A Month with Starfish is almost ready to publish. It will be appearing next week as a paperback in UK English and soon after as an e-book in US English. Hopefully also an audiobook on Audible. A Dutch edition will appear in March. I did think of getting a Greek edition, but....

A Month with Starfish

I am continuing to edit and update this blog, which will eventually cover the period up to 27 November, when I flew back to Amsterdam.

If all goes well, the blog will be published, initially only as a Kindle e-book on Amazon, as A Month with Starfish. The proceeds will go to Starfish. 

Who is doing the work here?

The bad weather continued on 23 November, and we had few boat arrivals. At yesterday’s volunteer meeting we had discussed taking the opportunity to continue winterizing the camp. One part of that would be laying down sandbags around Oxy to prevent rain seeping into the tents. In the morning, this plan ran into a few hiccups when the first bags proved too weak, but eventually the sandbag operation got going. My friend A told me the following story.

     An IRC bus arrived, and a group of refugees started forming a line to get on the next bus. Several IRC men stood smoking and waiting for the line to fill up. They were also watching A, who was bending over an extremely heavy sandbag nearby, trying to load it into a wheelbarrow. She is pretty strong, but after several attempts she was close to giving up. The bag was just too heavy. The IRC men looked on. Suddenly, one of the refugees, unable to stand the sight of her efforts any longer, rushed out of the bus line to help her with the sandbags.

     Clearly, the IRC are doing very useful work. They send the buses that transport refugees from Oxy to Mytilene. Thank God they do, since it was only a few months ago that all the refugees, even small children, were obliged to walk the entire 65 kilometers from the beach to Mytilene.

     The UNHCR too do useful work. They provide the other buses, which take rescued refugees from the football field straight to Mytilene. They also provide a couple of excellent large tents, each of which sleeps 200 people, and very warm blankets. They sometimes come to Oxy and give informative meetings for refugees. In addition, they sometimes identify vulnerable people such as people with a disability and minors traveling alone, and ensure that the IRC bus drivers know about them.

     Still, there is quite a bit of tension between the volunteers and the major agencies, especially the UNHCR. The UNHCR often puts out PR that suggests it is doing far more than it actually does. It has referred to the “fleet of minibuses” with which it supposedly transports refugees from the north coast to Mytilene. Most of us had never seen a sign of this mysterious fleet, but someone eventually discovered the existence of one such minibus. I know that the UNHCR works all around the world and is badly underfunded. I also believe that all sorts of behind-the-scenes political shenanigans hamper the UNHCR and other major aid agencies and make it harder for them to take a more active role here. But that is no excuse for misrepresentation.

     On Monday morning, there were two UNHCR women standing at Oxy, apparently taking stock of what was going on. Since it was quiet, I decided to go into town to buy some things we needed in the food tent. One of the UNHCR women, seeing that I was driving off, asked if she could come with me to buy cigarettes. She was new to the north of the island. “I’m from Communications,” she said, and I said that was nice, and added that we had our own communications system.

     “Would you like me to tell you about how we work here?” she asked.

     OK, I’ll be frank. If I'd had any sense, I would have said “Oh yes, please!” Now I shall never know what she might have said. Instead, my mind flew back to the volunteer meeting a couple of weeks earlier, when two UNHCR people came to tell us how best to prevent aggression arising at Oxy.

     “It is important to issue tickets.”

     “You must ensure that people stand in line.”

     “You must be fair.
     “You must ensure that people understand why you are doing what you do.”

     These were all things that Starfish had been doing competently for many months. So competently that there was almost never any aggression at Oxy. The presentation gave me the feeling, and I was far from alone in this, that the UNHCR was pretty clueless and arrogant.

     So when the UNHCR woman asked me:

     “Would you like me to tell you about how we work here?” I did not react sensibly. I immediately replied,

     “I know exactly what you do here. You provide two nice large tents and very good blankets.” The woman was taken aback. She told me that volunteers in Mytilene often did ask for the UNHCR’s advice, and this may well be true. I dropped her off, barely managing to suppress my laughter, and went off to do my own shopping.

     When I got back to Oxy, I told the camp manager about my encounter. I thought it quite amusing. But she had already heard about it.

     “It has caused problems,” she said. She did not personally think I was in the wrong, but apparently the communications lady had complained, and the local UNHCR leader happened to be there. He was fuming at the lack of respect shown to his worker.

     I decided that I needed to defuse the tension a little. I went over to the UNHCR man, but he was talking on his mobile. When he got off the phone, almost an hour later, I went over and apologized, saying that I had meant no disrespect.

