Week 0 Day 0
As the sun set quietly behind the trees on the other end of runway, its gentle rays filled the terminal. I sat in a crowded D11 waiting space for the first and longest leg of my travels to Turkey before my final destination of Lesvos, and observed those seated around me. Many of them spoke a gentle, foreign language I can only assume is Turkish. For them, I suppose this is a returning of home — a going back to perhaps meet the family or place they had once left, or a visit to a land their lineage was birthed from — a return to their roots. For me however, this flight was quite the opposite; it meant the beginning of a new understandings and new purposes. As I took a glimpse of the fading sunset, for me it might as well have been a new sunrise.
I am writing this as I sit wide awake on this sleepy flight to Turkey, before my transfer flights to Athens and finally Lesvos. With more than half of my 12-hour flight left to go, I have too much time to think of the 80 or so days that lie before me. I think of looking for my new apartment that I couldn’t find on Google Maps, or if my funds are sufficient for the entirety of my travels. But most of all, I think of what lay ahead of me as I begin my work with Movement on the Ground, a nonprofit specifically focusing on the refugees who have landed on the island after fleeing violence and uncertainty in their home states. As the displaced there wait years for their asylum interviews behind the fences of refugee camps, uncertainty, disease, and boredom plague the tens of thousands of lives stuck in limbo. As volunteers, we know we can’t save them; the problem is far bigger than us. But what we can do is to address their dignity and humanity of the men, women, and children as they lay trapped indefinitely on this island somewhere, or perhaps the middle of nowhere, in between Greece and Turkey. I don’t know if it’s enough, but it’s something.
While trying to convert my nervousness to excitement, I often remind myself why I am going in the first place and why the commitment. And the simplest way I can put it is this: I want to do compassion for a living. Although in a form and a future that is unclear now, I want to heal the brokenness of individuals shattered by the injustices of society. If others refuse to take responsibility of the suffering caused by their actions, I will. However, words and ideas often sound more beautiful than the work actually is. There is nothing glorious about the work, it is something that few care to know and fewer can appreciate, but I believe the lack of appreciation is a cheap price to pay if human life is the reward. My volunteering work is my test of will and love. If I truly am to believe in these values I hold true, I need to have my eyes unclouded, to witness the raw suffering in its fullest, to learn to bear the burdens of friends whose names I’ve not yet known, faces I’ve not yet seen, and to fall in love with the people and the work unconditionally. If I can leave this place at the end of the summer with a greater passion that I came in with, that will be my evidence to continue on this path that I am on. I enter these 80 days with a bare ego and asked to be humbled in whatever way possible.
