Friday the thirteenth

It’s usually a joke, Friday the 13th. And for much of the day, it still was.

There has been a definite decline in boat numbers in spite of the beautiful, calm weather. Last night we heard rumours that one of the major smugglers in Turkey has been caught, leading to one of the biggest boat operations being wound up (or more likely temporarily suspended). Plus there is supposedly some sort of delay in imports of rubber dinghies. People will be waiting even longer in the woods in Turkey, often without eating or sleeping for days, before they hear there is a boat for them. 

Perhaps this is partly why a larger, wooden boat arrived at Eftalou this morning, with 300 people on board. Fortunately, everyone was able to disembark safely. You would not want to depend on the life jackets that are sold along the Turkish coast. Some are sold very cheaply, and are full of straw, while others are more expensive, but these too (according to someone involved in testing them) are porous and will not keep someone afloat for very long.

A Canadian reporter arrived at Oxy, looked at the big UNHCR tent and concluded, “Ah, so this camp is obviously run by the UNHCR!” Heleen put him straight, explaining that Oxy is run by Starfish, a volunteer organization. The UNHCR provided the tent and continue to provide excellent warm blankets when we call for them, but all the people working here are volunteers who are funding their own travel and accommodation, and all the food, clothing and medical services are also donated and dispensed by volunteers. The journalist hadn’t heard of Captain’s Table or Starfish, and set off to Molyvos to get better informed.

Earlier, a UNHCR person had arrived at the camp to take a look, and asked why Melinda had called for blankets. Heleen said she didn’t know, but that there was a constant need for them. The man got out his mobile and called Melinda to find out. The thing about blankets (there is a thing about everything here) is that when people leave Oxy on buses in the cold evening air, they may well want to take their blankets with them. Some say the UNHCR blankets should stay at Oxy, but few will want to ask a cold refugee to give back their blanket when they are going to inhospitable Moria, where they will probably have to sleep in the open air.

The Zahra Trust brought nice individual rice-based meals, and soon the food line stretched down to the road. Some people appeared to be going back to the ticket tent and getting food tickets again and again. The thing about tickets is that some people think we should not keep handing out food to someone we have definitely seen before, while others think that since many of the refugees will be going to Moria, where they may not eat for days (since at Moria, food depends on random distribution by volunteer groups, without any central coordination), we should feed them up at Oxy and help to build up their strength.

Eventually everyone was fed, and for a while there were no more arrivals. A small group of women, all graduates and politically savvy, congregated in the food tent: British, Dutch, Greek, and Spanish. L has a doctorate and comes from Catalonia. She gave us a brief account of social tensions caused by the polarized attitudes to Catalan independence. S, who comes from Athens, discussed the missteps taken by Syriza and the disappointment among many of its supporters. We pondered the tendency towards polarization in so many European countries.

Then the mood lightened as our hilarious Greek security guard appeared at the food window, with his immaculate, Elvis Presley appearance and non-stop jokes, all of them unfortunately unrepeatable. He did a tremendous dance routine to illustrate the samba moves enthusiastically taken up by a fellow villager who had become bored with martial arts. He will undoubtedly make it big in stand-up comedy one day. Why is his hair so carefully coiffed? someone enquired. He said he had decided to spend more time on it after he had been taken for a refugee two days running and directed to the caravan where he could get a ticket for food.

At the end of the day, the horrifying news came in of the terrorist attacks in Paris, and Friday the 13th acquired a sinister quality, a day we would never forget. Someone on the app offered condolences to our French volunteers, someone else cautioned that it might be wise to be extra vigilant in the days to come in case of possible activity by the rightwing groups on the island, but aside from that, everything goes on as before. We look around at the people huddled under their blankets, and recall that terror, senseless violence, is precisely what they are fleeing from.