[Since I left Lesvos, the UNHCR has posted a video that gives the impression that it coordinates the teams of volunteers in the north of the island. This is plainly ridiculous.]

I set about reorganizing the food tent. The transformation had shuffled the huts into a new constellation. The sandwiches and water were now stacked in a hut that bore signs of its previous incarnations: children’s drawings from the period in which it had been used for women and children, and a list of symptoms in Farsi from the time it was the medical tent. It had now metamorphosed into the temporary food tent. Our new carpenter, A, came over to saw a hole in the side to make a window through which we could serve the sandwiches, fruit and drinks.

   I moved about four hundred water bottles away from the side of the hut that had developed an alarming bulge to a sturdier side, and put the sandwiches, bananas and apples in more convenient places. I hung up some scissors with which to open the milk cartons. When I had finally rearranged everything, I couldn't think of what else to do. We had no refugees, In this strange lull, I had time to muse on my role here. What was I doing on Lesvos? Was I actually a useful volunteer? I watched people around me busily engaged in carpentry, and moving things about with purposeful energy, and felt pretty useless. True, at 64, and with a bad hip, I had always planned to be careful about engaging in too much physical activity. It was in no one’s interest for me to get injured and to need medical attention myself. Still, I started wondering if I was protecting myself too much. Who was I to get all high and mighty about the UNHCR? 

Lifesavers

On Sunday 22 November I had lunch with the British volunteer D, one of the good friends I have made here. Such a warm, spontaneous person who radiates positive energy. I am sure we will keep in touch. I have made more friends on Lesvos in this month than in the past several years.

    I signed up for a shift at Eftalou. I wanted to go there anyway, to speak to the British artists Eric and Philippa Kempson, who have lived on Lesvos for 16 years. I had bought some medical and other supplies I wanted to leave in their storage area, and I also wanted to buy some of their beautiful products. Before leaving the house I called Spiros, the leader of the Hellenic Lifeguards, and agreed to meet him at Eftalou to talk about their work.

    In principle the Eftalou shift means standing by in case of boat arrivals, and helping people to board the bus to Oxy. But there was a strong south wind, so we were not expecting any boats. The engines on the little dinghies cannot cope with a stiff southerly wind, which would simply blow the boats right back to the Turkish coast.

    The artist couple live in an atmospheric cottage in secluded surroundings down a path leading away from the beach road, with a little artists' studio and shop. Philippa had visitors, and someone had brought cake. We sat around a table in a rather English way with tea and cake, on a small veranda. The house used to have a very spacious veranda, but that is now full of shelves of clothes and other items for the refugees. The couple's entire life has been turned upside down. It was over a year ago that Eric and Philippa and their singer daughter Elleni (artist's name EjK) first started helping people to disembark safely and taking care of them. Getting people off the boats safely is often difficult, since much of the coast is rocky, and those who jump out enthusiastically or get out too quickly can easily sprain an ankle, or worse.

    "We didn't choose to destroy our lives," mused Philippa. I asked if "destroy" was not too strong a word. She explained that the tourist trade on which they depend has almost dried up, and they have few customers for their products. I have seen Eric's reaction online, when he is asked why they abandoned their normal lives to spend most of their time helping the refugees. He clearly thinks it's a stupid question.

    "Because we're human beings!" he will say bluntly. People needed care, and the idea of not giving that care would have been unthinkable. The couple are also fierce about respecting the refugees' dignity.

    Philippa was talking about the difficulties they had faced from some of the locals, and I chimed in that most of the people in Molyvos I had spoken to had been full of compassion, though clearly worried about the future. At that point, Eric came in. Eric is 60 years old and sports an idiosyncratic haircut: pudding bowl in the front, shoulder length at the back. I had to remind myself that it is not Eric but his daughter who is the musician of the family. Hearing my defense of the villagers, he became angry:

    "We've been spat at! We've had our tires slashed! We've had death threats!"

    I knew about this, having watched several of his regular YouTube videos about the refugee situation. In fact it was perhaps his videos that first made me think of going to Lesvos. Eric and Philippa have reacted heroically to the influx of refugees on their doorstep. They, more than anyone, have given up everything to help. And they have received plenty of abuse for doing so. In Eftalou too, some subscribe to the mysterious doctrine that refugees come to that particular beach because Eric and his wife are there – these days with dozens of volunteers from a variety of groups, including Starfish – to help them off the boats, distribute water and hand out dry socks.

