I arrived in Turkey on April 13th…was immediately taken in by customs officers because they were concerned about all the eyeglasses I was bringing (to donate to refugees). They refused to look at my paperwork (showing which NGO was accepting the eyeglasses) and confiscated all my luggage, charged me fines, and even made me miss my plane (costing a hefty $600+ to reschedule onto another flight and not lose my original return tickets. Miserable start… And, if that wasn’t bad enough, I developed a bad case of Covid (my first even being vacc’d and boosted). I was sick in bed for 14 days…pretty miserable.
While in Turkey, I walked the streets of Istanbul. So many Syrian children digging through garbage, selling flowers on the streets, begging for money. This young girl offered to polish my boots and then used her spit and her very stained jacket to clean them.
Finally made it to Lesvos. I have spent 2018, 2019 and 2020 here helping the huge numbers of refugees (at that time 23,000+). Moria camp burned down and a new camp was built right on the weather (horribly cold in the winter) and there are now 2,000+ refugees here.
606+ refugees arrived at Lesvos in March 2023 by rubber rafts. Many more try, but when the Hellenic Coast Guard can, they rush to find incoming rafts of refugees, stop their boats, remove the boat’s motors, take all the money and phones off the refugees and tow them back to Turkish waters. All this to stop more refugees from entering the EU, despite this being against all the 1951 international laws on refugees which said all countries should recognize and accept refugees fleeing persecution.
There are many nationalities represented in the camp. Primarily Afghans, but also large numbers of Palestinians, Somalians, people from Sierra Leone and Sudan. I picked up a young boy from Somalia who was with his two friends. He said that he had kidney failure and was on dialysis. Two years ago he made it to Turkey and to receive dialysis, had to gather donations each night from all the other Somali refugees to pay €60 per dialysis treatment to keep him alive. Five days ago he and his two friends made it to Greece where he is now being given dialysis treatments free of charge. He was so grateful and happy. He resides in the refugee camp on the island with many others and is unaware of the future, but for today he is grateful to his God, that he made it to Europe.
Today a group of Afghan minors, all girls, sang the National Anthem of Afghanistan since it was Eid-Al-Fitr (the end of the month-long fast for Ramadan). They held one hand to their hearts and the others they waved back and forth in the air. As they sang, many of the women in the room cried…including many of the elderly women. A young teen, Fatima, aged 15, came up from behind the crowd and surprisingly, and sobbed in my arms for at least 5 minutes as I tried to sooth her. It was heartbreaking. The Afghan girls have such deep sadness knowing that the lives of their female friends back home are lost forever.
Last week I met Fatimata from Mali. She is 38 and all alone. Over time and in gaining her trust, she shared her story. When 11 in Mali she experienced a clitorectomy by an elderly woman in her village. She said that many young girls died from infections, and she herself experienced a very bad infection that she believes made her sterile. When she was 18, she was sold to a man who had three other wives. She could not produce a child after several years, and he started to beat her and eventually kicked her out on the street, calling her worthless. She said she lived on the streets, and then eventually met a person who gave her a job cleaning a hotel. While there she met a man from Turkey who helped her get a visa for Turkey. In Turkey, she worked for several years in some sort of chemical factory that made her very sick. She entered the hospital and had some operation that left a huge scar on her stomach, she showed me. She still has no idea what the surgery was for or what was removed. She was discharged from the hospital and returned to the chemical factory. The owner refused to pay her anything he owed her and called her many derogatory names for being black. Again, she ended up on the streets in Istanbul all alone. She eventually met a Congolese woman who helped her get a job at a metal factory, and together the two of them lived with five other women in a room. After over a year of working, she saved €1200 which was enough to pay a smuggler to send them by boat to Lesvos. On the raft coming to Lesvos, the Congolese woman who had become her best friend, drowned when the motor of the raft ran out of fuel and began to sink. Fatimata broke down crying as she shared her loss. I took her hands and held them…Fatimata then admitted she had never had a white person touch her or treat her with kindness. More tears…
Sadly, the refugees here are in a honeymoon phase as they feel after all these months/years of trying, they have made it to Europe. Many have been pushed back repeatedly, and witnessed drownings and beatings by border guards along the way. But, now they have “made it” to the promised land. Five years I have been volunteering with refugees along these borders and I am unfortunately aware that their struggles have only just begun… they will face asylum rejections, no housing, no money, no medical care or education for their children. But one by one…I and others try to give some light to this day.
Lexine