Last night’s shift at the refugee camp in Lesvos Greece started off with a tense energy in the air. It was raw, cold and windy. Everything was wet from the endless rain throughout the day. It was right before dinner, so people were hungry and the line for getting served a meal was hundreds of people deep. Let me be clear, I am a miserable, crabby asshole when I’m hungry, wet and cold for even thirty minutes never mind for hours on end with absolutely no control over resolving the situation.
Assigning housing was its usual shitshow. There were over two thousand more refugees at the camp than the planned capacity for the facility. Families with close to fifty people in them were begging us through translators to keep their family together. The unwavering pleas from fathers representing their families were no different than what any American father would do when it came to ensuring his family was not separated. It was stressful for the volunteers to try to navigate the situation, but that stress wasn’t even a drop in the sea of anxiety the refugees have dealt with during their journey to uncertainty. There was a palpable negative energy in the camp and it was the first time I had ever felt it.
Once people had been fed and started to settle into their assigned housing, the negative energy was quickly replaced by that of joy. Yes, joy. Imagine finding joy in a barb-wire, concrete facility thousands of miles away from your home with no idea of what your future holds.
After dinner, we were in the volunteer hut and we heard singing outside. A few of us came out of the hut to find a group of about twenty Syrian men in their early twenties — the most feared demographic on earth — along with a handful of young Syrian boys singing with their hands in the air and smiling throughout. I walked over and shined my flashlight on the man who was leading the song in a way that a band’s lighting crew would illuminate the lead singer on a stage. As I held the flashlight in the air, I moved my body to the music along with this group and sang the refrain even though I had no idea what it meant. Later our group translator told me the men were singing about their love for Syria, the sadness they felt and the hopes they had for their country’s future. The men sang and moved in a way that could have mimicked any group of American male college students singing their school’s song before the start of a big football game. The young boys were beaming as they joined in and looked up at the men with an expression of elated pride. They couldn’t believe their bounty that they were part of this celebration.
Suddenly one of the men pulled me into the center of the group and gestured for me to sing and dance with them. Although both of those things are not my forte, I was awash with the bliss these men felt and found myself as a thread in the fabric of their pride. The two other American women joined us as we swayed and sang in pure elation. The moment was incredibly charismatic even though we didn’t understand the words being sung.
After the group dispersed, four Syrian men joined our volunteer group in a circle of chairs and spoke to us through a translator. To the outside world they would have looked like a group of ISIL terrorists. They wore black head-to-toe and had various black scarfs wrapped around their heads. The reality could not have been more different. One of the men was studying to be a vet at the university before the violence forced him to leave. He spoke of how much he loved and missed his cat. He then swiped right on his phone through an endless stream of photos of his younger brothers and sisters who remained in Syria. He shared heartfelt stories of each one as he swiped. One of the other men pulled up a photo of his brother who was killed by “Daesh” — a word ISIL despises anyone using to refer to them and threatens to cut out the tongue of anyone who uses it. The look of pain on this man’s face was so present and so raw. He had studied economics at the university before he too was forced to leave a land and family he loved in order to ensure he wasn’t recruited by this terrorist organization or killed for his refusal to join them. The other two men shared their personal stories of their university studies, their families and their need to flee.
Before our shift ended, a much loved volunteer named Pontus played and sang a song on his ukulele. When he was done, the Syrian man who was studying to be a vet asked through a translator if he could recite verses from the Quran from memory with an elocution, which is often called tajwid. There are no words to describe this moment. The room we were in was completely silent and the pronunciation, style and tone of this man’s communication was so personal that it literally reverberated the souls of everyone in the group. I stood silently as tears streamed down my face thinking of the love that lived in this mans heart — his love for Allah, his love for Islam, his love for his family and his love for a country where he could no longer live. I can’t think of a more moving moment in my life. I didn’t need to understand what he was saying, I could feel it through his words and see it though the pain on his face.
Please pray for the refugees. #BeKind
