Face to Face with the Refugee Crisis
Visiting a Migrant Camp in Serbia
Have you ever been afraid of the gravity of other people’s circumstances? I don’t have words to describe the feeling, but as I prepared to visit a group of people whose experiences were beyond my level of comprehension I was afraid. I was worried about insignificant, small things. I’ve been tainted by stories of places like this one and was afraid of coming face to face with the reality. As a volunteer for the Ecumenical Women’s Initiative (EWI) — a Croatian based women’s fund working in South East Europe — a visit to the migrant camp in Subotica, Serbia was arranged for me with members of Ekumenska humanitarna organizacija (EHO), a Serbian based humanitarian organization.
It brought me face-to-face with the refugee/migrant crisis. I still don’t know how to process it and I don’t live it every day. I was just a visitor, an outsider looking in. But I need to tell you what I saw and experienced so that maybe it will become more real for you.
“You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back — it’s hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.” — Naomi Shihab Nye
Initial Reactions: When we arrived I stepped out of the car and walked through a big yellow gate into a fenced-in, hilly area no bigger than a football field, with six or seven temporary containers acting as buildings scattered around. Clothes hung over every inch of the surrounding fence and some had fallen to the muddy, worn ground. Although it was a sunny day, there was a chill in the air and people were wearing only sweaters as jackets and worn out shoes or backless slippers on their sockless feet. I felt cold looking at them. It was immediately clear to me that these people had only the clothes on their backs and nothing else. Warmth and shelter are basic human needs and they were barely being met here. As autumn blows into winter on the flat, unforgiving Serbian plains, the need for adequate clothing and shoes will only grow but it more than likely will not be met. For the time being things are fine but a drop of rain turns the whole place into a mucky swamp, ruining the shoes people do have. I could see traces of it on the mud smeared floors and splattered, worn-out shoes as I walked through.
Clothes weren’t the only things lacking here, I saw a few old wooden chairs scattered around, a couple of long yellow picnic tables, and cots; these were the only places for leisure, or gathering.
Their Reality: Everything there was so temporary, slapped together to provide some sort of shelter for the hundreds of thousands of people who have gone through, but not at all designed for human interactions. As I walked through the commons building I was told that during the summer months, when they had six hundred and fifty people at the camp, people were sleeping on the hard tile floor, packed together so close you couldn’t walk through without stepping on someone. The day I was there, it was quieter, and a few people were hanging around eating microwaved box meals provided by the Red Cross. They get three meals a day, but aren’t allowed to cook anything. This simple restriction of freedom is just one of many that these people face daily. On the plastic walls of these temporary buildings were signs picturing the faces of missing family members, taped up with band-aids.
At the Hungarian border, people are met by barbed wire, dogs, and police who aren’t shy about bashing their knees in. Hungary is a transit country, meaning that people just move through it on their way to other places, but they treat migrants like animals or worse. They only let in thirty people per day, who are then kept in locked detention facilities where they may or may not be taken care of. After that, if they make it into Germany, they are put into another camp where they wait to see if the German government will accept them as asylum seekers. If they don’t, they’re put on a plane back to Serbia or Turkey. In Turkey there are currently 3 million refugees in camps. 3 million displaced people. It makes me sick, I can’t even imagine what that looks like. This is their reality.
The Clinic: I spent part of my time in the clinic where I observed nurse Jelena and Dr. Branko from EHO, while acting as the (un)official welcome party, greeting every patient with a smile and a hello. I was taken aback by the impact a simple smile, greeting and fresh face had on the patients. They lit up. Every patient that came in was a bit different, but they all had a few things in common, of course every patient who came in was different, but they all possesed this tired look, like the kind of exhaustion that never leaves you, that marks itself on the face of its victims in the form of sunken eyes and deep lines on dusty faces. But they all had this unfaltering hope shining through in their wide smiles and tired eyes. In the clinic, the majority of cases are either injuries from the police at the Hungarian border, hygiene related or made up. The people working in the clinic told me that they now know how to tell the actors from the truly injured. They didn’t seem upset by the actors, rather sympathetic. They explained to me that there’s nothing to do at the camp, people simply get bored. They want something, anything to keep them occupied and a trip to the clinic fulfills that need.
