Only A Mountain of Life Vests

Yesterday was a day of travel; we left London at noon and arrived at Lesbos at 20.30. After a brief loss of handbag(!), we managed to get our rental car (a Suzuki Jimmy — the cutest 4x4 ever!) and set off towards the northern side of Lesbos. We were lucky that we could follow a car the entire way (1h30mins), as the road was dark and winding up and down mountains, before reaching our hotel in Molivos. Lovely people running our hotel but oh boy is it cold. There is only an air-conditioning unit to heat our entire room, which means that the room is freezing cold. Despite putting on most of the clothes in our bags, we struggled to stay warm (Mom hardly slept at all because she was freezing so much). Makes you wonder about the refugees that are not even in rooms but in tents and have a lot less clothes and no heating.

This morning we showed up for Dråpen i havet’s (the drop in the ocean) information meeting (http://drapenihavet.no/en/). Dråpen i havet is a Norwegian grass root organization that was started by a Norwegian tourist that found the situation on Lesbos horrible. It is an organization that relies entirely on volunteers and is present on Lesbos, Chios and in Athens. Maria is the new coordinator on Lesbos and she makes sure that there are enough volunteers on key areas on the northern shore all day and all night.

Once the information meeting was over we were driven around the northern shore to learn where to show up for our scheduled working shifts. We drove from Molivos towards the different beaches and the first beach we visited was the lighthouse beach. On the lighthouse beach there are heated tents — so a good place for boats to arrive. There is a women’s and a men’s tents as it is a place to change out of wet clothing into dry donated clothes. We were instructed to be very sensitive to the cultural differences and the men in our group were told to not touch any of the women unless in case of a life or death situation. As women we were told to keep women’s pads in our pockets and hand them out discreetly to the women arriving as it is one of the things they struggle to ask for.

We then visited the “graveyard”. This is where all the life vests ends up at once they are cleaned off the beaches. It is an orange mountain! From there we carried on to Belvedere, which is a hotel on a high point of the area with a balcony facing the sea. At that hotel there are people keeping watch for boats arriving and then communicating that to the teams on the beaches. These people are working 3 hours shifts, where they are standing on a balcony watching the ocean with binoculars, sending texts as soon as they see boats departing Turkey and updates as they see where they are heading on Lesbos.

We then continued on and passed the new camp on the island. There is a lot of controversy around the new camp. It is run by International Rescu Committee (IRC) which is not a volunteer organization and they are not letting any of the volunteers in to the camp. For someone like me, just arriving, it’s difficult to know what to believe. I’m sure time will tell.

We are now on the “dirt track” — this is a winding dirt road up and down the mountain on the northern cost of Lesbos and part of area that Dråpen i havet are monitoring for boats arriving. This road leads to Skala — a small fishing village where we stopped and had lunch.

Heading back from Skala, we stopped at Fred’s and Filippa’s place. This is a British couple that have turned their house into a warehouse where they store everything you can imagine being needed here, clothes, medicine, tents, blankets, etc. It’s really amazing to see this couple that have turned their life into helping others. We arrived just as a truck was about to deliver 3 pallets of supplies. Despite the disbelief from my fellow passengers, I actually understood the truck driver when he said he had 3 pallets to deliver in Greek :-) We of course stepped out of our car and helped him. Once we had unloaded the truck we started to fill up our car with supplies. Apparently it’s good to have the car filled with clothes, water and emergency blankets.

And all of a sudden our day was over. It was a quiet day with only 10 boats arriving but even so, I’m surprised of not having seen a single refugee. The only proof of their existence we have is the mountain of life vests we saw at the “graveyard”. Seems like the machine that has been put in place here is working, that is, the refugees only spend a very limited time in the camps near the beaches before they are transferred to the bigger ones close to the airport. Let’s see what tomorrow brings, we are scheduled to be at the lighthouse beach between 07.00 and 13.00. I will keep you posted.