Field Guide to Volunteering in the Refugee Crises
I wish I could make a 3-bullet PowerPoint about my takeaways from Greece or show a few charts that illustrate the impact of volunteerism in the refugee crisis. I can’t. The truth is that implementing an analytical approach to this problem is hard. I’m writing this post because it’s the reference guide I wish I had before heading to Chios. Hopefully it will be of help to people who are contemplating going into the field.
Expectations
It’s easy to watch a 3-minute long video of the crisis and then look away or forget about it. You can’t do that when you are out there. You can’t unsee the human costs of war. They follow you around all day, every day. War becomes real and not just an abstraction you read about in the news or a textbook. Your heart will break and it will be overwhelming and uncomfortable.
Perhaps the first instinct is to react to it, reject it or freeze up and numb out what you feel. The best course to pursue here is to be patient with yourself and allow time to process the things you see and feel, however uncomfortable they may be. Take everything in and start setting healthy emotional boundaries as you start getting pulled in multiple directions. This allows volunteers to progressively expand capacity to serve the community in a much more sustainable manner.
If you do it any other way, you may become cynical about the world’s indifference or you’ll start to feel immobilized. Can individuals actually do anything in this crisis to make meaningful impact? It has become so complicated in scale that even diplomacy has broken down completely. The bombings in Aleppo have essentially become a proxy mini world war.
Remember that you cannot break down in front of the refugees even when these thoughts and emotions circle around in your head. They have to put up with so much more. Tell your friends about your experience, talk to other volunteers, talk to people who have been there before.
Set very realistic expectations about what you want to achieve out of the trip. Even when you do, you will change your mind 15 times about what you’re feeling and thinking everyday. You will be surprised by how quickly the environment becomes the new normal. Adaptation to the circumstances happens faster than you think.
Even after you hear horrific stories and palpably see and taste the tension in the field remember there is always hope, laughter and joy. Go back to the fact that these people have made it as far to Chios and survived. That despite the political, social and economic pressure that’s been unloaded onto their normal lives unexpectedly, their humanity precedes all. They are trying to live their version of “normal” as best they can even in the worst possible situation.
The volunteers & the work
Chios attracts diverse characters. There were long and short term volunteers mostly working with NGOs and grassroots organizations mixed with locals, tourists, sailors, and refugees. The driving force to volunteer was unique to each person but usually a combination of empathy, compassion, idealism and shock. There is also that ever present frustration directed mostly at the governments who are meant to represent them.
The work was straightforward on paper: we were going to serve food to the refugees and keep the children entertained and cheerful. In practice, it was the most physically exhausting and draining work I’ve done in a while. Don’t get me wrong though, the exhaustion was easily forgotten when I witnessed significant improvements in the behavior and mood of these children that had gone through trauma. It made the job rewarding and satisfying in the most practical and real way.
Despite harboring some doubts about the value of the trip, I quickly realized that volunteers were undoubtedly needed in the field. International NGOS are present but missing at the same time. Grass root organizations, individual volunteerism and local aid are incredibly important in this crisis. They fill in much of role that the UNHCR is expected to be doing.
The camps & regular life
The facts around camp life and what people sacrificed to get there are grim. The personal stories you’ll get to hear will be the most haunting part of the volunteer experience. They are haunting not because of violence, but because you realize just how normal life was prior to the civil war and how when societies fall apart, everything goes so easily.
The boats people took to get there were dingy and unsafe. Everyone left behind war, destruction, and family. The communities aren’t treated with basic human dignity. Kids are deeply traumatized and men are misunderstood and untrusted. More than 60% of the women are pregnant and there’s barely any medical or legal help provided.
There are shortages of all resources but the most frustrating aspect of life is that the asylum process, that everyone is counting on, is barely moving along. These camps were meant to be pit stops in a journey to Europe but have turned instead into unwanted homes. The desperation is making people consider a path to Athens that is not only dangerous but also illegal.
These facts are aggregate and they hide the dullness and commonness of daily life in camp. Collectively, they capture impressions of refugees but cannot represent the individual stories or journeys of the very real people going through the experience. The people still wake up every day, get food, chat with friends. They play soccer, chill at the park and swim in the ocean. There’s music, dancing and drinking and then they go to sleep and do it all again another day.
Conundrums & community needs
The days spent in the camp passed like years and each of them brought a different perspective or contrast to be pondered.
Initially I winced at the shortage of talent, experience, skill sets and resources needed for the challenge but as time passed you noticed the aid workers starting to feel at home. The people that stay longer make social ties with the community and learn some Arabic. Yet staying longer doesn’t necessarily mean helping them more. What refugees want the most is to move along in the asylum process and restart their lives in a safe home.
The news cycle doesn’t report on this slow moving process and only highlights the most intense bits. This type of journalism ultimately hurts refugees because it fails to bring their stories to the concrete. It fails to humanize refugees who spend the day in a mix of tension, laughter and mostly boredom. It fails to summarize the help that these people want to receive. Instead, the gratuitous violence shown leads to compassion fatigue and de-sensitivity to these human stories.
Financing and staffing are also done mostly on a short term basis but what these communities actually need is long term investments. These camps need a consolidated vision and sense of ownership if the ultimate goal is to assist refugees for the long term.
Refugees are reluctant to share their personal stories more openly and vocally for very good reasons of dignity, vulnerability, and safety. Yet their missing voices also put them at risks of being forgotten and misunderstood by a world with ephemeral attention spans that flip between heart wrenching news and cat memes. Strong leaders has to be raised from within to speak on behalf of the communities the same ways Martin Luther King, Nelson Mendela, Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi did for their people.
What are new organizational models or companies that can operate more effectively than development aid agencies and can cut through obvious inefficiencies? How do you protect these people and help them resist against the social and political currents that feel as if they’re intentionally blocking them every step of the way? Creativity and hacking are much needed to tackle many of these issues which are systematically blocked.
Parting Thoughts
Towards the end of my trip, all I wanted to do was read a book on my hotel porch and eat some traditional Greek food. For a short 8 days, the only new hard skill I had learned in Chios was how to make Turkish coffee. In the midst of what felt like mostly exhaustion, there was also a humbling peace of just letting the complexity of everything be and ride on the tension.
As a history student, it’s eye opening to witness the many faucets of imperialism that never really ends no matter how time turns the pages. That dusted chapter about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its impact is still so visible on this Greek island off the Anatolian coast today.
My only immediate and clear reflection is the unfortunate reality that the peace paid for in two World Wars seem to be on track to being quickly consumed by our indifference in the developed world. Our cynicism is creating the unstable governments and social systems we love to mock and ridicule from the comfort of our keyboards.
Upon my return and for the first time since 8th grade, I wrote a letter to the President. It is time for me (and for you!) to regain basic civic skills and engage as the people we are (artists, designers, entrepreneurs, wannabe philosophers, private citizens, software engineers, etc…) in our communities, cities, local & federal government and nation.
The memory of the trip is marked by fractions of moments: the smiling little girl who had witnessed her mother’s murder by ISIS; all of the strength, miracles and simple human stories of civilians who made to Greece after hellish crossings of the Turkish borders and through the ocean; and the boat of people who drowned in the Aegean Sea while trying to get to Chios. But above all of these memories I will remember most the newborns arriving to camp and Chios being their first home. The island itself remains the cool and laidback land sitting calmly in the vast Aegean blue blissfully unaware of the stories it carries.
