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.