V is for Variety

The refugee camps in mainland Greece have gradually been improved since the current crisis surged in 2015. The Greek Government has reorganized them, reshuffled people, put people temporarily in hotels, closed camps, opened camps and generally tried to manage the situation, or behaved capriciously, depending on how you look at it.  The camps on the Islands are another subject altogether, I’m told, but I have no experience of those.

On my first day back to work in Thessaloniki after a four-day break with a respiratory infection, I visited one of the mainland camps. As I was driving fellow volunteers Ken and Bro out to Sinatex camp, a place where they’d been teaching English and - mostly, I suspect – organizing soccer games for some time, Bro’s phone rang: “Oh,” he reported to us, “The camp’s closing tomorrow”.  Great, I thought, I just get assigned to something and it changes. But, after all, what’s so new about that in this volunteer game?  Variety is the spice, they say, of life.

 

The looming closure of the camp had been on the cards, but we’d expected a few days’ notice – and so had the refugees who lived there. But no, they’d only just been told, so when we arrived they were busy packing up to move next day.

 

We’d planned to give English lessons that afternoon, but we found ourselves without students, language lessons not being high priority in view of the impending move.  Ken quickly organized a well-supported soccer game: apparently that was a priority. Bro had brought his own guitar and two others to share so he launched into a three-hour lesson/jam session with some Kurdish men. It was difficult to pry him loose at the end of the day! I was left to find something useful to do. The trusty coloring pages and crayons in my backpack came into play as I rounded up a number of young children and staked out a corner of a bleak empty room where we sat on the concrete floor to amuse ourselves.  Three unplanned hours with a dozen small children can be a long time! We cut, colored, jumped rope, played running games and even danced the Hokey Cokey, which apparently everyone  in the world knows!

 

But those few hours could be my only experience of Sinatex Camp, for it is no more.

 

At Sinatex, about a hundred refugees, mostly Kurdish I believe,  lived in compartments inside an empty industrial building

 


Soccer game beside the camp. I guess someone just missed a goal.

Social center just outside the camp. This is where English lessons and children's
activities had usually been held. Its fate was unknown when I visited.



And there was a playground - all now abandoned

The organization I was working for in Thessaloniki has no projects of its own. It’s a labor pool, supplying volunteers to other NGOs as needed.  So any one volunteer might find herself working for a variety of different projects, one day at a time.  Over several days or weeks, of course, you might be consistently assigned to one particular project or type of project, depending on your skills. And once you’d learned the ropes somewhere, you’d be more useful in that place, so a certain amount of regularity would set in. But this system requires a lot of careful organization and leads to a lot of last-minute changes.

 And, in my case, I didn’t give it enough time for consistency to develop. In the five days I worked there I was assigned to five different places, each of them about 45 minutes away in various directions, mostly by public transportation. I spent one day sorting clothes at the warehouse; one day helping organize children’s activities at Intervolve, a well-equipped education center for female refugees; one afternoon at Sinatex camp and two days in two different kitchens helping to cook food and distribute it to homeless refugees.

 



Soul Food Kitchen cooks and distributes food to homeless people,
mostly refugees, living in abandoned buildings in Thessaloniki.
When I was there they were  temporarily homeless themselves
 and using kitchens belonging to different non-profits in the city.



Volunteers cleaned and chopped vegetables, cooked them with rice, pasta,
lentils or beans, and packed up about 60 meals twice a day.  




An abandoned multi-story car park,
 one of the buildings where homeless people live.




DocMobile joined us at the food distribution site - a very dirty
empty lot - to tackle health issues.




Nurse Susan examined a patient in an ad hoc privacy shelter.



We left a dozen meals at this place. We saw no one come to claim
them, but apparently they're picked up every day,



We left the meals on the window sills.
 

 

The work was varied and interesting and I met some great volunteers, but it was exhausting, the weather was grim, and bearing in mind that I was still unwell and very low on energy, the labor pool system really wasn’t a good one for me. So I called Kitab, my ngo in Athens, ascertained that they had work and accommodation for me, and returned to the capital after a total of 12 days away. It was quite a relief to find myself once again on the comfortable train, then back in a reasonable apartment and weather five degrees (Celsius) warmer than Thessaloniki.



