Conflict avoidance

On Tuesday 10 November, I was working at the food tent again. T has clearly decided that this is the best place for me! Someone has fixed the bendy door to the caravan really nicely with duct tape. The young Swedish man, M, who was working with me, explained that there is a saying: “if it moves and you don’t want it to move, use duct tape. If it doesn’t move, and you want it to move, use WD40.” So Swedish people will sometimes give each other presents consisting of a package with a roll of duct tape, a can of WD40, and a bottle of wine: guaranteed to solve all problems. This is clearly the mentality that produced Ikea.

The boats seemed to be slow again today, and we went outside to help clean up. Since there were not many refugees in the camp, the IRC stopped sending buses to get them. Our camp manager, O, went off on his scooter to Eftalou to find out what was happening and to convince the IRC to send more buses.

Several people discovered discarded camp beds – three of them incomprehensibly strewn on the cliffs on the other side of the road – and piled them up. Most people sleep on thin mats on the ground, with a blanket. Distributing blankets is less simple than it sounds: if we are not careful, the supply runs low because of people who take too many. Once we found a woman using two as a pillow, two to lie on, and four more to keep warm.

Someone handed out the camp beds to refugees who seemed to need them. One man came up and was given one. Then L, who has only been with us for three days, said “No! They are only for people who are sick!” and took it away from him. He got angry, saying he hadn’t slept for three days and was exhausted. It was not clear why L thought she had the authority to interfere.

Someone decided it would be nice to make coffee, and set up a little butane camp gas burner. Someone else pointed out that it was not terribly safe right next to the big UNHCR tent where most people sleep. I began to hope that O would return soon from Eftalou.

I watched the huge crane that was lowering a new block of (Dutch!) toilets, donated by the organization Samaritans Purse. Then O came back, having successfully persuaded the IRC to send more buses. As darkness fell, several boats came in, buses started arriving from the beaches, and just as M and I were getting ready to serve them, some people from the Zahra Trust arrived with a huge cauldron of hot lentil and potato soup, to be distributed from the food tent. This was a bit tricky, especially at the point at which two or three plastic plates of hot soup had to be handed out through the window across the piles of sandwiches. M was still with me in the food tent, but suddenly L arrived and seemed to want to take charge. My initial reaction was irritation: she was not assigned here, and what was she doing? But then I watched her as she took the plates of soup from the Zahra people who were crouching on the floor ladling it onto the plates, and handed the correct number of plates to people without spilling anything, so I took the tickets and did sandwiches and water while she did soup and fruit. It worked quite well, and I decided to suppress my irritation. When the soup ran low, I thanked her for coming to help and suggested as tactfully as I could that M and I could manage now. “You mean you want me to leave?” she said, a little taken aback. Again I thanked her for her excellent assistance, and asked about the PhD thesis she had just defended and her development work. We parted on very friendly terms and I congratulated myself on staying non-confrontational and calm.     

In the evening we suddenly heard singing. A group of refugees were singing songs, with one standing on a crate in the middle. It was wonderful to hear this chorus of plaintive male voices in the night air. Someone was filming them, and I asked who it was. It turned out to be the award-winning filmmaker Hamy Ramezan, himself an Iranian refugee, who now lives in Finland. At the end of my shift I went over and spoke to him. He is making a documentary, following groups of refugees from the beginning of their journey in Europe right through the Balkans into Germany. The film will hopefully feature at next year’s documentary festival IDFA in the Netherlands. I asked where the singing refugees came from. He said that he had initially thought they were Afghan, since they sang in an unfamiliar dialect, but in fact they were Iranian. What were they singing about? They were singing about their love of their country, and how it felt to be so far from home.