The end of Elpida
29th June 2017
Following my visit to Lesbos I did a short stopover in Thessaloniki. It was planned months ago as I was invited by Anna to come and speak to the Oxford Consortium of Human Rights students, about the grassroots response to the refugee crisis in Greece.
By sheer coincidence the week before I arrived, Elpida got notice that they would be closing down that week. By the time me, Anna and the students got there, all but 3 of the families had moved out.
It was a very surreal experience being back in Elpida almost exactly 1 year after we’d originally arrived. Through a stroke of fate I got to witness the beginning and the end.
While I wandered around the corridors and through the many rooms, reminiscing and coming to terms with the fact that this chapter had come to an end so abruptly, the students helped take down the big white tent and the left over ERCI volunteers and Elpida Home staff were busy sorting and packing everything that still had value and could be reused. There was a very strange atmosphere of emptiness and the volunteers had to dig deep to find the motivation to finish off the packing and cleaning up. (Big shout-out to them! It is so much harder, energetically, to end a project than start one.)
Better Day’s big white tent was donated to Communiterre who will be using it for maker spaces (which is very cool). The rest of the stuff is being stored and then re-donated to other projects.
All the families are being rehoused in apartments and so far feedback has been positive. They’re centrally located, beautiful and well equipped. (Bathrooms, washing machines, fridges, food and toiletries for 2 months etc). For example one lady and her 6 kids are in a 4 bedroom apartment overlooking the white tower. After spending over a year in tents or all crowded into 1 room, she’s very happy. Everyone was sad to leave but happy once they saw where they were moving too.
Elpida home helped to move all the stuff to their new apartments and handed out leaflets detailing local community support options. Two of the staff will stay in touch and help them settle in.
Officially the reason for closing is that funding is changing and the army no longer has a budget to rent warehouses. All the camps will be closed by the end of the year and moved into accommodation.
It seems ECHO (European funding) is getting fed-up by how much money has been wasted and has given Greece an ultimatum to close the camps and get people into apartments pronto. (more details on why it was so expensive and the money wasted here).
Why Elpida wasn’t the last to be closed after worse camps were closed? No idea. Politics, power play. Who knows.
Lagadikia and Diavatar are the only camps that will stay open into 2018(even though the conditions aren’t great, they are government owned camps so don’t cost them anything). So decisions, as usual, are being made for money and political reasons rather than having the welfare of the people at the centre.
As it seems with all positive developments in this crisis Elpida closing is not without it’s pain. Elpida was a beacon of hope which has been switched off. There were undertones of disagreements between actors and rumours that it may be re-opened under new management (more favourable to the government) in the future. It is a shame that after so much investment of time, energy, love and money it was only open for just under a year. It was not luxury accommodation, living in 1 room with your extended family for months on end is not a long-term dignified solution to wait for asylum, however the community spirit around Elpida was beautiful. The children had friends, activities and schooling in their daily lives and parents had the support of their neighbours. It was not perfect and there were many issues but I do believe Elpida proved that with love, lots of hard work and partners working together, a lot can be achieved.
I feel proud to have been a part of it and sad that it is now gone.
