I was going to Greece anyway already because I was working at a summer camp
just a normal summer camp for international youth aged between 16 and
25. It's an activity camp full of kind of watersports and people having fun in
the summer, and the camp was on the island of Kos which is not far from Lesbos
and obviously I'd been hearing lots about the refugee crisis, been reading
about it lots in the media and it's been full of hostility, full of this kind of
you know the term refugee crisis has been coined, and it always seemed a bit weird to me
how it's a crisis for us you know a wealthy society that that needs people
to come in but not really a crisis for them. So, I headed to Lesbos, [to the] Pikpa camp and
I spent three weeks there basically, three weeks in Kos and three weeks in Lesbos.
It's this kind of sense of anger, a sense of 'What am I doing about this?', 'Am I just
Tweeting and posting and sharing raging articles from The Guardian?', or am I actually
doing something about it? It was that feeling. And the media obviously have the
vested interest, they they want to create shock and shocking pictures like the one
of Alan Kurdi worked to sell papers and to generate conversations for a few
days but then went back to the sort of bread-and-butter issues as well and for
me it was more about exploring the stories behind the numbers and kind of
seeing what dreams people take with them, what motivates them to make that journey,
what motivates them to pay 2,000 Euros to a smuggler to get on a pontoon? Yeah.
Okay, so it was a pretty international atmosphere. Initially the
camp was just set up for those from Greece so lots of people from the
neighboring islands and Lesbos, mainly, were coming. At one point there were 25
volunteers from Mytilini, the village which only has about 2,000 people in
general and it kind of felt like this hippy enclave almost, it used to be just a
place where the Greek youth from all over Greece came to have fun, to learn, so it's
very colourful. Lots of colourful graffiti on the walls. It wasn't, the sort of image of
a camp with lots of fences and chains and sort of almost like a militaristic
detention camp. There was a genuine atmosphere of welcoming and you know
'This is your space, this is your home. You're not here temporarily but you can
actually stay here for a while until we figure out what's next.'
There is this, this one guy, his story particularly touched me
He came from Eritrea, he was the son of two generals, high-ranking military generals
and his mother worked for the army as well in the capacity of a psychologist
so he came from a pretty wealthy family in Eritrea. He was, you know, part of the
crème de le crème of Eritrea , you could say, but he was really against the the idea
of getting into the military and not being able to get out. The conditions in the
Eritrean army are terrible and he was LGBT - he was gay - and he was actually way too
scared to come out as gay, he would never tell his parents. In the army, it is
pretty much impossible to show that but at the same time it's very difficult to
to hide your identity and it's difficult to kind of just just go about your daily
business like that. So, one time he tried to escape the
camp, just sneak out basically the military barracks. He failed to do so and
he was beaten by a general that was one [step] below his father and his father didn't
do anything to stop this, his father basically authorised the beating, so
it was quite regular to essentially torture the soldiers. Once he escaped, he
faced a perilous journey through Egypt, Sudan and then Egypt, where he was detained in
Sudan and brought back to Eritrea. He had to basically discard his passport and
discard his ID card just to just to make sure that he was not being chased, and then
he managed after six months to cross again back into Sudan and travel
entirely on a bike which he bought at a market.
He went to a good school, a private school, his English is perfect because he
he learned English since he was 6, so he was not the stereotypical refugee that we
see in tabloid papers. He was educated, he looked completely like a Western
citizen, and despite making this journey he's a person of so much potential but
kind of the potential was crushed by dictatorial system which basically
didn't allow him his rights and didn't allow him his dreams.
My eyes always kind of open, just looking around, they didn't have a
focused view point. I was always curious about human suffering and you know
myself I'm Jewish so I lost my family in the Holocaust, my far family that I
never got to meet. So I'm quite aware of the kind of amount of discrimination
there is in the world but I never experienced that first-hand, I've always had
a safe upbringing, I was always in this sort of bubble, and it's really
difficult to make that first step. I was kind of regretting on the first night
actually on the first few hours when I arrived in Lesbos of coming there
because it just felt so heavy and it felt like it was going to destroy me completely
and I'm not strong enough to cope with all this, but I also realised that there
is more than me and my fears, and you know, if I, if I overcome something not only
does that make me feel good about myself because that doesn't matter but it
actually helps people, you know. Being able to exchange smiles and - and to
exchange these stories and to genuinely listen to people really gives them a
feeling, really empowers them. You know, listening really empowers people and
this is something that I learned. I can't do anything for the refugees apart from
cooking them some porridge and some soup and teaching a session of English but I
can listen. It doesn't matter how dramatic a story is, it doesn't matter if a
story makes you cry or not, it's about looking into people's eyes and like
understanding what their concern is and this actually taught me a lot for SYP and the
work I'll be doing in the future because one of the main things why I took up
SYP is to be a better listener. I've always been quite
opinionated, I've been a party activist since I was 15, etc., and it's good to step
back from it and look at the broader picture and look at what people dream,
people desire, what people want to communicate.
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