My Night With the Refugees (Part 1)

“How are you doing?”

“I’m good”, I would reply, but I was lying.

The truth – I was an insecure, annoyed, unorganized mess; but I was hopeful. Hopeful because this day would finally bring the time and space I needed to gather my thoughts and create some structure around my team’s time here. Here being Lesvos, Greece where I’m leading a team of 12 people who are volunteering their time to serve refugees and other volunteers involved in the refugee crisis.

Since the beginning, we would wonder what this mission would look like and how we were going to serve. We spent weeks preparing and raising money. We spent days traveling from Atlanta, GA to the quaint town of Molyvos. We had many conversations that all revolved around the same concept – “you’ll know more about how you will be serving once you get here“. After much anticipation, FINALLY we would have some answers, or at least the appearance of answers.

Our morning started with a debrief to give us a better understanding of the history of this crisis, the players who were part of the serve team, and the geography of our surrounding area. Knowing that I would have the evening to myself to set the team’s schedule and organize the chaos, I chose to join a group going on a tour of Sykaminia, one of the transit camps for incoming refugees.

With the sliver of sun that appeared yesterday, these same roads that were frozen just a couple days prior were finally clear enough to travel. How lucky we were! As we rose in elevation, however, the weather worsened and the journey to the camp was far from a simple drive. We took the windy road around a mountain in snowy precipitation. With every slope and every turn around the next mountain bend, my imagination became more active – vividly picturing our van’s plummet off the mountainside after braking suddenly, skidding forward, and over compensating a turn while trying to avoid hitting the oncoming vehicle that would inevitably appear out of nowhere. Thankfully, my imagination wasn’t quite reality and we arrived at the refugee camp, safe and sound.

Once we unloaded our vehicle, rather than receiving a tour we received orders and were assigned to specific work stations. There were only a few volunteers at the camp manning a sudden onslaught of refugees. Since weather had been so bad recently, fewer teams traveled to and from the camp. This team that we met had been there for 24 hours already and were waiting for another team to come and relieve them – the next team would also serve a 24 hour shift before being relieved.

Since we happened to be around in the interim (although I’m certain that none of this “just so happened”), we were asked to help out in lieu of touring the camp.

The call came about an hour after arriving to the camp. Katherine, our organization leader, stepped out of the food tent to take the call. It was easy to distinguish — from the tone in her voice and hearing bits and pieces of her response to whomever was on the other end of the line — that the news we would soon receive wasn’t going to be good news.

“Don’t worry.” 

“Be safe.”

“We understand … We’ll handle it.”

Katherine stepped back in the tent, “I guess you can imagine what I’m about to say”, she told me.

It was time to gather the group together for a team meeting. And this was the beginning of a very long night.