    Eric expresses himself forcefully on his videos. He voices his disgust at the way the refugees have been abandoned by the EU and by the national government. He is indignant when the UNHCR promises to deliver tents and then fails to do so. He is outraged by the behavior of the occasional aggressive photographer, who he has seen pushing volunteers out of the way, and even, he remarks on his videos, sometimes steering a boat towards a rockier bit of the beach, in order to get more sensational photos. Eric is also appalled by the plans to build a new camp along the dirt road, since this road is treacherous in the winter months and unsuitable for the minibuses that will be needed to transport refugees up and down between the camp and the asphalt road.

    As for the locals: there are undeniably some people in Molyvos who are hostile to the aid effort. It is my understanding that there are even a couple of Golden Dawn supporters, as there are handfuls of fascists in Amsterdam, London, Paris and everywhere else. Eric emphasizes that it is only a few locals who have been aggressive to him.

    My own experience is of course very limited. In a month in Molyvos, although I heard a few unpleasant anecdotes, I did not personally see or hear anyone express hostility to or about the refugees. I did see locals bringing food and clothes to Oxy. As Melinda had said, talking about the situation at our Starfish volunteer meeting:

    "There are people who are for us and work with us, people who are against us, and people who would like to help but are not sure how to do so."

Spiros arrived, and I sat down with him on a wall outside. Spiros Mitrisakis is the leader of the team from the Hellas Lifeguard Training Center.  These are people who normally work as gym instructors, or who sell sports equipment, but work part-time providing first-aid training for volunteers and assisting  at major events such as the annual swimming event on Spetses and the annual SUP (stand-up paddle) race through the entire length of the Corinth Canal.

    Following the coverage of the disastrous shipwreck of October 28th, in which so many lives were lost, he and his wife had assembled a team to work on the beach near the lighthouse at Eftalou on a 24/7 basis. He had been incensed by a remark attributed to Wolfgang Schaüble: “Let them drown; it costs less.” They had soon attracted sponsors, including Aegean Airlines, Lalizas, Blue Star, and WIND Telecoms. There are now twelve Hellenic lifeguards in total – besides the other lifeguards on the north coast, like the Spanish NGO Pro-Activa Open Arms – working as volunteers on Lesvos:  

    “Not just men, also women,” added Spiros. “Many women refugees don't like to see a big man holding out his hands to help her off boat, or to hold her baby.”

    I asked Spiros if it was true, as I had heard, that the Greek coastguard does not allow them to intervene if they see that a boat is in trouble. He shook his head:

    “No, but we must phone first, so the coastguard knows who we are, and that we are competent to help.” He related a story about a honeymoon couple who had sailed off in a boat hoping to save people, with the best of intentions but no knowledge of what they were doing.

    The team had had some dramatic rescues. At one point they rescued a boat on the rocks, and as they were helping the people to disembark, the refugees said, “Wait, where is the other boat, the one that had mostly women and children?” The lifeguards set off on a feverish search for an hour before they finally found the other boat, which had become stranded on another part of the coast, and managed to rescue all of those on board.

    Spiros had thought a lot about trying to solve the problem of getting people off the boats safely onto a rocky beach. It was not always enough to keep them calm and encourage them to disembark slowly.

    “So we made a platform. Look!” and he showed me a picture on his phone. Spiros’s men were the proud inventors of a disembarkation jetty made from boards attached to an upside-down boat. This enabled the refugees to step onto the platform and simply walk onto the beach, remaining dry.

    “We thought, maybe we put a red carpet on top, for welcome!”

    Several weeks earlier, a wealthy Swiss businessman had come to watch the team at work.

    “And he said. He said . . .” Spiros was briefly unable to speak, and I saw that he was overcome by emotion at the memory of the businessman's words and his generosity.

    "He said he admired so much what we were doing. He gave us a house and paid for everything so that we can stay here for months!"

    Spiros's team-mates called him back to the car; they had to leave. I gripped Spiros's shoulder, and thanked him for taking time to speak to me.

[After I left Lesvos, there was an incident on the beach in which a photographer whose behavior had prompted anger in the past, as Eric's videos have recorded, tried to take pictures of refugee women while they were stripping off their wet clothes and changing in a tent. The Hellenic lifeguards were angry, and Spiros told the man to go away. He refused, and photographs show Spiros firmly escorting the photographer back to his car. The photographer has since filed charges for assault. Some of his supporters have also intimidated Eric in abusive phone calls, telling him to remove his YouTube documentation of these and related events. The case is expected to go to court, and there are many witnesses who can testify as to what occurred.]

Library to lighthouse

On 21 November I drove down the road to refuel the car, and got into a discussion with the attendant, a good-looking man in his thirties, about the influx of volunteers. He was irritated by what he took to be the implication that volunteers were good for business.

"Yes we may be making €4,000 more than usual this autumn. But next summer we'll we making losses of ten times that amount -- €40,000 for sure!"

