Never enough for children
Due to a project at Panteion University in ad discovery workshop with Betty Tsakarestou, me with my team decided to visit the refugee camp at Pireaus port.When I saw the tends from a short distance for the first time I had mixed feeling about how we can communicate with those people and I didn’t feel so comfortable. Twenty steps later children came to me running hugged me and tried to play with me. I felt a little panic, but without notice it I had a smile on my face. That was the moment I felt we are the same, that was the moment I felt comfortable being there.
So, walking though Pireaus port I also met many volunteers from all over the world, independent or not, but I couldn’t stop watching a guy and a girl playing with the children. They had actually achieved to create the most real smiles I’ve ever seen, with a simple theatrical game, that not only helped them know each other, but it also made children express themselves. Those to people was Dimitris Dimitriadis and Alina.
Talking to Dimitris, I thought the things a little bit different. He was there through an auto-organised initiative of a teachers group, so as to do activities with children. So, they applied theater techniques to approach and meet with basically everything that happens to the port. As he said, ‘’people here are scared and different and two different worlds come as close as they can get’’. The first step to come close to scared people is to meet them, so this is the first aim. We should come closer with a reality that exists now, Dimitris said, if we ignore it, it will get worse.
‘’There are the kids as well that have been though a lot .. we don’t even know what they have been though, we want to make them smile, even a little. This is it, nothing less, nothing more.’’ This is why teachers’ group decided to try to help, for the children ‘’to be able to express the whole thing they live in, to take it out, to express it and be expressed though their body, the moves, the drawing, and start slowly to feel that this is a place that is theirs here. Of course, they can not feel this, because there is always the fear that they may leave’’. So, ‘’the only thing we can do, he said, is when they are sad, and you can make them laugh, at least for five minutes, I think that this is beautiful for us and for them as well, they are searching ways to laugh. I have seen once a gypsy kid, that they learn to live to this way of life, that begged with his mother and he was drawing a little human in the mud. Generally speaking, this is what children always want, to play even in the most difficult situations, and this is, I think, what we have to offer to them, with any way we can and every means we have’’.
Dimitris was afraid that what is going to happen may be predeterminated and he was concerned about the aggressiveness this whole situation brings between people. The extra thing that we can do to help the situation in the Pireaus camp, due to Dimitris, would be to be funded so the conditions could be more human. ‘’I will say it forward, he said, now I am doing an application for a business fund at the Espa program, I wish this wouldn’t happen at all and those money could be given here, even if I didn’t have my business, not to do this thing, not new businesses to be funded by Espa. The money that european union gives to come here and make the situation more human’’.
