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.