Finding Hope in Despair: Reflections on Our Visit to Greece

“Progressive change must come from the way we live out our lives, and the communities we are a part of in whichever capacity. And I’m full of hope in knowing that there are so many other people around the world who light the dark - let it spread like wildfire, let it rip through this poor earth. We are the hope, we are the future, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

On the systematic dehumanisation of refugees in Greece, and how we can find hope as a community.

In January, Amber, Rachel and myself embarked upon a 10-day trip to Greece to visit our forRefugees grassroot partners on the ground. At forRefugees we make these trips several times a year, to each corner of Europe where refugees are being hosted or are on the move in their search of safety. These trips are not only vital for us because it means we build and upkeep close ties with the organisations and volunteers we support on the ground, but because being there in person invokes a stark reminder of why we have to continue advocating for refugees and for the people who support them. The systematic dehumanisation of refugees can sometimes feel far removed from our everyday lives. It is when you are there, meeting people in person that truly stirs a deep anger inside of yourself, a feeling of injustice at how the system can treat vulnerable people with so much disdain. A system created by people: by EU representatives, by politicians, lawmakers, and sometimes by us as a society in how we decide to represent refugees in the news or on social media.

For myself it had been nearly 5 years since last being on the ground in Greece. I found that even though the rules and the asylum system in place had changed, the dehumanisation and alienation had not. It seems as though politicians and governments have been very busy thinking of new ways to make people feel outcast. The sheer inhumanity of not looking after such a vulnerable population: victims of war, persecution, (gender) violence, LGBT+ and minority discrimination or long-term conflicts and civil disputes. And even the small minority of people who don’t tick these boxes. I don’t care where you’ve come from and if you’re a refugee fleeing war or an economic migrant looking for a future – nobody should have to live in forced squalor like this. Nobody, ever. Because any living human being on this planet is looking to better their lives for themselves or their children, it is in our nature, and it is not a crime.

Located far outside of population centres, Greece’s camp are defined by curfews, queues and surveillance.

In the first place let’s talk about the reception centres themselves. In the early days of volunteering, we were able to go inside of the camps to meet people, arrange our distributions or set up our projects. When they realised that we were able to report on the dreadful situations inside, volunteer groups and smaller NGOs were very quickly denied entry. For years it meant that very few actors except for large organisations like UNHCR or the Red Cross had access inside of the camps. Millions of euros were pumped into the organisations to provide basic necessities for people like sleeping bags and hygiene kits. Until covid hit, and the Greek government decided that they would keep all organisation and aid ‘in-house’. The result was ‘Closed Controlled Access Centers’, proudly signposted in large at the security entrance of each camp. On Kos where we visited, the government boasts about its ‘most secure’ CCAC: an airport-security style entry and exit into the camp. With curfews, queues, X-rays and a list of prohibited items. (One of the prohibited items being food that can be cooked, but we will come back to that later). The designated centres are carefully located to add to the feeling of being totally alienated: often far away from shops, towns, the rest of civilisation and normal life. Away from job opportunities or away from services like medical care or even volunteer run projects.

