Relay: The Compounding Power of the Small
The other day it was the teddy bear backpack that did me in, aqua blue and sodden with seawater on the shore. “Teddy bear backpacks should not be washing up on beaches,” the caption said.
Then the report that a baby had died of exposure after sleeping rough in a cold tent at the camp. The first child of 2016 to die in the Aegean Sea. Tonight’s news that 36 people perished when two boats overturned.
I’m falling apart a little; one has to fall apart. How can someone see firsthand the refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and not shatter into pieces?
What I saw on the Greek island of Lesbos, what I keep learning since, is splitting head and heart.
The boats from Turkey have not stopped, even in rough weather and cold. The people who have left behind homes, professions, family members — maybe dead — need to move. The smugglers want to make their lucre.
It’s all so very unbelievable: the faces of the people packed onto a rubber raft holding many more than it’s meant to carry, the sight of the flimsy boats riding low to the sea, just inches from swamping.
Frightened voices, keening sounds in the dark. Jubilation and fear, determination, unspeakable sadness all twined into one as people — some of them — safely reach shore.
Half my mind, at least half, is still there on Lesbos, a sweetly scenic island where on a bright blue day, high up on the winding roads connecting harbor towns, you see the specks, just barely afloat, making their way across the Aegean.
Ask anyone who goes; you do not come back the same.
At the cobblestoned center of the harbor village of Skala Sikamineas, a landing point at one of the narrowest gaps between Turkey and Greece, the fruit and vegetable vendor sells oranges from the back of his pickup truck. From the mud track a hard left at the foot of the hill come the groups of just-arrived refugees, wrapped in crinkly metallic emergency blankets flashing gold and silver around their shoulders and feet. Metal fabric blooms like flowers trail from ill-fitting used but dry shoes provided, along with warm clothes and hot soup, at the temporary reception camps as a welcome and a way to ward off hypothermia.
They walk up the steep road ahead to the bus pickup point, to the camp where they must register in Greece as refugees, to the ferry across to Athens, and then on, they hope. Only as far as the next closed border, sometimes; as far as the next refugee camp, the next closed door.
To be helpful, volunteers have to stay calm and strong. “Just be present,” a therapist friend advised me before I went.
So I kept looking into the face of the man who told me his family was dead, kept my eyes on his even as they started to glitter and fill. I stepped forward to hug him; I offered dry clothes. He shook his head. “I am strong,” he said.
I’d look up and smile as groups of people just off the boats passed by. In Arabic, I said, “Welcome to Greece,” repeatedly pulling a cheat sheet out of my pocket to practice.
Men, women, children would smile back. Or gaze, too traumatized to respond. But often, two English words: “Thank you.” Or a gesture — hand to heart, then extended out.
When you gather the pieces and go on, pull your coddled self together to help the people in crisis (how dare I complain or be upset? Afghan, Iraqi, refugee — it’s a spin of the wheel), the fault lines remain.
It’s a permanently altered worldview, an obsession, perhaps. A need, once home, not to sink back into the comfortable familiar, taking for granted so many things. Shelter. Safety. Food.
And don’t even talk about my heart. I went, deliberately, to challenge it. To recalibrate, to amp up my gratitude. To turn toward questions, unanswerable questions, about why the world is this way. How can I want or expect, well, anything, when there is suffering like this?
In dreams I’m up and down the mud hill at Moria, the registration camp where refugees — where people — go and sign their names, become official numbers in a humanitarian crisis, in a political game.
I stood with them along the barbed wire fence eyed by armed riot police, waiting to take their next step into a vast unknown, stripped of any surety about who and where they would be, when they might eat, if they or their children would survive.
There’s no way to write about this but in dramatic tones.
In the dark Moria is bleak. Those huddled shapes are tired people wrapped up and trying to sleep, choosing a spot on the rock rubble instead of in the mud. Night tests courage; the desperation runs strong. With night comes hours that seem too much to bear.
In the light pops of color — pup tents with sagging sides — spread across the gray mud of a decimated olive grove. The cheery colors and picturesque landscape of the hill under a sweeping sky are a strange contrast.
Moria: a word that gave me “Mordor,” the black volcanic plain in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. “A barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust,” the author wrote, like the Syrian streets dissolved under bombs, where so many of these families lived.
This week, after heavy rain, Moria was not just a sea of mud, it was flooded.
But there are many focused efforts now to improve conditions, all led by volunteers, and they have snowballed since my time there in November.
While adequate food, blankets, maybe some heat is an uphill challenge, there is joy, blips of it, in a children’s art and play tent that was just getting under way when I was there. In bright paint, in crayon, the kids draw their worlds: a lopsided boat, stick people in the sea, an exploding bomb over a house. Under a hanging sock monkey in a now comfortable, padded-floor tent, they blow and pop bubbles; maybe they laugh.
The massive humanitarian effort, the refugee rescue work, moves forward one dry pair of socks at a time, one ride at a time, one baby bundled warm and given the doctor’s A-okay.
You do one thing, and then the next. Pass on some information; smile, hug, shake a hand. Lend a phone to someone for a call back home to report that they made it so far, alive.
It becomes an exercise in belief, in the compounding power of the small. Just say yes and go. Do what you can, and then one thing more.
A sleeping bag, a bottle of water, a little rabbit puppet to make a child smile. Hand on a mother’s shoulder, help covering her infant’s head.
A moment of normality, of levity, in a snatch of sing-along song shared. Some things surpass language and cultural borders. I wore a smiley face sticker on my hand, peeled it off and slapped it on a young boy’s palm. Shared a smile snuck into the spaces between forbearance and fear.
“Why are you here?” one man asked another volunteer. “I’m here to help,” she said, and watched his face change at the realization that we, all of us, were there for them.
I was impotent to really help. I’m not a medic; can’t translate to Farsi or Arabic. And the big picture — well, my heart broke when an English-speaking Afghani man, who was targeted by the Taliban for his skill, begged me to tell him where he should go. Would Germany let him in? What would happen to him at this border? At that? I hated my inability to reply, the world’s lack of the answers he needs.
All I can do, I thought, is be here, be present, to stand up for you, connect person-to-person and represent all the people in the world who care.
Salaam. Salaam. Salaam, I kept repeating to the refugees. “Hands like a weave of heaven,” I wrote as a line in a poem I began one day over coffee at the harbor, thinking of the many caring souls working to help.
Four Muslim men from Birmingham, England, were the most passionate and compassionate, the most energized and charged people I met, focused not only on meeting the refugees’ basic needs but on safeguarding their humanity. “It’s about the food and the water, but it’s about the dignity,” Amir explained. I can still hear the emotion in Nadeem’s voice as we sat over late-night tea in the cafe. “We’re humans. We’re human beings, all of us,” he said.
In recent days, news reports from Europe have highlighted some of the difficulties posed by the influx of refugees. I’m not naive; a mass migration is no easy thing. But look into people’s faces and you’ll see.
We are a web, all of us, now, sharing information and concern across the world. On Lesbos, a net of hard-working responders. If only we could do more.
Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.