He expressed a fear that I heard again and again. Some tour operators have suspended their trips to Lesvos, which is set to cause further hardship on an island already dealing with multiple challenges. Hoteliers, restaurant owners and everyone else who depends on tourism for their livelihood are holding their breath, terrified of what next summer may bring, or not bring. (I later conducted a mini internet survey of Dutch tour operators, from major companies such as D-Reizen and Neckermann to Greece specialists such as Ross Holidays, and was happy to find that not one has scrapped Lesvos from their catalogues. The UK company Thomas Cook does appear to have suspended it from their list of destinations, however.)

I walked up into the village, and a man about my age accosted me, asking my name and inviting me to sit and chat. We sat down on the steps. He was G, who owns a local produce store. Like many villagers, he was full of compassion for the refugees. His only concern was the debris. It is true that on some beaches there may be piles of discarded life jackets and dinghies for a while until they are cleared away. But I remember how astonished I was when I arrived on Lesvos at the end of October 2015, when 7,000 refugees a day were arriving on the island, to see that most places were very clean. The local council operates regular rubbish collections and groups of locals and volunteers frequently organise cleaning days.

G remained sombre about the future of the island's tourism, and after we had talked for a while, he voiced an opinion that I encountered several times:

"It is partly because you are here that the refugees come to Lesvos!"

I said that this makes no sense, that the refugees are fleeing from war and devastation, that they frequently have only the vaguest idea of where they are going. One of their first questions, on disembarking on the beach, is often "Where am I?" It is the Turkish boat mafia that push the boat out and point the hapless man who has been set at the helm – "That way!" Does G really think that the boat mafia choose destinations on the basis of how likely it is that volunteers will rush to the refugees' aid? This misconception remains a puzzle to me.

I bade G farewell and carried on up the hill to the village's proud library, which serves the community as a lending library and has an impressive store of historical books. It also has a modernizing influence, helping to introduce users to new technologies, and maintains international ties with summer schools in Canada and Norway. The librarian emphasized his solidarity with the refugees:

"Of course – my grandparents were refugees!" he exclaimed.

Forced migration is at the core of the island's history. Thousands of Greeks fled from the Ottoman Empire in boats in 1922-1923 after what the Greeks call "the Asia Minor Catastrophe", part of what is known as the "Greek genocide".  Many settled on nearby Lesvos; over half of the island's population of just 89,000 descend from those refugees. This undoubtedly explains why, despite the locals' concern for their future, so many identify with the refugees in a sense that is horribly lacking in certain other parts of Europe.

I spoke to the librarian about my ideas for Lesvos to become the centre of recycling for the Aegean – surely all the plastic water bottles, life jackets and rubber dinghies can be turned into something useful. V smiled ruefully, and mused on the engines salvaged from the dinghies, which have been stacked up in sheds all over the village without anyone taking the trouble to distinguish ones that could be re-used from those that need to be thrown away.

Recycling is a funny business in Greece. In Molyvos, all the rubbish is jumbled together. In Mytilene, the librarian told me, it is separated. In one area, at least, the Greeks have an advanced recycling system. People throughout Greece collect bottle caps, and once they have collected a ton (!) of caps, they present them to a charity, which uses the resulting funds to make wheelchairs for the disabled. Surely one could build on such a plan, which is very popular in Greece, to popularize a more comprehensive approach to recycling?

I also spoke of my idea for a museum of migration on Lesvos. I would later discover that other people are already working on recycling – developing plans to turn life jackets into baby carriers or rucksacks, for instance – and that material is also already being collected for a future museum of migration. But at this point I was still nursing a hope that I might be able to influence people, to help the island develop ideas that would help its economic recovery. The librarian, although he liked the sound of both projects, said:

"It is always the beginning that is most difficult". He also took a more judicious view of his influence, and mine. "We are just small people," he said. I certainly felt very small.

I drove down to the beach overlooked by the nearby lighthouse to meet up with Suleman, a warm and witty Londoner with a sharply perceptive view of events around him, with whom I had struck up a friendship the week before. He has worked a lot on the beaches, helping with new arrivals, initially with Starfish, and later with Drop in the Ocean and other volunteer groups. He showed me around his section of the beach, where people only remain for an hour or two before moving on. There were separate tents for women and men to change their clothes. The men's tent had a small plant with pink flowers that struck an incongruous note in the corner. It had stood outside the women's tent and had been rescued from the wind. Suleman also introduced me to the team of Greek lifeguards, and I arranged to meet up with their leader and speak to him the next day.