The centres are also purposely constructed to feel hostile. We managed to approach a few of the camps (some closer than others before being approached by military guards), but if you didn’t know any better you would think Greece’s most dangerous criminals are being housed inside: metres tall concrete slabs with barbed wire on top, tannoys, military guards and CCTV cameras enclose the encampment not only denying anybody to enter or exit without having to pass through security, but also ensuring that no critical eyes can see in, or that hopeful eyes can look out. I won’t forget the view of the beautiful snowy mountain tops in Ioannina as we walked around the centre. But these same stunning views were entirely blocked by the concrete walls for the residents inside. Accommodation conditions are tough inside, especially in the cold of winter and especially in the heat of summer. I managed to catch a glimpse of the inside through a crack in one of the concrete blocks. The inside looked neat, not like the old Moria that I had seen before. But it is also devoid of any sense of community or creativity: people are not allowed to add any sort of structure to the outside of the isoboxes, like a shade cloth for the boiling summers. Sometimes, the heaters don’t work inside of the isoboxes and electricity is intermittent, leaks and drafts are a common issue. (When we left Ioannina early on a Sunday morning, the thermostat stated -4 degrees.) Katsikas camp has 2 washing machines for a population of more than a thousand people. We have been shown some photos of the inside of the camps, shared in confidence by its residents with the volunteers on the ground. Refugees actually are scared to take and share photos of their living conditions, because they fear that it might have negative consequences for their asylum claim if the authorities were to find out who the pictures have come from. There are no cooking facilities, no community spaces and despicable hygiene standards in the scarce toilet and shower facilities.  The ‘homes’ are also vastly over capacity, pushed so full of people and belongings that there is actually no space to put anything. Not a locker, a drawer or a hook to hang your clothes. Just totally bare walls with dirty used mattresses on the floor, or if they’re really lucky a bunkbed so they are able to create some form of privacy with blankets and hang their items from somewhere. That brings me to blankets: or rather the lack of. Grassroot groups would often (rightly) criticise the large well-funded NGOs when they were still running inside the camps for their ineffectiveness, but I think we could at least rely on them to give every new arrival a sleeping bag and a hygiene kit. Now that this care has been absorbed by the ministry we are seeing that they are entirely unprepared. We heard from some of our partners that ministries will often reach out to them asking for sleeping bags because they’ll have none to give to new arrivals. I think every volunteer has something that particular infuriates them. For me, it’s leaving people cold. As someone who easily feels the cold myself, I just cannot bear the thought of people, especially small children, sleeping in leaking unheated isoboxes with not even a blanket. The blanket scarcity is felt all across Greece - it is something a lot of our partners mentioned the distinct lack of. And when we visited Attika warehouse they were down to their last big bag of summer-style blankets and 6 sleeping bags. It really felt like the whole of Greece is out of blankets. I think we all look forward to summer, though the scorching hot weather of course brings with it an entirely different set of issues. People are being forced to live in squalor and extreme temperatures, and the ministry is not equipped or willing to treat people humanely, with something as basic as decent accommodation or a sleeping bag.

When I meet someone at the centres coming for food or clothes, some warmth, a chat, some kindness and community - it both saddens and infuriates me that they are unhoused, and do not have a dignified home to go back to at the end of the day.

“Some organisations have started weighing children to monitor the ongoing malnutrition because kids growing up are not receiving enough vitamins, minerals and proteins to be healthy.”

I had already mentioned previously that uncooked food is prohibited from being taken into Kos centre. They have a strict policy on no cooking inside of the camp. Is this rule because the camp management doesn’t wish to have another fire disaster like we had in Moria in 2020? Or is the answer more sinister? If they don’t want people cooking on open fires, why are they not providing safe community kitchens? It means people are forced to eat the camp food, and are removed from their own cultural cuisines and reminders of home. Food served inside the military camps can be terrible - we’ve seen photos of food with mould, parasites and above all no health nutrition. Some organisations have started weighing children to monitor the ongoing malnutrition because kids growing up are not receiving enough vitamins, minerals and proteins to be healthy. Food poverty, and nutritional poverty is a rife problem all across refugee communities in Greece. We would love to know where all the EU Migration and Asylum funding money is going, but it certainly isn’t going into people’s stomachs. Though we have no proof of this, we are certain that catering contracts are going to family and friends, or perhaps the lowest bidder - but not to anyone who actually wants to cook culturally and nutritionally appropriate meals for vulnerable people arriving on the shores of Europe.

