Tea For Refugees
At Ellinikon International Airport, there are no inbound or outbound flights.
There haven’t been since 2001, when Ellinikon, replaced by a newer facility, closed its runways. But on this hot day in late July, the abandoned airport is crowded.
Emily James and Rachel Roa climb up the steps and look around the airport’s second floor. Only narrow pathways exist in a sea of colorful pop-up tents and blankets.
Their guide, Maria Karra, weaves through the tents with purpose and familiarity, while Emily and Rachel carefully measure each move. Outside many of the small tents, shoes are lined in neat rows, and Rachel worries they’ll step on someone’s belongings. They’ve been in Greece for less than 48 hours. At Ellinikon, they begin to sense of the magnitude of the crisis.
It’s exactly what Maria hoped would happen.
A protracted crisis
Forced from their homes by violence, asylum seekers from the Middle East began to settle at Ellinikon at random about two years ago, taking shelter wherever they could find it on their journey away from war and deeper into Europe.
Maria, a native of Greece and the co-founder of the nonprofit Emfasis Foundation, had only a few hours to show Emily and Rachel what life is like for thousands of displaced people who live at the airport’s deserted facilities in Athens. Emily and Rachel, employees of GlobalGiving, were in Greece for a few days to collect field data for the Syrian Refugee Relief Fund. The GlobalGiving fund supports locally driven nonprofits responding to the crisis.
Before they arrived in Greece, the co-workers knew they would meet nonprofit leaders who were deeply rooted in their communities and determined to be there for refugees. They left with newfound respect for Maria and other GlobalGiving partners on the front lines of a protracted crisis.
Lives in limbo
Although Ellinikon began as a makeshift camp, it has been officially recognized as an emergency site for refugees for about a year. More than 4,000 residents are crammed into just three Ellinikon sites, according to the latest report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In early 2016, a wave of European countries sealed their borders to refugees. Now, more than 60,000 people fleeing war, violence, and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Algeria are stuck at similar sites across Greece.
Pledges to relocate waylaid refugees in other countries remain starkly inadequate. UNHCR reported in October that just 14 percent of resettlement needs have been met through pledges — and less than half of those pledges have resulted in actual resettlements. As Greece’s cold and rainy winter season approaches, refugees at Ellinikon and other makeshift camps have nowhere to go. Many are not authorized to work or access state-run support outside their home countries. Until they’re granted asylum or another type of legal protection, their lives are in limbo.
Restoring dignity—one cup of a tea at time
Maria visits Ellinikon and other hotspots in Athens a few times per week as part of her work with Emfasis. The small nonprofit is rooted in the principles of social street work, a form of outreach that focuses on forming relationships with individuals in need and empowering them to overcome problems like homelessness, unemployment, and drug addiction.
“We are there to devise solutions that derive out of their needs and priorities and to totally forget what we have in mind. Ultimately, depending on the time and circumstance, they may need something totally different than we expected: human contact, the feeling that they are not alone, a simple conversation,” Maria said.
It’s an approach too often missing in the traditional aid sector. In a recent survey, refugees and others displaced by crises in the Middle East gave aid agencies a score of 3.5 out of 10 in ‘treating people with dignity and respect.’ They also gave agencies low marks in considering their opinions and meeting their priority needs.
Restoring dignity through the provision of culturally-appropriate services is an imperative for GlobalGiving partners in Greece who are focused on meeting long-term needs that fall outside the focus or scope of larger aid organizations.
For Emfasis, questions are a critical tool. At Ellinikon, volunteers go from tent to tent. What would make the difference for you today, they ask? What would make you feel like a normal human? What would you like to eat?
Dignity, they discovered, could be delivered through something as simple as a cup of tea. In Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, tea is part of everyday life, but initially at camps in Greece, it couldn’t be found.
“Tea is more important to a Muslim than water during the fasting period,” said Maria, who helped coordinate its preparation and distribution (sugar and a side of dates is essential) during Ramadan. She noticed an immediate impact.
“Once we had these homely touches, everybody was in a much better psychological state,” she said.
Emfasis shifted its focus to addressing other cultural voids in the refugee camps. They helped set up designated prayer zones, separate bathrooms for men and women, and a playroom for children. They distributed books in Arabic to kids and reams of fabric to women who wanted head and body veils.
“When we distributed the fabric for burkas, many women had tears of gratitude in their eyes. They immediately stopped feeling that one of their basic needs was being violated. They finally could wear the type of clothing that was a cultural ritual all of their lives. They didn’t need a discarded pair of jeans,” Maria said.
Building trust
Instead of jeans, the problem for Ruby Terzaki is jackets.
Hundreds have been donated to Kid & Family, a nonprofit Ruby founded in 2002 to combat the epidemic of childhood hunger in Greece. These days, many of Ruby’s clients are refugees, and jackets are not high on their list of priorities.
“We’ve received enough jackets now. We make recipes for jacket burgers,” Ruby joked with GlobalGiving.
The need for culturally-appropriate mental health services in Greece, however, is a serious matter. Syrian refugee children are at risk for a range of mental health issues: 79 percent had experienced a death in the family; 60 percent had seen someone get kicked, shot at, or physically hurt; and 30 percent had themselves been physically hurt, according to Migration Policy Institute. Almost half displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder — 10 times the prevalence among children around the world.