I have not worked on the beaches myself. Given my age and my bad hip, I thought I would be better employed elsewhere. Suleman too has been blogging on his experience here. Since working on the beaches is an essential part of the work done by volunteers on Lesvos, and involves a much higher level of emotional intensity than handing out sandwiches, I asked him if I might quote from his blog, and he kindly agreed. Here are some extracts from his entries for 5 to 7 November:

        5 November 2015

Today I was on beach duty in Eftalou. This is a small hamlet in the middle of a stretch of beach. The people who meet and greet the boats give people some water and then send people over to our station, an area with a few tents. There we give them more water and get them to queue up for a bus ticket to Oxy. Again, it is a managed process to ensure fair queuing and no scrums.

Single men without families have to walk the route, about 7 km. Some men try it on to get onto the bus – quite understandably, I'd do it myself. I've perfected my own way to deal with that. I say that I can put them on the bus but it will mean that a woman or child will not be able to get on. I then ask them if they are happy with that, in their hearts, while gently patting their hearts. They have all then agreed to walk. It is terrible that we cannot allow them all on the bus after their boat journey but there is little choice, given the limited number of buses.

We were expecting a slow day on the beach. The Greek president was coming to Lesbos to have his picture taken handing out bottles to refugees. The allegation is that the Greeks did not want these photos spoiled with more pesky refugees coming across the sea and got their Turkish counterparts to slow things down. Certainly that seemed to have been what happened.

The day was beautiful and when we finished litter picking on the beach, including moving many of the discarded life jackets, we sat on a wall drinking water and looking at the beautiful sea. I was joking to my partner that I had packed everything except a sun hat and that my crown would probably burn – as well as dazzle the cars passing immediately behind us. (Strangely, 45 minutes later an English guy I didn't know walked over to "our" refugees – see below – and started offering them sun hats. He saw me and offered me a hat. Probably he thought "poor Afghani," or maybe he was just being nice).

You can see Turkey from where we were and we saw a couple of orange dots coming towards us. As they got closer we could see they were boats: orange is the colour of the life jackets of the people who were crammed onto an inflatable dinghy. Orange life jackets usually means Syrians, as these life jackets are the least awful and therefore the most expensive. Black life jackets and car inner tubes are the cheapest and usually worn by the Afghans. Some of the so-called "safety vests" given to the desperate migrants by the scummy people-smugglers are even worse: thin plastic swimming rings and arm bands.

One of the boats landed west of us and one arrived exactly where we had been sitting. Before coming here I had tried to mentally prepare myself for all sorts of horrible stuff, including what it would be like to see dead bodies. But what I had not expected was seeing the sheer joy on about eighty faces in a boat for having safely reached Greece. Little did they know what awaited them in later parts of their journey. As soon as they were in earshot, the Norwegians started clapping and we all slowly joined in (slowly so as not to scare the refugees into thinking they should not have landed there). The refugees joined in. The Norwegians from the volunteer organisation Drop in the Ocean arrived from nowhere like blond dervishes, went into the sea up to their knees, helped the people ashore and then disappeared. Once the refugees were all on the beach, families started hugging and kissing each other. I was absolutely not prepared for this show of pure joy. It was beautiful.

We gave them a few minutes to recover and then directed them to their first Greek queue – for bus tickets and basic information from me and an Arabic translator, who joined me. One of the Syrian guys wanted to know how much the bus would cost and insisted on paying. It became a battle of the stubborn and I won. The winning line was that it was from our hearts and he would offend us. We had been briefed that we were probably the first people to offer them any kindness since they had left home. One of the Syrian men grabbed the side of my head when the bus arrived, pulled it down and kissed my shiny forehead. Very sweet. Kind of a shame it wasn't one of the beautiful Syrian women.

There was quite a long wait for the second bus and I chatted to one of the Syrian lads. He was asking for shoes for his family whose feet were wet. Their jeans were also wet. He said the Turkish people-smugglers had thrown their bags into the sea so that they could cram more people into the boat. We managed to rustle up a few pairs of shoes, though some were the wrong size.

Each passenger pays around $1,000 for the crossing [NB This sum kept rising: by the time I left on 27 November I heard of people paying $2,500. Some suggested that the sum included certain bribes–BJ]. Cheaper deals are kindly offered in stormy weather, when the risk of drowning rises exponentially. It is Afghan refugees who are most likely to accept this discount and brave the storm, since they have the least money.

About five minutes after we had got the refugees out of the boat a group of Greek men arrived (we often see the same faces) to cut and remove large plastic sheets from the plastic boat, remove the plywood floors and the outboard engine. The plywood is used to make the sides of animal shelters and the plastic is used to make waterproof roofs. It all seems a bit distasteful but the benefit is that it does get the ugly boats off the beach and out of the way for the next rescue.

