Transformation

Transformation

I took up my usual post in the food tent, which was oddly occupied by a bicycle of all things. This meant that I had to perform constant stretchy exercises to get to the bottles of water. I put a terse message on the Whatsapp asking the bike’s owner to take it away.

After a couple of busy hours, we were briefly twiddling our thumbs when two ginormous trailer trucks turned up, taking up much of the space where the IRC buses usually park. Special gifts for Oxy! One of the trailer trucks was a huge mobile kitchen, and the other was crammed full of items ranging from a massive generator, a defibrillator and a festival-standard PA system to wet suits and diving shoes for rescue workers, thousands of blankets and ponchos, and cooking equipment. The PA system will make it possible to inform people in English, Arabic and Farsi of crucial information such as imminent bus departures and mealtimes.  The convoy and its contents were arranged and transported, including all the fundraising achieved through sponsoring, by a passionate group of determined people from the Netherlands. Proud to be Dutch!   

One of the leading lights behind this great project is the singer Laura Jansen, who knows my musician daughter Tessa Rose Jackson. She arrived with the convoy, and we took a celebratory photo of the two of us together.

The cook A told us the mobile kitchen’s history. A couple of months ago, refugees moving north through Europe who arrived at the station at the border between Serbia and Croatia had to tramp a kilometer and a half, often in the dark and/or rain, to get to the bus stop in Croatia where they could continue their journey. So various helpful people set up stalls all along the way, making their trek to the bus stop a surreal kind of free shopping mall. As they struggled along with their babies and bags, the people could stop off to get dry clothes and shoes, rain gear, plasters, and medical attention. From the mobile kitchen, which was part of this shopping mall, they were served a wonderfully nutritious soup prepared by A, himself a Kurdish refugee from Iraq. The kitchen has the capacity to produce 10,000 meals a day, or 1,200 meals an hour, for refugees and volunteers alike. A described his soup to us in loving detail, from the lentil, potato and tomato base (tomatoes are used to avoid the need for water) to the various additions that would make the soup different and interesting every day. We looked forward to tasting it.

Eventually the international volunteers had persuaded the Croatian government to extend the road to the border, so that the refugees would no longer have to walk a kilometer and a half but could board a bus straight away. Exit shopping mall. The kitchen was no longer needed in Croatia, so the organizers decided to move it to Lesvos.

As we took turns inspecting and admiring the amazing mobile kitchen, a major winterization project was getting under way at Oxy. There were relatively few refugees, and the weather was still good, so it was essential to get the camp ready before the rain came. A construction worker rumbled into the grounds on a bulldozer and set about levelling the rocky terrain to make room for a second big UNHCR tent to accommodate another 200 people.

The operation included emptying all the “tents”, i.e. huts, of their contents and moving them to different places. This was particularly sad for E, who had devoted such time and energy to getting wonderful new shelves installed in the women’s and children’s clothes tent, and now had to watch as they were all dismantled again. To her credit, I did not hear grumble once. She’s one of those tireless people who takes everything in her stride. Someone later mused about insurance, liability: people on construction sites wear helmets, a fashion item that is seldom seen in Greece. In fact E and K skidded out of a bend in the road on their scooter this morning and appeared at the camp with scarred lips, elbows and knees. Luckily no head wounds. I have never seen anyone sissy enough to wear a helmet on a scooter or a motor bike here. Later that day I saw a Greek couple coming down the hill on their scooter with their toddler sitting in front on the driver’s lap, waving.

As the light waned and an IRC bus rode off with the last refugees, a Dutch volunteer finished setting up the PA system. As we walked over to the car, the speakers were blaring the Monty Python song, “Always look on the bright side of life”!’

We did a little shopping, and on our way home we passed the elderly Greek cleaner, who often sits on a wall at the roadside near our house.

“How are you?” we ask. “Ola kala?”

“Better, better”, he invariably answers. He has an optimistic cast of mind.

And it’s true. Everything is getting better all the time. Soon we will all be eating nutritious soup. Not so soon as we had hoped, however. Someone forgot to apply for the necessary licence.

Oops.