Who is doing the work here?

The bad weather continued on 23 November, and we had few boat arrivals. At yesterday’s volunteer meeting we had discussed taking the opportunity to continue winterizing the camp. One part of that would be laying down sandbags around Oxy to prevent rain seeping into the tents. In the morning, this plan ran into a few hiccups when the first bags proved too weak, but eventually the sandbag operation got going. My friend A told me the following story.

     An IRC bus arrived, and a group of refugees started forming a line to get on the next bus. Several IRC men stood smoking and waiting for the line to fill up. They were also watching A, who was bending over an extremely heavy sandbag nearby, trying to load it into a wheelbarrow. She is pretty strong, but after several attempts she was close to giving up. The bag was just too heavy. The IRC men looked on. Suddenly, one of the refugees, unable to stand the sight of her efforts any longer, rushed out of the bus line to help her with the sandbags.

     Clearly, the IRC are doing very useful work. They send the buses that transport refugees from Oxy to Mytilene. Thank God they do, since it was only a few months ago that all the refugees, even small children, were obliged to walk the entire 65 kilometers from the beach to Mytilene.

     The UNHCR too do useful work. They provide the other buses, which take rescued refugees from the football field straight to Mytilene. They also provide a couple of excellent large tents, each of which sleeps 200 people, and very warm blankets. They sometimes come to Oxy and give informative meetings for refugees. In addition, they sometimes identify vulnerable people such as people with a disability and minors traveling alone, and ensure that the IRC bus drivers know about them.

     Still, there is quite a bit of tension between the volunteers and the major agencies, especially the UNHCR. The UNHCR often puts out PR that suggests it is doing far more than it actually does. It has referred to the “fleet of minibuses” with which it supposedly transports refugees from the north coast to Mytilene. Most of us had never seen a sign of this mysterious fleet, but someone eventually discovered the existence of one such minibus. I know that the UNHCR works all around the world and is badly underfunded. I also believe that all sorts of behind-the-scenes political shenanigans hamper the UNHCR and other major aid agencies and make it harder for them to take a more active role here. But that is no excuse for misrepresentation.

     On Monday morning, there were two UNHCR women standing at Oxy, apparently taking stock of what was going on. Since it was quiet, I decided to go into town to buy some things we needed in the food tent. One of the UNHCR women, seeing that I was driving off, asked if she could come with me to buy cigarettes. She was new to the north of the island. “I’m from Communications,” she said, and I said that was nice, and added that we had our own communications system.

     “Would you like me to tell you about how we work here?” she asked.

     OK, I’ll be frank. If I'd had any sense, I would have said “Oh yes, please!” Now I shall never know what she might have said. Instead, my mind flew back to the volunteer meeting a couple of weeks earlier, when two UNHCR people came to tell us how best to prevent aggression arising at Oxy.

     “It is important to issue tickets.”

     “You must ensure that people stand in line.”

     “You must be fair.
     “You must ensure that people understand why you are doing what you do.”

     These were all things that Starfish had been doing competently for many months. So competently that there was almost never any aggression at Oxy. The presentation gave me the feeling, and I was far from alone in this, that the UNHCR was pretty clueless and arrogant.

     So when the UNHCR woman asked me:

     “Would you like me to tell you about how we work here?” I did not react sensibly. I immediately replied,

     “I know exactly what you do here. You provide two nice large tents and very good blankets.” The woman was taken aback. She told me that volunteers in Mytilene often did ask for the UNHCR’s advice, and this may well be true. I dropped her off, barely managing to suppress my laughter, and went off to do my own shopping.

     When I got back to Oxy, I told the camp manager about my encounter. I thought it quite amusing. But she had already heard about it.

     “It has caused problems,” she said. She did not personally think I was in the wrong, but apparently the communications lady had complained, and the local UNHCR leader happened to be there. He was fuming at the lack of respect shown to his worker.

     I decided that I needed to defuse the tension a little. I went over to the UNHCR man, but he was talking on his mobile. When he got off the phone, almost an hour later, I went over and apologized, saying that I had meant no disrespect.

[Since I left Lesvos, the UNHCR has posted a video that gives the impression that it coordinates the teams of volunteers in the north of the island. This is plainly ridiculous.]

I set about reorganizing the food tent. The transformation had shuffled the huts into a new constellation. The sandwiches and water were now stacked in a hut that bore signs of its previous incarnations: children’s drawings from the period in which it had been used for women and children, and a list of symptoms in Farsi from the time it was the medical tent. It had now metamorphosed into the temporary food tent. Our new carpenter, A, came over to saw a hole in the side to make a window through which we could serve the sandwiches, fruit and drinks.

   I moved about four hundred water bottles away from the side of the hut that had developed an alarming bulge to a sturdier side, and put the sandwiches, bananas and apples in more convenient places. I hung up some scissors with which to open the milk cartons. When I had finally rearranged everything, I couldn't think of what else to do. We had no refugees, In this strange lull, I had time to muse on my role here. What was I doing on Lesvos? Was I actually a useful volunteer? I watched people around me busily engaged in carpentry, and moving things about with purposeful energy, and felt pretty useless. True, at 64, and with a bad hip, I had always planned to be careful about engaging in too much physical activity. It was in no one’s interest for me to get injured and to need medical attention myself. Still, I started wondering if I was protecting myself too much. Who was I to get all high and mighty about the UNHCR?