We hung about after lunch. We observed a Greek man arrive from somewhere on his motor bike, pick up rubbish on the road and leave. The Greek people are an inspiration with both how clean they keep the island (everyone seems involved in its cleanliness) and their welcoming view to the migrants. If we in Northern Europe had hundreds of thousands of people head for our shores, I am sure we would get out the machine guns, barbed wire and patrol boats. The Greek view seems to range from slight negativity (the minority) to warm sympathy, help and hospitality.

Later on I got a lift into Molyvos for a nice seafood pasta meal. I joined some of the volunteers and three Syrian men. I did not know why these men had been brought over to join us, or by whom: possibly there was some family connection. It was good to hear their stories and chat to them. They bore no visible animosity to the West for bombing the hell out of their country. They were very anti-Assad and considered it vital to bring democracy to Syria. I asked if democracy was more important than food, water, housing and electricity. They said it was. They added that if the Americans really wanted Assad to go he would be gone.

6 November 2015

I was on the afternoon shift. We all chatted for a while as there was not much to do without "customers". While we were chatting, we saw that one of two refugee boats we had seen earlier was making its way to us. We started waving to them and getting ready for their arrival. It turned out to be a boat of about 50 Afghan refugees. Again the Norwegian dervishes had the boat ashore and people out in minutes. The women and children were rushed to one tent to undress and put on the replacement clothes the Norwegians had brought. The men had to wring out their clothes and dry them on rocks, since we had no dry clothes for them. There was a collection of shoes (dried from previous refugees, I think) that the men could swap into. Again, the boat dismantlers were there before we had got the kids into the tent.

. . . Later I went to Oxy. The only interesting thing that happened there was that I had to escalate a 70-year-old double amputee diabetic onto the line for the bus for Kara Tepe. We had no wheelchair or safe place for him to sleep. The guy weighed a ton, and two of us manhandled him to a chair some distance away.

7 November 2015

. . . At the end of the shift I went back to Molyvos, extremely hungry: had two starters and a main course. I ate at Captain's Table. Towards the end of dinner, we had a report of some Syrians who had just landed and one of them had a broken leg and was banging his head against a wall. They called a doctor and a psychiatrist. I paid up and went to see what was happening. The other Syrians were in great humour and the last twenty shook my hand. Unusually, even the one woman in their number. Very touching. I got to the injured guy who was sitting on the pavement in wet clothes, wrapped in a blanket. He was in a state of shock and nobody was doing anything. I embraced him and he burst into tears. I suppose it was the shock of a tubby bald bloke doing that, especially given the number of hot Scandinavians around. I then told the paramedic to help me lift him into the car, which we managed without causing him any further pain. Another hug, more tears and we parted. Intense. Our paths will probably never cross again.

Winds of change

I drove Heleen to the airport in Mytilene. As we approached the airport, we saw lines of refugees struggling along the roadside with their bags. Apparently one or more boats had just landed here: quite unusual, since most boats land on the northern shores of the island. I bought 20 bottles of water at the airport, to hand out on the way back, but by the time I drove back, the refugees had all vanished.

I went to Oxy and started the shift on bus loading. This can be quite a stressful job when it's busy, since you have to check that people have the right tickets, separating the 'Syrian' from 'non-Syrian' tickets and ensuring that people are not jumping the queue. Although 50 tickets are issued for each bus, it's not an exact science, since small children have to sit on their parents' laps and are not given tickets, and there is always the occasional person who sleeps through the bus's departure and will need to be rescheduled.

Today, however, there were only a few hundred refugees, and there were few buses to load. A more pressing problem, as some of the young volunteers hammered planks and stood on ladders to span tarpaulins to protect queues from the rain and continue the winterization project, was the strong wind that had blown up. As the man assigned to the ticket tent was more useful in the realm of carpentry than I was, I took over the ticket tent. Soon, it became a problem of weighting the tickets, maps and pamphlets down so that they did not all fly away.

I watched the tireless L, the young man who had been such a severe instructor in the realm of ticket-making, as he balanced on a table while attaching horizontal struts to the vertical posts separating our boarding lines, which could then be spanned with canvas to protect people from the rain. In a moment of rest, drinking our bottles of water, I said that he had perhaps had too little faith in my ticket-making ability. It seems ridiculous to me now that I needed to say this, but there you are.

"Ah, but I was right," said L. "Because I saw that you did miss a ticket, and you had to count the whole pile to check!" This really creeped me out. It meant that he had been watching me cutting tickets from his restaurant table for an hour and a half! I couldn't figure L out. Was he over-zealous or simply poking fun at me?

