Aug 19 Day Shift Day 9

Aug 19 Monday

Day 9

First Day Shift

Moria camp during the day is so very different from evenings or nights.  It is so very busy.  Our team did a variety of things. Some leveled a plot of land in an olive grove just outside of camp.  This was to put up a Tom Cruise tent that is subdivided by hanging blankets inside the walls of the tent.  This results in 6 to 10 living spaces depending on the size of the family.  The more children the more space is allotted.  Before the tent is put up you lay wooden pallets (the kind that goods like vegetables are stacked on so that a fork lift can lift the stack.)  The pallets level the ground above the rocks and dirt and it allows rain water to run under the tent.  But the pallets have to be brought from the ware house in a big box truck.  A couple of us went to load pallets and bring them back.  The closest spot to unload the truck was about 50 yards from the tent site.  Not a problem, except that there was a 30-foot-deep 20-yard-wide creek gully between the truck and the tent site.  The technique used was to roll the square pallets down and back up the gully.  It was crazy.

I volunteered to go with one of the I-58 folks in the box truck to a vegetable ware house where we purchased 60 more pallets and loaded them to the top of the box truck.  The ware house had a fork lift that brought the pallets to the bed of the truck but we still had to lift each one and stack it.  Then we took these to the Euro-relief warehouse to stack them for later use.  My new best friend allowed me to stay in the box truck and throw them out on the ground where he picked them up and stacked them behind a storage shed out of sight.  Getting up and down out of the truck was not something I wanted to do.

When we returned it was about noon and they had the Tom Cruise tent up and were hanging blanket dividers.

This afternoon I felt like Sisyphus.  I did not have to roll a stone up the hill in camp but I did make the trip a dozen times taking tents and things up to an area where they were putting small camping tents. 

The numbers of refugees that come to Lesvos is overwhelming.  I was talking to Penny this evening about this.  The Greeks and the UN treat these refugees with great compassion.  They are not imprisoned here in Moria.  They can come and go as they like.  They run bus service from camp to the towns around here.  We ate in Mytilene this evening and there were lots of people from camp who came to town to stroll around the beautiful bay.  So why don’t they just leave.  Well until they get asylum status they can’t rent an apartment or get a job.  They are forced to live in camp even though there is no housing for them in the camp.  We are putting up tents (even small camping tents) as quickly as possible.  The weather has been lovely but that will not last.  What will happen when it rains. 

The solution to this is simple and the same solution to the problem at the southern border of the USA.  The time it takes to make decision about asylum claims is months because there are not enough decision makers.  The Greek government and the EU Committee make 7 to 8 decisions per day, Monday to Friday and not on holidays.  When there are 100 to 400 or more people coming every day, the math will tell you that the camp will never be empty.

One of the things that struck me while working in the day for the first time was the number of families that had teeny tiny babies.  I cannot imagine the fear, and danger that would motivate a mother to bring her infant on a rubber boat that was made to hold 20 people and had 50 people in it.  Many coming from Africa.  From some areas they take flights or ferries from their home country to Turkey where officials are often bribed by the mafia to look the other way as the mafia smugglers charge exorbitant prices to allow refuges to cross into Europe (Lesvos, Greece) 

I was told not to take pictures of anyone or thing inside the camp.  So, I did not.  But Google Moria Refugee Camp and you will find thousands of pictures.  Many are old pictures, many are taken during winter with rain and snow and I could not recognize the location in the camp.  The camp is ever changing.  As of today there were 4 or 5 large tents in the olive grove just outside the fence there were not there yesterday.  I was told by Kim that 18 months or so ago the camp was comprised almost entirely of tents.  In the main part of the camp the tents have been replaced largely by IsoBox living spaces.  Another thing that keeps changing the camps is the structures that the refugees build out of scavenged material.  These are constructed almost everywhere.  None of this is good but much better than tents.  There are still tents and more tents going up all the time.

Another image you will see is garbage dumpsters overflowing with garbage.  That was true every afternoon and evening.  But every morning the garbage trucks rumble through the camp and empty all the dumpsters and then a small army of Greek workers come through with brooms and shovels and clean the streets and empty garbage bags in the living areas.  But by evening it looks like they were never emptied.  A lot of people create a lot of garbage.  The packaging for three meals and 3 or more bottles of water per person results in lots of stuff.  Not to mention the stuff people bring into camp from the cities. 

All in all, it is a sad place and my hope is to make it a little better.