Learnings from Katsikas — Empathy
Before traveling to Greece, I wrote I didn’t know what to expect — and I really didn’t — but obviously I did have some ideas in my head of what I would find once I arrived. I know I was afraid of not finding something where I could be proper useful. People who know me will confirm I’m not the biggest ‘peoples-person’, so how would I be able to help when I have no real talent for dealing with people.
With temperatures hitting 40 degrees in the afternoon, day one in the camp was a cold shower. I can’t remember the last time I found myself in a situation where I felt more useless. After attending the morning meeting for the volunteers — where tasks for the day are assigned — one of the volunteers showed us around in the camp. The looks from the people in the camp — seeing yet another volunteer — varied from polite distance to held-back hostility. Never did I feel more like a rich, white male and never did I feel more out of place.
Later in the afternoon, my first task as a volunteer was guarding the door of the warehouse/clothes-shop of the camp, making sure that volunteers can get in when their task requires it, that the refugees who have the vouchers for shopping can access the clothes-shop, but most importantly, making sure that anyone who is not supposed to be there doesn’t enter. Especially the pre-adolescent boys of the camp, after their morning classes, find sport in trying to breach the threshold and to them, every new volunteer guarding the door is a very welcome distraction from the daily routine of the camp, as well as an opportunity to hone their breaking-the-limits-of-patience skills.
They have seen a thousand foreigners come and go in their lives, and their lives have been in circumstances you and I cannot conceive of. That combination makes them experts at finding your weakness and explore that weakness relentlessly. They got under my skin in an instant and then challenged the limits of my patience effortlessly. And they came at me in waves. After an hour at the door, I had no sympathy left for them.
The added ‘benefit’ is that after that hour, they know my face (although forgot my name), so whenever I was working on something in the camp afterwards, they’d come over to check out what I was doing. And it was at that point, when I actually got to talk to them, in rudimentary English, that I started to get to know them and saw a glimpse of what they have been through. Everybody has seen pictures of soldiers after battle, young men with the infamous thousand-mile-stare. When I started talking to these boys “Where are you from?” — Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan — and they started to relax a bit, I discovered that same look in their eyes and everything changed. Understanding where someone comes from doesn’t necessarily justify their actions, but it definitely helps understanding them and that in turn can help relating to them.
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All that being said, I never managed to build a proper relationship with the kids in the camp (I was often elsewhere engaged) but there was a group of Spanish volunteers who worked with them on a daily basis; football, workshops, teaching Spanish & English, and just hanging out with them. Those volunteers definitely managed, little by little, to gain the respect and trust of the kids in the camp, and my admiration for the good they were doing.
