When a boat comes in
Even if you are prepared well, with enough volunteer workers, lifeguards and medics, with experience, assembled at the landing spot, once everyone disembarks chaos is inevitable. On a good crossing and landing, refugee passengers are still shook, wet, they’ve been sick, babies are screaming. Women and children are at the very least, saturated from the waist down, from sitting in the middle of the dinghy so packed it’s letting water in. As a volunteer, you might see a screaming wet child squirming on the beach floor, parent seemingly not around, pick it up to comfort and warm it. Try to locate that ‘mama’, to find that she’s not so far away, but too much in shock to know how to help at all.
We understand that the traffickers buy the dinghies with motors (‘lawnmower motors’ fellow Drop Kathryn calls them) at €1000 each from China. They charge €1000–2000 per person for the crossing, often cramming 60 odd people into a boat fit to carry around 15. That’s some margin. And some expense if you’re a family that want to cross together. There are special offers on rough weather days, resulting in a higher number of disabled refugees coming when the sea is especially treacherous.
Not everyone makes it. The lifeguard groups operating here are saving lives every day. Mostly these real-life action volunteer heroes and heroines are not on even a rota — they are on call 24/7.
When a boat of refugees leaves the Turkish shore, its normal that the trafficker will board the boat with them, drive it a short distance but jump out and swim back to shore, landing the role of skipper on an unsuspecting, often totally inexperienced refugee.
Things go wrong. The cheap motors often cut out or leak poisonous carbon monoxide, and as anyone nautical will tell you, the most dangerous parts of the journey are the first and last parts. In Lesbos, the coast is very rocky, and overloaded dinghies are punctured and capsize when when they’re seemingly on the home stretch. Volunteer lifeguards working off the Greek coastlines are not permitted to venture into Turkish waters, and indeed several lifeguards were arrested and detained on suspicion of ‘trafficking’ when they responded to a refugee boat in distress earlier this month.
Even if rescue teams manage to retrieve everyone, several hours at sea (and possibly days hiding in forests waiting for their crossing) allows hypothermia to set in, tragically taking victims once they’ve landed on Greek soil.
That thousands of people risk this crossing every week, with their young children and elderly relatives, is a clear indication of their desperation. That the lives of these people lie largely in the hands of volunteers is nothing short of absurd.
The shame.
Click these links to donate to the Pro Activa Lifeguards or Hellas Lifeguards, teams of volunteer life-savers, dependent on your donations to keep working on Lesbos.