I passed several groups of tired yet excited and bright-eyed refugees. They came in clusters of 20 and I saluted them as I passed. I must have passed over 120 refugees before the engine of my 50cc scooter cut out.
It would be over an hour for a new bike to arrive, so I took a walk towards the ocean. The sun was beating and I got a small taste of the 17 mile walk each refugee had to make. The sun burnt but it was beautiful and quiet.
Most of the refugee boats land in a small village called Petra. From Petra they must walk roughly 20 miles to the refugee camps to be processed and then another few miles to the town of Mytillini where they will hopefully join a packed boat to Athens, if they find a way to afford the ticket.
The groups I passed on the road represented only a fraction of the refugees that came that day. A separate bus shuttles the women, children, sick and elderly. But sometimes even this bus cannot fit the numbers and so many women and children take to walking as well.
I rode along the dirt road parallel to the shoreline and saw the accumulation of busted rubber inflatable boats (aka dinghy) and orange life jackets and cheap plastic engines left from over 100,000 refugees over the course of the past year. Someone collects the engines that survive each trip and ships them back to Ayvalik, Turkey for the next group of refugees. Eventually the cheap engine will fail for some poor overcrowded group and without luck they will make the headlines as another failed attempt (if they are ever found.) As I walked along the shore I ran into the engine collector. He wasn’t at all happy to see me with my camera and he let me know it.
I wanted to see how far the shore of life vests and black rubber refuse went on and so I rode for miles with no end in sight.
I came upon a group of about 15 aid workers with neon vests as they were flagging down a dinghy in the distance. The boat made its way to the rocky shore much quicker then I expected.
What happened next was confusion, jubilee, sadness with a splash of an existential crisis.
The refugees scrambled upon the rocks with wobbly feet and shot nerves, excited to be alive but shocked by what they had just gone through.
Here is what they go through, taken from interviews and a little bit of artistic merit:
A refugee finds a smuggler who promises a certain degree of safety. The refugee pays as little as $800 and as much as $1600. Many refugees (roughly 1/3 of my interviews) are robbed of their extra money, watches and phones at gunpoint before hastily and forcefully put on an overcrowded rubber boat and cast to the sea.
With luck the sea is calm. The Mediterranean tends to be calmer just before sunrise so most go early in the morning. With too much wind the waves are high and the excessively weighed-down dinghy takes on water, or in the worst case, flips.
If it flips many people will probably die. If it takes on too much water a few brave kind souls can swim alongside with a rope as is the case in this story - http://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/left-for-dead-in-the-aegean-syrian-teen-refugee-swims-16-hours-back-to-turkey. If the dhingy comes upon the greek coast guard, the refugees puncture the dhingy so that the authorities have to take them in.
Once they make it to the shore they are met by humanitarian volunteers and cameras. There is a scramble and jockeying for position by the humanitarians and overly ambitious cameramen as the refugees hit the rocky shore. The humanitarians go to aid the children and elderly as the cameras push in for the right angle. It is an awkward scene accented with the hysteric cries of women and children who 20 minutes ago thought they were going to die or who may have lost someone along the way.
I did have an overwhelming urge to hug people. Everybody off the boat seemed to really need an embrace. I did hug an old man, he was stoically standing to the side of the madness out of the way but he had the gleam in his eye suggesting he had seen something beautiful and sad.
Many refugees have the premonition that it is smooth sailing from here, and compared to where they came from it is better, but it is no cakewalk.
Despite the dirt, heat, smell, sickness, lack of food and water, cardboard beds and poor treatment by some uniformed men; for many this is the first time they can finally relax.
After years of random explosions from the chaos of war, the insecurity, terror brought on by ISIS, Assad, Taliban and all of the Russian and U.S. guns and bombs - here in the prison-like atmosphere of the Tera Kepe and Moriah camp these tired and shattered eyes can begin to imagine a new future.
Most of these refugees don’t know about Islamaphobia and are unaware of the fear and rejection that awaits them — not only for the months ahead on the road to Germany, but also for the years ahead from distrustful locals who have to make space for them. These refugees will feel the pressure from cautious Europeans afraid of losing a piece of the pie and fearful of the abstract and overblown threat that we have come to simply define as terrorism.
I would like to address articles such as this one from the Daily Mail - or anything from Fox news essentially. The premise that ISIS will send terrorists mixed in with the refugees is a logical fear. I love logic and I cannot deny it when I find it. From a tactical perspective it is a good move and if it happens I wouldn’t be too surprised. I brought this up in most of my interviews with refugees and most would not consider it but I will not dismiss it.
Still it begs a bigger question. Do we let a threat of fanatical reprobates get in the way of our humanity? If so then who are we?
Here is a good organization to help - https://www.wfp.org/countries/syria
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