Ongoing updates from the ground

These are updates from the town of Molyvos on the island of Lesvos, Greece. I’m currently buying supplies from locals and wherever possible to support the thousands of refugees coming from Syria & Afghanistan via Turkey. The support from people like you is making this possible: https://www.gofundme.com/3z3p9ufw

Update #8:

Today we spent the first half of the day at PIKBA, a storage facility where we will be storing 30 tonnes of supplies which are arriving this week. We cleaned up the facility and got it up to scratch, ready for the delivery.
After, we went to Moria — the Afghani (and other non-Syrians) camp. There, we met a family of Somali refugees. Ekhlas Mohammed, 17 years old, had been on the road for a week and was looking after her mother, her sisters and an extended family of five. When I asked her why she left Somalia, she told me that most young women are being raped where she is from, outside the capital.

There are very few who escape sexual abuse and neither she, nor her family have felt safe for years. Finally now they saved up enough money to get out, and have made their way to Greek shores.
She told me that her only priority was to feel safe. To build a new home. To start a new life. She spoke with a stability and strength that resonated through the air and struck me as a young woman who had seen adversity beyond my imagination. And yet, she had a smile on her face.

The camp itself is in serious trouble. Unlike Kara Tepe, the Syrian camp, there is little UNHCR / IRC presence. Instead, there is little information for new arrivals; a prison complex houses those who are being registered. They are detained for two days while their fingerprints and photographs are taken. But the problem is they have no information communicated to them throughout the process. They are shuffled in, locked up, split from their families.
While the registration is important, and the procedure may be necessary, I couldn’t help but feel for the hundreds of men, women and children that clung to the fence in despair…

Thank you to whoever out there is sending their well wishes / thoughts / prayers for those who are suffering more than us. And thank you for continuing to read these posts and share in some of my world at the moment.

Love is truly all you need.

Update #7:

News just in: registrations have now opened in Mytilene and rather than having 2 windows open, there are now 10. Just today, 8,000 refugees were registered.This is really big news, as it will help to clear the bottleneck that existed in previous days and is cause for celebration!

The volunteers in Molyvos are currently hunting for a space that we can use to create a temporary camp here, for the arrivals, which will only further alleviate tensions in Mytilene. As more and more volunteers arrived and in the continued absence of established organisations, we are streamlining our processes, training volunteers, creating volunteer shifts and schedules and, everyday, making our end more efficient.

This efficiency is directly translated to better conditions for refugees. In Molyvos, each morning, we give out orange juice, a sandwich and a piece of fruit to the children, women and men in that order.

This morning we gave out some juice to Hasan, a boy who I have never seen without a smile on his bright face, a boy whose joy is contagious. And amidst the hardship going on in our world, I hope that for one moment, his face also brings joy to everyone out there.

Update #6:

Thank you everyone for your continued support. I was meant to leave here on Wednesday 9 September, but have decided to extend my work on the ground until early October.

The storage house here in Molyvos is in a constant state of flux.

Money comes in. Supplies are purchased. Money is depleted. The house is stocked and organised. Boats arrive. Suitcases of dry clothes, nappies, emergency blankets and towels are packed. The suitcases are taken to the beach. The storage house is empty. The day ends. Money comes in.

Your contributions are imperative in bringing some sense of order to the chaos in providing much needed funds to help keep the supply lines open.

The needs change on a day to day basis — sometimes we have boat loads of children — nappies deplete. Sometimes, the boats are at sinking point when they arrive — emergency blankets deplete.

I have been carefully recording all funds spent so far and allocating them on a needs basis, prioritising children, then women, then the elderly and then men.

Spirits are high. Then they are low.

But always, there is gratitude from the refugees for the support they are provided. As but a conduit, I convey this gratitude onwards to you.

Update #5:

Myself and two other volunteers from Denmark watched the sunrise as we waited for the early boats this morning.

Before long, we were at it. Greeting the boats is a two-fold process. The boats themselves are rubber floats, with a small 50hp engine. They are usually crammed with 45–60 people. Refugees. Not migrants.

First, we help the people onshore. The beach is rocky, with a sloping gradient, but getting sick, tired and often injured refugees off them, when they’re already wet and close to hypothermia is not as easy as it sounds.

Second, once onshore we attend to the children first, getting them out of wet clothes and into emergency blankets. After receiving 8 boats (so approximately 400–500 people), we had run out of towels and emergency blankets.

The only way to keep the trembling, blue-lipped children from further peril was to hold them. The physical transfer of heat from one body to another. From but one human’s heartbeat, to another’s.

And this is what moved me most today, and this is what I would like to update you with. I have allocated a portion of the funds raised so far — and thank you again! — for the purchase of emergency blankets, which are integral. They are usually expensive — between $1 and $1.50 each. Bear in mind, we had approximately 500 arrivals from one beach alone today — of which maybe 20% are children.

This is one necessity at the moment, as supplies are running low, waters are getting colder, and they cannot be purchased easily.

Please continue to support this every-growing crisis.