The Sunday after

Although I had the day off, I wasted it rather, watching the news over and over again, as I always do, obsessively, when the world shudders a little. But did the world shudder any more on Friday than last week? Facebook is suddenly full of people complaining that all this revulsion about the events in Paris, compared to near-silence about a terrible bombing in Beirut the day before, shows our callous Eurocentrism, if not racism. On the one hand this is so ridiculous that it hardly needs a response: certainly I feel more emotionally connected to Paris than to Beirut, or indeed than to Wellington or Toronto. It’s virtually next door, I’ve been to Paris many times, and love it. On the other hand they do have a point, perhaps. “News” is a departure from the norm. In some countries, we classify mass bombings and attacks as routine, even if they aren’t.

Sunk in these muddled thoughts, I was actually pleased to be “rescued” by a plea in our Whatsapp group for someone to go and help in nearby Petra, where the coastguard was bringing in 92 people who would need to be registered for the port police. With my recent experience registering the eight Afghans who had been brought in by the coastguard in Molyvos, I considered myself a veteran of registration and immediately offered to go if MIP would come to get me, since Heleen had our car at Oxy.

MIP is the Starfish car, named affectionately after its registration plate. More importantly, the MIPs are our drivers. The guys who rotate in the MIP shift, which like all our shifts operates 24 hours a day, work incredibly hard, buying items from flypapers to plastic bags, searching through boxes for clothes, loading and unloading everything from sandwiches to carpenters’ materials, and driving all over our part of the island. One of the core workers at Starfish is a guy with an endearing personality who successfully overcame a serious drug problem to become one of the most reliable, conscientious and tireless MIP drivers, the person I would be most likely to call if I were in any kind of trouble here. The MIPs also transport other Starfish volunteers when needed, giving rise to a verb, as in “Please mip me up to Oxy”. So I was mipped up to Petra.

Two boats had been brought in, one with 26 people on board and one with 66. Once I had figured out how to bypass the wire fence blocking the quayside, by going down some steps and along the waterside, without looking down, I went and joined the medics and support staff of the SCM (the Salaam Cultural Museum, a slightly puzzling name for a group of aid workers) who had come to receive the refugees on the jetty. The SCM people often work in the medical tent at Oxy. None of them had any experience with registration, but luckily some of them speak Arabic, and since the first boat consisted entirely of Iraqi Kurds from Mosul, half of whom appeared to belong to a single family, Arabic was essential.

Even with the assistance of J, my SCM Arabic interpreter, registering the Iraqis took rather a long time, and when we got to the second, larger group, who were from Syria, some of them Palestinian, one of the other SCM people starting registering half of the group herself, to speed things up. Many of the Syrians had passports, which made things easier. 

Eventually we were done, we had some decidedly odd-looking and inconsistent spellings and a number of people whose birthday consisted only of a year, but we were done. I totted up the totals. 26 in one group, 67 in the other, and gave the registration forms to the officer who was waiting for them. His face darkened. “The number is wrong”, he said. “It is wrong,” it must be 66 in this group, and look, you have 67.” The SCM woman and I started furiously scanning our sheets to see if we had registered anyone twice. One of the babies, perhaps? Nope, didn’t look like it. Couldn’t the coastguard have possibly perhaps miscounted, I suggested, as meekly as I could. “Impossible,” said the officer. The coastguard had counted, and then the port officers had counted again. It was 66.

Ten minutes later the problem magically evaporated. “It was 67,” announced the officer.

Starfish had ordered two UNHCR buses to take these people straight to Mytilene, and once I was sure my help was no longer needed, I went home.

We had another Sunday meeting. Again some 70 people crowded around the room, in spite of the fact that an entire shift was unable to attend. Melinda told us the sad story of the fire that had taken place the previous evening. A tourist boat (entirely unrelated to refugees) had caught fire in the harbour, due to some technical malfunction. The fire had spread to the boat of a local man who is dependent on it for his livelihood. Melinda said she would be raising funds to buy him a new boat. The two boats on fire had drifted close to some nets, causing further damage. All this had prompted certain malcontents among the locals to accuse Melinda: it was all her fault, she had brought the refugees here, she was destroying the harbour, destroying the island. Only a minority of islanders are hostile to the help being provided to the refugees. Some actively join the aid effort, while others would like to help but are unsure how to. Like everything here, it is complicated. But some locals who are frustrated are inclined to blame everything on the refugees and on those who help them, even a tourist boat with a short circuit.

Two announcements were made. First, the Whatsapp group – which was new when we arrived less than three weeks ago – was already obsolete (it only takes 100 participants) and we were graduating to a new communication system called Slack. I looked at a volunteer who works for Google, trying to read his face and to deduce his opinion of Slack. 

Second, in future, volunteers wishing to sign up with Starfish would be asked to commit for at least a month. This sent me into a depression: when would I ever be able to come for a whole month again? The fact is, this has been the most extraordinary experience of my life, and I find the thought that I might not be able to return here almost unbearable.