Because human

Arrivals were slow, so I left N at the food tent and went to learn about tickets. Partly, perhaps, I was pleased to get out of the food tent because twelve boxes of bananas had just been delivered. Our bananas come from Costa Rica, and someone said casually,

“Oh, just watch out for the spiders.”

“Big ones?”

“No no, not so big. Just so big,” showing me a fist. “But they’re not tarantulas, or anything, just -- oh Brazilian jumping spiders.”

So I find myself feverishly googling spiders and discover first the Brazilian wandering spider, which turns out to be the most venomous spider on earth, and does an unearthly little dance before it kills you. Then I find jumping spiders, of which there are many. These, I am relieved to note, are not dangerous, despite their off-putting “herky-jerky way of moving”.

The ticket tent is where new arrivals go first. People get a ticket for food and another kind of ticket for the bus to Mytilene: Kara Tepe camp for Syrians and Moria for others. We issue different tickets for the two destinations. We were doing yellow with a triangle for the next Syrian bus, and purple with a bird for the next non-Syrian bus. We issue 50 tickets for each bus, and the colour indicates the order of departures. Numbers are not functional in this situation, partly because some people are illiterate. So we use different colours and draw symbols on them. We were going through our non-Syrian tickets fast, and needed a new batch. I scrabbled among the remnants in the bag, and found a batch of 33 orange tickets with a tortoise. I am not good at drawing, but I did my best, since we only needed another 17 tortoises to have a full pack of 50. The camp manager dropped in and shook his head.

“Please, draw simpler symbols on the tickets!” he groaned. I wanted to explain that the tortoises were not my idea, but he had gone.

For a time I worked with M, who speaks fluent Arabic.

“Where are you from?” I asked a man with a family of four at the window.

“Syria,” he said.

“They are not from Syria, they are from Iraq”, said M after they had gone, clasping Syria bus tickets. “Different dialect”.

I wondered what would happen to the family, when it was discovered that they were not Syrian. Would they be sent from Kara Tepe to Camp Moria? I decided I needed to find out.

At the ticket tent, I learned some new Arabic phrases. One of the first things that people ask when they get off the boat is “where am I?” Some people think they are in Athens, and others assume they are not so far from Germany. So in case they had not quite assimilated the answer, dazed with relief at surviving the boat trip, we tell them again: “You are now here [pointing to Molyvos on a map] on the island of Lesvos”. The Arabic for “the island of Lesvos”, I discovered, was “Al Jazeera Lesvos”, so I pondered the implications: the excellent TV station based in Qatar (the only English-language channel we can receive at our apartment) calls itself “the island” because -- as I read when I looked it up later -- it is the only independent news network in the Middle East.

   

I walked around the camp at the end of my shift. E, mistress of the clothes tent for women and children, has two grand obsessions – signs and shelves. Within the space of two days, she has covered the site with signs to the clothes tent over which she presides, and arranged for a carpenter volunteer to cover all the walls with shelves. I have to admit, it looks pretty damn impressive in there. And no one is likely to ever lose their way to the women’s clothes tent again.

Outside the UNHCR tent I met an elderly man, travelling alone, who was deciding where to go. He had been living in Syria, but his status is that of a Palestinian refugee. He looked weary. There was a kind of permanent disbelief in his eyes. He wanted to show me his Syrian passport, a special passport which states on the front that it has been issued to a Palestinian refugee.

“Holland?” he suggested, when I asked where he was going. He has a son in Sweden, but thinks he will be able to bring his wife over more quickly if he settles in Holland.

“It might take a long time in Holland too”, I said sadly, and then immediately regretted it.

“Holland was good before. Now not so good?” he asked, with a defeated air. Then something happened and the man disappeared, perhaps towards the bus line. I was angry with myself. We are cautioned not to make any comparative suggestions to refugees. We may be wrong, and events on the ground move fast, sometimes from one week to the next. Later I tried to find the man again, wanting to undo the impression I had inadvertently given. I recalled the time someone had said to me, quite casually “why not try Amsterdam?” I followed his advice, and have spent the rest of my life there.

In the evening Heleen and I did some shopping at a supermarket, not the one we had usually shopped at, and talked to the owner.

“We are happy that you are here,” he said, “Because you help.”

Many refugees pass his shop on their way from the beach to Oxy. Once, he told us, a little refugee girl, maybe nine years old, had been sitting on the kerb outside his shop and suddenly keeled over. She was carrying a very heavy rucksack, he said, and two heavy bags. The shopkeeper picked her up and dusted her off, and watched in consternation when the family got up and set off again. Then he dashed after them, took the heavy rucksack off the girl’s back and placed it on her father’s back. The shopkeeper sighed.

“You help because the people of Lesvos too know what it is to be refugees”, I suggested.

“No,” he said shortly. “We help because human.”