On Monday I was assigned to bus loading. I was a bit nervous, since I hadn't done this before. The bus loading area at Oxy is cordoned off and divided into lines, with one volunteer at each end of the line. Wet clothes have been hung to dry, and are draped over all the ropes of every line.
A board at the entrance to the line has tickets clipped to it, indicating the order in which buses will load: first the orange ticket with the circle, then the blue one with a star etc. An arrow indicates which one will be boarding first. There are separate boards for the "Syrian" buses going to Kara Tepe and the "non-Syrian" buses going to Moria. The ticket tent issues fifty tickets for each bus: small children don't get tickets, they sit on their parents' laps.
The most important thing here, aside from keeping order, is to make sure that families are not split up. This can be difficult in the case of very large families.
A young man from Afghanistan kept coming up to us. He seemed very uneasy. First he said he was 17. Half an hour later he was 21. Then he asked if it was better to be 17 or 21. Was it an advantage to be a minor? We told him not to lie, and that the authorities had ways of testing a person's age. He was also worried about fingerprinting. Perhaps he had heard that if a person is fingerprinted in Bulgaria, he can be sent back there. That is possible, but we assured him that if he is fingerprinted in Greece, he will not be sent back to Greece. That has been true for years now.
After an hour the boats stopped coming. This rarely seems to be related to the weather, which was good. Usually there is a political reason. Someone said that Erdogan was visiting the coast, which meant a heightened police presence. Then the boat maffia melt away and wait until the police have gone. But this was just a rumour, a guess.
I took the opportunity to try to improve my Farsi. I had already learned a few useful things in Arabic, such as "only for children!" and "stand in one line!" but my Farsi was useless. Many of the Afghan refugees only understand Dari or Farsi. So far, I only knew that milk was "shir" and this was really not good enough. So I googled to find essential phrases in Farsi, which tends to be called "Persian" on most basic language sites. I found a site with essential phrases, like "Happy Valentine's Day" and "When are you coming back?". Oh, that was part 5 of essential phrases. So I looked for part 1.
Ah, Part 1 of Essential Phrases in Persian!
"You are big!"
"The light wraps you."
"A red rose is like a hot kiss."
"I want to do to you what the spring does to the cherry tree."
At that point, boats started arriving again. I gave up my efforts in Farsi for the day and opened up the food tent.
A board at the entrance to the line has tickets clipped to it, indicating the order in which buses will load: first the orange ticket with the circle, then the blue one with a star etc. An arrow indicates which one will be boarding first. There are separate boards for the "Syrian" buses going to Kara Tepe and the "non-Syrian" buses going to Moria. The ticket tent issues fifty tickets for each bus: small children don't get tickets, they sit on their parents' laps.
The most important thing here, aside from keeping order, is to make sure that families are not split up. This can be difficult in the case of very large families.
A young man from Afghanistan kept coming up to us. He seemed very uneasy. First he said he was 17. Half an hour later he was 21. Then he asked if it was better to be 17 or 21. Was it an advantage to be a minor? We told him not to lie, and that the authorities had ways of testing a person's age. He was also worried about fingerprinting. Perhaps he had heard that if a person is fingerprinted in Bulgaria, he can be sent back there. That is possible, but we assured him that if he is fingerprinted in Greece, he will not be sent back to Greece. That has been true for years now.
After an hour the boats stopped coming. This rarely seems to be related to the weather, which was good. Usually there is a political reason. Someone said that Erdogan was visiting the coast, which meant a heightened police presence. Then the boat maffia melt away and wait until the police have gone. But this was just a rumour, a guess.
I took the opportunity to try to improve my Farsi. I had already learned a few useful things in Arabic, such as "only for children!" and "stand in one line!" but my Farsi was useless. Many of the Afghan refugees only understand Dari or Farsi. So far, I only knew that milk was "shir" and this was really not good enough. So I googled to find essential phrases in Farsi, which tends to be called "Persian" on most basic language sites. I found a site with essential phrases, like "Happy Valentine's Day" and "When are you coming back?". Oh, that was part 5 of essential phrases. So I looked for part 1.
Ah, Part 1 of Essential Phrases in Persian!
"You are big!"
"The light wraps you."
"A red rose is like a hot kiss."
"I want to do to you what the spring does to the cherry tree."
At that point, boats started arriving again. I gave up my efforts in Farsi for the day and opened up the food tent.
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