the people I’ve met. They’re just ordinary people into whose lives a huge and dangerous disruption intruded. Their lives will never be the same again.

 

The organization that runs Orange House can be reached at zaatarngo.org