In most of the centres we visited, volunteers would tell us that people often shared with them that this would be their only meal in the day. When people are in the asylum process they are entitled to a miniscule amount of money (as little as 75 euro per month for a single person if camp catering is provided): this is for everything they might need – for food, transport, clothes, diapers and toiletries. Like the rest of Europe, Greece has been hit with massive inflation these past few years. Food prices have increased by an estimated 25% since 2022 and of the 27 EU countries, Greece ranks fourth with the highest food prices. Poor nutrition then becomes a viscous circle of other issues: depression, health issues and for children a lack of growth and for everyone a lack of concentration to be able to work or to study.

Glocal Roots Community Centre on Kos.

People will leave the islands for the mainland full of hope. But the reality of the mainland camps is shocking. People will often leave camps such as Filipiada in the North (50km away with a €13.70 return bus ticket to the nearest town) because they are so desolate and dire, and they will then find themselves on the streets of Thessaloniki or Athens without any accommodation or a cash card. Ruhi from Refugee Biryani and Bananas said that the cash card procedure often get so drawn out that people never even get one by the time they have a positive asylum decision, at which point they also lose the right to the cash card, and the right to accommodation in a camp. So not only do these people then face homelessness, they also have no money for eating. Their only source of food supply become the community kitchens or food distributions that our partners have set up across Greece.

It became apparent too that there actually is a lot of work around, (let’s put aside the quality of these jobs for now), but access to it for refugees is still far removed. Greek parliament approved a bill in December that will grant around 30,000 undocumented migrants the right to a three-year residency permit and work in Greece. The law is designed to fill shortages of unskilled labour in the country. This means people can work before receiving a positive asylum decision on their case. In practice, as Gabrielle from Action for Women told us, nothing is set in place to guide people into employment or integrate them into society through language or culture. The Greek government has now said people can start working legally after 2 months of being in the country, but everyone is put in camps pushed so far out of society that it is then impossible for people to actually get to work by expensive public transport or foot and it means the government can say: ‘Look how lazy refugees are, they don’t want to work’. It means that the government is manipulating the narrative by putting a seemingly humane system in place, but with a system that doesn’t work in practice. The result is not only that you are not solving your gap in the labour market, the result is also that people are bound inside of a terribly depressing refugee camp all day, with little to no access to everyday life things such as work. Along with the terrible food, lack of access to healthcare and total pointlessness to someone’s day, mental health issues are rife. And this is where the community centres we support come in to give people a day out of the concrete walls of their prison-like existence.

On Kos we met a young Palestinian man volunteering at the Global Roots community centre. He had been sleeping on the streets, in the rain and the cold, coming to the community centre during the day to volunteer with Sarah and the team. His mother was a teacher but she passed away of cancer last year, he leaves behind his father and siblings in Gaza. He told me about his worries for his family living under bombs, and he showed me a video of his perished baby cousin, not even a month old, wrapped in the infamous white plastic as we have seen so much of in the news these past few months. I will spare you the video he showed me. He was limping all day, which turned out to be a foot infection because of the conditions he’s been living in. He had taken antibiotics already, but his pain had gotten worse and his whole foot swollen. Elena took him to the hospital at the end of the day. Lack of access to doctors is another huge issue since medical NGOs are no longer active inside the camps. There are 4000 people in Kos camp, there is no doctor, no infirmary and the only support group on the island is the small team running the community centre Glocal Roots in Kos town. Anyone who is unwell has to visit local doctors or hospitals without a translator, and with no money for the medicines they are prescribed. Due to the poor hygiene inside the camp, lack of access to showers, cleaning products and laundry facilities, diseases such as scabies and other contagious skin infections are running rampant through its communities. They are diseases that make most of us go ‘ew’, and it is especially heartbreaking when you think about the fact that for most of the middle-eastern populations in the camps, personal hygiene is a big part of their religion and culture. But the squalid conditions don’t even enable people to be able to keep themselves and their clothing proper. That in itself is total dehumanisation of people.

Once people receive a positive decision they have 30 days to leave the camp. However for many people, the accompanying travel documents take months to follow, meaning people are forced to either wait it out on the streets of Kos, or take an expensive ferry to the mainland and back to collect it. All support is cut after these 30 days, like the cash card and right to food and shelter. These people then have only the grassroot groups to turn to for help.