Later, however, as the wind intensified and I battened down the ticket tent, and one of the struts threatened to come loose and to lift the entire ticket tent into the air, perhaps with me hanging underneath it as an elderly Mary Poppins or Winnie-the-Pooh clinging to his balloon, it was L that I called over to help. He immediately rushed over with rope and tools and secured the tent.

This happened again and again. I would find myself first put off by someone's behaviour, and soon afterwards see them from a completely different angle and find myself admiring them. It happens in ordinary life too, but here everything is speeded up. We are all nationalities here, and all individuals. Each volunteer’s story, what led him or her to come here, and what each person has to contribute, is as unique as each refugee’s story.

We had what I regarded as an interesting moment of linguistic confusion. Several people insisted that we were going to have a storm, while others said definitely not. It was as if the forecasts were wildly different. Suddenly, I figured out what was going on. When German and Dutch people refer to a storm, they mean a very strong wind -- what British people call a gale. But to British and American people, a 'storm' is always accompanied by rain. I was quite excited by this discovery, and communicated it to the group. A couple of people shared my linguistic enthusiasm, while others looked blank, as if I was ranting about the merits of different potted plants.

Late in the evening, we heard that forty refugees had been rescued by the Greek coastguard and were arriving at Petra, very wet. We received urgent calls on our app to pick them up as quickly as possible, and several people set off in cars to fetch them. About three-quarters of an hour later, the refugees arrived at Oxy, having been given some dry clothes and water. Half the group came from Afghanistan and the other half were from Somalia. I was manning the ticket tent, which was still being attacked by gusts of wind.

First I welcomed a group of Afghans who did not speak a word of English, gave them their bus and food tickets and a pamphlet in Farsi, and showed them the route they would be following as clearly as I could by pointing at the map.

            Then came the next group, four Somali men, one of whom did speak English.

            “So you are a group of four?”

            “Yes. As you see,” said the man in rather clipped tones. He appeared to think I was being patronizing, since the four of them were standing there, waiting.  

The entire group had had a very narrow escape. One related to a team member that the boat had been sinking fast and they had thought they were going to die.

            'The water was up to my neck when we were rescued. We all got out our mobile phones to say goodbye to those at home.'

Once the new arrivals had settled in, I stood and watched the camp dog, Kanella, cavorting with her new friend, a dog who had appeared at the camp a couple of days before. Then, suddenly, they were no longer cavorting but coupling. Fellow team members looked puzzled, peering through the darkness of the camp to understand what was happening. The dogs were joined and facing in opposite directions, and few team members were familiar with the niceties of dog breeding. I warned them not to try to separate the dogs, sent a photo on the app, and suggested that someone took Kanella to the vet the next day for a morning-after pill. She would really need to be sterilised, and I was sure that someone would take care of it. Many of my fellow volunteers took loving care of the dogs around us, and at least one was adopted.

At the end of the day I drove two fellow volunteers home to hotels quite remote from the centre of Molyvos, one of them all the way in Eftalou, several miles away. I was thankful for our wonderful apartment with Nadia. I was brooding about the events of the day and my own responses. Why had the linguistic discovery about the word 'storm' stayed in my mind longer than the knowledge that the people who had been rescued at sea and brought to Petra, then to Oxy, had very nearly drowned? Was I blocking off my emotions in some way, as a kind of self-protection? Navigating the winding roads in the darkness, I saw a hairpin bend too late and braked sharply, coming to an abrupt halt near the edge of the cliff.

High standards

High standards

Thursday 19 November

While Oxy was being transformed by digging machines and an army of carpenters, electricians and DIY enthusiasts, I was scheduled to do an early shift on harbour duty. If people are rescued by the coastguard, this involves receiving and taking care of them, registering them, giving them dry clothes, food and water, and walking them up to the football field, where the UNHCR bus will come and collect them to take them to Mytiline. If Oxy is busy but no one has been rescued by the coastguard, harbour duty involves going up to the Sandwich Factory and slapping hundreds of pieces of processed cheese onto pieces of processed white bread (someone sweetly suggested that we use higher-grade cheese and wholemeal bread, until it was pointed out that Starfish’s food budget is already astronomic and it simply can’t be done).

There were no coastguard rescues, and we sat at Captain’s Table discussing why the flow of boats to the island had dried up. Some thought there were political reasons: perhaps it was related to Tsipras’s visit to Turkey to conduct negotiations on the flow of refugees, since the Turkish coastguard often seems magically to acquire better interception resources when there are bigwigs in the area. Perhaps it was the weather: although it was still fine, there was quite a stiff south wind, which might be too much for the dinghies’ little engines. They would keep getting blown back to Turkey.