I spent most of my time with nurse Jelena who has been working six days a week, every week since June. She is a highly skilled, college educated, well-trained nurse who gets paid €300 per month. This is a typical salary in Serbia for trained professionals. She’s not in it for the money, though. As a paid volunteer with EHO, she cares deeply about her patients and has befriended many who have come through the camp. She told me she doesn’t know how she keeps doing it, how it has all become a strange new normal for her. She had to become numb to case after case of barbed wire injuries, neglected hygiene, dog bites, and countless other injuries. She said that she’s realized she can’t take the work home with her, but of course she still sometimes does. When talking with her about whether or not there will be government aid in the next year she said, “I don’t believe in politics or politicians, I only believe in myself and I’m doing what I can.”
The Kids Corner: The other part of my day was spent in the kids corner, a room dedicated to keeping kids at the camp entertained and active. Everything from football matches to geography lessons happen in that room and kids from the age of 3 on up run in and out throughout the day, painting pictures, putting together puzzles, playing sports and practicing their English.
One of the girls really stood out to me. She asked where I was from so I showed her Montana on a map. She pointed to Syria and said “me from Syria,” then drew a line up to Germany confidently saying, “me going to Germany.” When I offered to teach her how to say thank you in German, it was like I was offering her the world. I wish I knew more German. I sat with her as she went through a book of English words, she knew almost every single one. I helped her where she needed it and tried to teach her conversational phrases by asking questions. In doing so, I found out that she is 11 years old, loves reading, has an unquenchable thirst for learning and her mom and sister are teachers. Her sister still lives and works in Syria, she isn’t going to Germany and she’s 23, the same age as me. Learning all of this had enough of an effect on me, but I recently read about the bombing of another school in Idlib, Syria and my heart sunk. I’m sick. I will never know if that was her sister’s school or if the next one will be, I just can’t comprehend it.
Her story is one of many.
I saw a violent video playing on one of the girls’ tablets with gunshots and shouts. I could see it was animated, maybe a game but when we asked her what she was watching she replied, “It’s Syria.”
While playing hand games with a little girl who was around five years old, she lifted up her shirt, like little kids do, and I saw that her entire stomach was covered in reddish purple scabies marks. She wasn’t the only one. There was an outbreak of lice and scabies at the camp while I was there. These kids and their families don’t get a break.
This is one of the better camps too, but people were living in conditions that are unfit for animals, simply because there isn’t money for anything better. The people working at the camp do their best but there’s only so much they can do. Serbia has an open border policy that states they will take in any refugee from any country, including economic refugees from countries such as Pakistan. From a humanitarian point-of-view this is great but the reality is that Serbia doesn’t have enough money to invest in their own citizens, they have nothing to invest in migrant camps. To make matters worse, Europe is slowly closing its borders and cutting off funding. The people coming through Serbia plan to live in Germany or Sweden, they think life will be better. The reality is that they’ll be moved from camp to camp, potentially granted asylum but more than likely sent back to live with the millions other refugees living in camps in Turkey and Lebanon. If they are granted asylum, they still have to settle in, learn the language, find a job etc. Their struggles don’t end when they reach Europe, in some ways they begin anew.
So what can you do?
- Make a donation to: The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, American Refugee Committee, Mercy USA, Helping Hand for Relief and Development, Ecumenical Humanitarian Organization or any other humanitarian organization of your choosing. People need food, clothes, water, transportation, shoes, etc.
- Welcome them into your country, because getting there is only half the battle. Find out more at International Rescue Committee or write to your elected officials urging them to advocate for displaced people.
- Keep them in your thoughts, prayers, meditations, etc. don’t forget about them or their humanity. Let them know they aren’t forgotten by sending a postcard, a message and/or a care package.
- Care.
“What is at stake is nothing less than the survival and well-being of a generation of innocents.” — Antonio Guterres United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