“If you have come this far in reading, it all may sound very very dire. And from the framework of ‘The System’, it is. But I actually feel, more than ever, brimming with hope that one day things will change.”

And there are so many more ways in which people are marginalised within Greek society - lack of affordable housing once they receive asylum, extreme difficulty for children (especially teenagers) who have often missed years of education who then have to find a way to integrate into Greek school, and a severe shortage of legal advice as people prepare for their interview and navigate rejections and appeals. If you have come this far in reading, it all may sound very very dire. And from the framework of ‘The System’, it is. But I actually feel, more than ever, brimming with hope that one day things will change. And it is because we as a community are the change makers. We are nearly 9 years on from the time our screens were flooded with images of people flooding the shores of Lesvos. And whilst the media has long moved on, the refugee solidarity community are still here, because we know the ‘floods’ of people are traumatised individuals in need of protection and security. And we know they have that right and that the law is on our side.  We see things so radically different from the way politicians look at these issues, that in my mind we are decades ahead into imagining what a world looks like in which we treat refugees with dignity, and above all what a truly inclusive and equal society looks like. It can feel discouraging to see all that is wrong, but we have to remember that any progressive change that has been made in this world once seemed like an impossible problem to overcome. So I say to hell with realistic solutions, let’s continue to think and act as unrealistically and passionately as possible. Martin Luther King didn’t sit around and think ‘well that’s just not realistic’ on overcoming segregation in America. The troubles in Ireland didn’t come to an end because the peacemakers just accepted the situation as the way it was. And by being part of forRefugees, by being a link in the chain with all these incredible grassroot groups on the ground who have been passionately fighting for a different world, we are the change that will be the norm many years from now. And if you feel like you are not doing enough, rest assured that whatever any of us do, it never feels like enough. And thank goodness for that, because it means we must keep going. I have such immense respect for the volunteers on the ground who have dedicated their lives sometimes for years to building a different kind of world. Some of them have sacrificed years of savings for a house, have sacrificed birthdays, Christmases or Eid with their family and friends back home, sacrificed well paid jobs and careers for meagre stipends to live in shared accommodation with other volunteers without heating. The fantastic projects that are set up that all just started with a group of people envisioning hope and positivity: community centres, showers, delicious food projects, vocational training, dignified free shops, cash support, housing support, legal advice, psychosocial support, music, dance, sports, education. But most often - a kind smile, a hand on someone’s shoulder and an encouraging word. I’m filled with awe for refugees who become community volunteers themselves, and dedicate their time to becoming part of the teams they join and serving others in need when they already have so many difficulties for themselves to deal with. They still manage to contribute their passions, their skills, their knowledge and their contribution in spite of being dehumanised in every step along the way of navigating ‘The System’. They are the voice of the refugee community and by being part of the unity they raise themselves from powerless to powerful. It is no small feat to leave everything you know and love behind and cross oceans and violent borders in search of a hopeful future.

At forRefugees we have a particular love for refugee-run and collaborative initiatives because we need to be following their lead. They know better than anyone what is needed in their respective communities and are vital in running projects with dignity and equality. And also I must mention just how much joy we find in working together and getting to know each other. I always thought that with the work we do we see both the worst (in the System) but also the best of humanity: and that is people of all backgrounds and walks of life rising together. And you our dear supporters, whether you donate £1000 or a tenner, all the likes and shares you give us, the comments, the recommendations, the moments you take in your day to read or think about the injustices we are fighting together: you are so important, because you are part of the change, the movement, the hopeful thinkers. Progressive change must come from the way we live out our lives, and the communities we are a part of in whichever capacity. And I’m full of hope in knowing that there are so many other people around the world who light the dark - let it spread like wildfire, let it rip through this poor earth. We are the hope, we are the future, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.