If someone was stupid enough to mutter that there was nothing to do, K would retort with barely suppressed anger that we should be very thankful if there was nothing to do on harbour duty. I knew why.

On the terrible night of 28 October, when a large boat with some 300 refugees had collapsed and sunk, leaving hundreds of people flailing in the sea in their frequently useless life jackets, K had been one of those who had leapt down to the harbour to help as lifeless or near-lifeless bodies of children were brought in. This young man, with his light-hearted banter and missing front teeth, had been one of the many heroes of 28 October, cradling and warming limp children, and performing CPR tirelessly for what seemed an impossible time in an attempt to revive one child whose body failed to respond as the father stood shrieking with torment beside them. So K did not want to hear any complaints from people about there being too little to do on harbour duty.   

S and others had made thousands of sandwiches, and all the fridges at the sandwich factory were full. S, the Norwegian woman who said “so many people come and go” when I had tried to introduce myself, can remain silent for hours at a time (even her text messages are cryptically concise, as in “sitrep sw fridges not to go"). S does not like going to Oxy. She is the most over-qualified sandwich maker in the world. She can’t stand going to Oxy since she knows only too well how major agencies work, and her sensibilities are offended by the rather improvised and impromptu way we operate at Oxy: she would say, perhaps, that we do everything wrong. Still, Oxy has been praised by so many professional agencies that I’m confident that her standards are unduly rigid.

Heleen swept the quayside, right down to the house of the elderly man who lives there. He sometimes opens and shuts his door again and again in a flurry of some indecipherable emotion.

I did very little, and was feeling guilty. Then, suddenly, at 12.30, someone sent a five-page memo to the Whatsapp group about what to do on harbour duty, including what to do when you’ve got nothing to do. Sandwiches, cleaning, and making bus tickets. I said I would make tickets, and asked on the app which ones I should make. I immediately got a response from the earnest young German L, who said he would show me how to make bus tickets when he got off his shift at Oxy. Clearly, it was not a task that could be entrusted to anyone who had not been properly instructed.

So I stayed on after my shift, to learn how to make bus tickets. L came down from the office and set up the sheets of coloured cardboard beside the paper guillotine on one of the outdoor restaurant tables. He demonstrated ticket-cutting with meticulous precision, indicating the marks on the cutter: Take 4 sheets, mark at 5-cm intervals here, then 7-cm intervals here, then rotate the cardboard 180 degrees, he urged with emphasis, and mark at 5-cm intervals along the other end too. Then put two of the four sheets aside, since each sheet makes 25 tickets and two sheets are exactly 50 tickets, which is one busload. Cut carefully at the marks using the paper guillotine. L explained to me how to make bus tickets in more detail than anyone has ever explained anything to me before.

Once he had finished explaining, he watched over my shoulder for half an hour while I cut the tickets. Every now and then I looked around, and there he still was, standing and watching to check that I was doing it properly. Eventually he went and sat at a restaurant table with some other Starfish people up the steps, but I was not sure he was not still watching me. I concentrated on making every single ticket exactly five by seven centimeters so as not to violate L’s high standards. Once I was disconcerted to find I had missed a ticket, and counted the last pile to make sure that was where it belonged. I did not want to run the risk of having one pack of 49 tickets and another of 51.

I cut tickets into the night air, and presented L with 12 neat batches of 50 tickets. He gave them a measured seal of approval.

Heleen and I had our last dinner together, since she was going to leave on Friday, at the local Women’s Cooperative Restaurant, which has terrific food and is one of our favourite haunts. A joined us, and over her choriatiki she told us the story of her love affair with M, the Portuguese nurse who is currently working in Saudi Arabia. A related how she had plied M with invitations and bottles of wine and M had finally succumbed to her charms. Later, when they were going back over the events of the past few weeks, it appeared that M had been attracted to pictures of A before she arrived. She had hoped they would get together but was too shy to respond. Now, A is set to return to Norway while M is back in Saudi Arabia.

We thought these two young women well suited to one another. A has a very particular approach to being camp manager: she calls everyone to meet in the middle of Oxy in a little circle at the beginning of her shift, to check that everyone is there and to discuss any special plans for the day. She is scrupulous about calling people to account if they are late. Sometimes her attitude clashes with that of others, and there is tension. M was the brave soul who saved us at the food tent on the night when we seemed to be threatened by a stampede. She closed the food tent, and she and others set up a system of ropes and lines for crowd management. I hope that A and M will get back together: these two dedicated, earnest and witty young women make a lovely couple.