Kid & Family partners with volunteer graduate students of psychology to address the huge need for help. Often, they improvise at refugee camps to overcome stigmas about mental health issues and reluctance to seek their services.
“It’s very important, but it can’t be in a traditional way,” Ruby said.
Kid & Family psychologists provide support and build trust in more acceptable ways: cooking workshops, Greek language classes, sports camps, dance parties, and puppet shows to name a few.
“Their arms become elephants, snakes, ducks, and the animals talk,” Ruby said.
The non-profit co-founder described a sunset dance party in one of the camps. It started with a steady drumbeat and a few volunteers and children.
“When the parents saw that we were dancing with their kids, they started dancing, also. And we made it,” Ruby said. “We became a community.”
Life at Ritsona
At a glance, it would seem Jacob Plitman, a 25-year-old from High Point, North Carolina, has little in common with the refugees of Ritsona.
They are mostly women and children on the run from Syrian war zones. They live in flimsy, white tents and share meager provisions — one toilet per 20 people, one shower per 50 people, one water tap per 250 people (if in accordance with UNHCR standards). Jacob wasn’t around when Ritsona opened. But he heard many residents sobbed when they first laid eyes on the remote site, surrounded by pine trees and tan dirt, and realized they were stuck here for the indeterminate future.
Ritsona opened more than seven months ago, and still more than 600 children, women, and men, mostly driven from Syria, live here. Wooden posts have been hammered into the ground to mark its evolving sections, but the names atop — female-friendly space, child-friendly space, big tent — are also reminders of reality at Ritsona.
Emily and Rachel visited the camp on their last day in Greece. Jacob was the first person they met. He picked them up at the town’s shuttered train station and guided them through Ritsona, where he volunteers with the nonprofit Echo100Plus.
Jacob quit his job to serve at the camp; in the refugees’ stories, he sees his own. His great-grandparents fled Lithuania to escape violent riots that targeted Jews. They got out just before Nazis seized the country, and Jacob grew up hearing stories about kind strangers who helped them along their dangerous journey: a family who let them sleep in their barn; a person who helped them board a boat; a businessman in their adopted home who gave his great grandfather a big welcome hug.
“They’re not going to remember my name, and that’s fine,” Jacob said of his service to refugees. “I’m not really here to be memorable. But I hope to be some part in making this — I hope short — chapter in their flight slightly less horrible. On a good day, it feels like I’m doing that.”
Scarce resources
At Ritsona, Jacob was charged with delivering supplies to residents, including survival kits to the newly arrived. Migration to Greece has slowed in recent months, but violence in Syria rages on. In October alone, more than 1,500 new asylum seekers and migrants have arrived. The Echo100Plus kits some will receive include little more than a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, and a couple blankets.
Just two months into his service at Ristona, Jacob is used to saying ‘no.’ No, I can’t give you extra shampoo today. No, I can’t give you more food. No, I can’t give you more water. Limited supplies must be carefully rationed, and Jacob has seen small comforts like toothpaste go a long way. So do respect and a sense of communal responsibility—Echo100Plus cornerstones. The founders mop floors and sweep shelves alongside volunteers, Jacob said. For the young volunteer and the nonprofit, being self critical is part of doing the job right.
“How are we participating in the camp and building relationships? But, most importantly,” Jacob said, “how are we using our privilege and our access to resources and our time to do things that no one else can or will do?”
When Jacob had to tell a woman who had been stuck in the same dirty clothes for days that new clothes weren’t arriving, he relied on his phone to explain the situation. He scrolled through a long list of donors that he had called for clothing to no avail that morning. As she looked through the list, her frustration softened.
“We can try to make that interaction as human as possible, and I can try to explain to her exactly how the process works and bring her into our thinking rather than her just walk up to a window and say ‘no,’” Jacob said.
As stays at Ritsona turn from days into weeks and from weeks into months, things like clean clothing and tea, which some outsiders might write off as luxuries, take on renewed importance, Jacob said.
“They’re not going to die without it. But it is one of the things that gives them 1-inch above survival and toward living, 1-inch better than just staying alive. I think if you are going to be here for six months, I think the line really blurs between what you need today and what will drive you crazy if you don’t have,” Jacob said.
As winter approaches, Echo100Plus knows that needs will shift, but it’s difficult to predict exactly how. The nonprofit is staying put in Ritsona, and Jacob is now in a management position. He hopes he’ll have the resources to say ‘yes’ more often.
Rachel and Emily’s pledge
Near the end of her tour of Ellinikon International Airport, a little boy in an Emfasis-run playroom passed a red ball to Rachel, an invitation to play. The GlobalGiving employee smiled and passed it back, and soon enough they were volleying. For a moment, it felt to Rachel as if they could be anywhere. In a friend’s living room or at a park.
It’s a feeling that Maria, Ruby, and Jacob know well.
“At the end of the day, we all have so many things in common,” Maria said. “It is just a passport that sets us apart.”
Later, once Rachel and Emily had gone from Ellinikon, they worried about the little boy who wanted to play.
They pledged to do whatever they could — during their brief trip to Greece and once they came home — to make life better for the boy. To support the local leaders who were supporting him, to give what they could, and to tell his story. Because they weren’t certain if he would ever feel at home again.
