A View of Koutsochero Camp
Situated in the midst of a marble quarry under the shadow of Mount Olympus, Koutsochero camp is home to 1,063 refugees. Like camp Moria, Koutsochero is managed by the Hellenic Army which prevents anyone from entering without proper validation as a volunteer.
The camp is 18 kilometers from the nearest city, Larissa, with no public transportation to take you from the surrounding countryside. It lacks basic amenities such as gender separate toilets or kitchens. There are 40 toilets total for over 1,000 people, all chemical toilets and many of them covered in garbage.
Outside the camp with the heat of the Greek sun reflecting off of the white rocks, I met Mohammad, a man that I had interviewed in Moria. He was wearing a big smile and a black hoodie bearing a Hunter S. Thompson quote, telling me that he was happy to see me again. He said that Koutoschero is not much better than Moria camp, but it is run by Red Crescent, a humanitarian organization from the United Arab Emirates that provides much better food.
He smiled uncomprehendingly at me when I asked him some basic questions about housing, and told me he had been here for two months, right after the snowfall on Lesbos. His friend, a shorter man with a crew cut wearing a black polo that read ‘I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell,’ fidgeted nervously while we were talking, and hurried him away the moment he had a chance.
The hours go by slowly outside the camp, with few people walking to and from the road since there is no where to go. A group of children played in the fields near the highway and on the quarry side, but most people stuck to their business inside the chainlink fences.
George, a physicist living in Athens working for International Organization of Migration (IOM) for the last six months, is in charge of enrolling children into school. He gave me a lift on the dusty road heading out of the camp, past the green plains of the Mediterranean highlands to the outskirts of the city of Larissa in his cobalt blue Renault, moving the scattered paperwork from the front seat to the back after I waved him down. He told me that there has been a lot of success getting children to school, with over 70 percent attendance, partially because of the lack of activities that surround the camp and partially because of the will of the parents to provide their children with a higher education.
The biggest problem with the schools he says, aside from the fact that the Greek government was caught off-guard and really was not ready to take on such a task, was the lack of classes being taught in Arabic and Farsi. Most schools conduct classes in either Greek or English, forcing many students and many parents to learn in a new language.
When I asked him if there were any special circumstances facing the camp he laughed, saying, “no, no special circumstances.”
Koutsochero camp is in the same position as the other camps dotting the countryside: There are few but the most essential amenities and difficulty with transportation. Education is a daily struggle, and the future uncertain.