 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T is for Train

 

Pericles

The best thing about my train journey from Athens to Thessaloniki, the big city in the north of the country,  was the view of Mount Olympus. That’s the wonder of Greece: I just keep tripping across the stuff of the myths. For instance, I alight at the wrong metro station in Athens and wander up a hill only to find myself in the Pnyx, the very place where Pericles used to address the Athenians twenty-five hundred years ago. Should I be surprised? Probably not.

 

 





Mount Olympus

Olympus itself hove into view about four and a half hours into the six-hour train ride. Snow-clad, dominating the horizon, it was a fitting place for the gods to live.

 

Back on Earth, the train was comfortable, clean and had a restaurant car. My ticket cost 34 Euros, that’s because I’m an elder – under 65 it’s 45 Euros and at night it’s only 25 Euros for people of any age – but I was traveling by train specifically to see a bit more of Greece, so the night train was a non-starter for me.

And see Greece I did: the mountains north of Athens were riddled with tunnels; the great plain of Thessaly spread its winter colors of brown and pale green on either side; towns and villages were scattered across the plain.
 

I saw little stations like Sfendali and Inoi where we didn’t stop; small farms, white houses with red tiled roofs; mixed herds of sheep and goats; olive groves and snow-covered peaks - not just Olympus but Parnassus too!

Mount Parnassus

 

Announcements were in Greek and at the larger stations where we did stop, signage was rare so I had to guess where we were and how much further we had to go. Thessaloniki was the terminus so I had no fear of missing my stop.

 

Tunnel after tunnel through the mountains.

First class passengers get separate compartments.

Walking along the train I encountered doors
 between the carriages. The junctions were a
bit scary! But see how tourist-friendly
Greece is! The instructions are written
in English as well as Greek.




A very comfortable train

 

Arriving in Thessaloniki, events take a downward turn: the person who’s supposed to meet me isn’t there and after a three-hour comedy of missed communications and wrong station entrances I finally take a taxi to the volunteer apartment where I’ll be staying, in Diavata, a small nondescript town 10 kilometers outside the city.

 

It’s dark by now: the light in the apartment stairwell doesn’t work. Two kind young volunteers carry my luggage up two flights of stairs – there’s no elevator – and introduce me to the apartment.  

The room in the volunteer apartment  was carpeted with shag.

It’s dank and dismal and mold adorns the bedrooms walls. The heating doesn’t work. There’s no Wi-Fi; I’m sharing a room with the two kind volunteers, Ken from New Zealand and Bro from Germany. Kind they are, but also male, and no-one asked if this was OK with me. The volunteer coordinator is not happy with me because of the station snafu. I’ve had a bad cough for some time and suddenly feel a whole lot worse. This thing is migrating toward my lungs.

 



Sunset behind the warehouse.

I work all the next day in the warehouse, sorting clothes. This is the HelpRefugees warehouse in Thessaloniki and in a way, it’s the reason I came to Greece. When I volunteered at the HelpRefugees warehouse in Calais in the summer of 2016 (see blog post #1) I spent four days packing up children’s clothes not needed in the mainly adult Jungle camp to be sent to this very warehouse in Greece. In 2017 I planned to follow the clothes but ended up in Athens. This year, I’ve managed to see the warehouse, the clothes long gone, I hope!

 



After a day’s work, an unexpected evening meeting and narrowly avoiding getting sucked into a prolonged and noisy birthday party, my lungs were screaming, so next morning I spent two hours wandering round in the rain trying to find a doctor’s office. I eventually found a walk-in clinic just two minutes away from the apartment – why had no-one told me when I asked?

 Armed with a bronchial inhaler and orders to rest for four days I took my leave of the squalid volunteer apartment and rented an Airbnb room from a very nice Palestinian man called Mohammed and his dog Lukas.

Four days of luxury ensued: the heating worked, the bed was comfortable and I had little need to stir outside. I binge-watched “Outlander” on Netflix, even though I cringed and fast-forwarded every time they launched into their grammatically strangulated travesty of the Skye Boat Song.



Street market seen from DocMobile apartment.

Following my break, I contrived to move out of the moldy volunteer apartment into one across the landing which was rented by a different NGO, DocMobile. This one offered heat, a female roomie and the companionship I found largely lacking among the youngsters in the other apartment. Decent accommodation put my Thessalonian adventure onto a more stable footing, while the challenges endured reminded me of how fortunate I am to be able to change my plans if something becomes too difficult – an option not usually available to the refugees I work with.

 Part two of my Thessalonian adventures follows soon.