AYS Special from Lesvos: Don’t film me chopping onions
By: Are You Syrious
Tags: Refugees, Special, Lesvos, Greece, Moria

But as one friend notes, we were thinking so fast that our decision-making processes were blurry, as if the choices were already made before we had the space to consciously make them. And everything was so solution-based, we didn’t have the time to fully assess the quality of our solutions, and inevitably, we were making decisions we ended up regretting later. We were also met with a crazy threefold opposition and repression. Local fascists were walking around swinging their dicks like clubs, threatening and beating people on the move and anyone providing aid. Law enforcement would skin you alive if you sneezed without permission, and quickly escalated to actively preventing any relief efforts from happening, even stopping medical personnel en route.

Governing bodies’ primary goal was to restrict as much ‘comfort’ (meaning survival) for those forced into homelessness so they could be easily herded into the new camp.

This ultimately devolved into restricting the ability to work in any capacity with those on the streets until providing emergency aid was made illegal altogether. As one friend remembers, when you realize you’re having negotiations with a hostile government to provide water to thousands of people who were just internally displaced, it’s a slap in the face. Maybe our choreography was getting progressively more intricate, but our balance was more like learning to walk bipedally — you do it so you don’t fall over.

Everyone was sleeping rough across from the Lidl parking lot, everyone was eating soggy egg sandwiches, everyone’s babies were sitting in soiled clothes, everyone’s elderly father needed his heart medicine.

Insecurity was at its peak and people were queueing for supplies they might not even get, so our pragmatic threshold for emergency was much higher. Emergency is proximal, subjective, and in flux, so who the fuck are we to decide whose emergency is more urgent than someone else’s? But making this distinction isn’t personal, it’s a last resort. We knew why we were doing it, and we had valid reasons for doing so, but that didn’t absolve us from the guilt. As a friend explained to me, his ability to mitigate an emergency changed the classification of it. Because “emergency” is often defined by society, we give people more power to define what that is than they need. That’s confusing, because it isn’t physically possible to respond to every single person who says they have an emergency. But in those moments, a mother who can’t find her kid presents significantly more of a problem than it might have been before, so the flexibility in how an emergency is defined is important.

(Sleeping on the street after the fire. Photo Credit: Maurizio Lavarini)

This paradox of prioritizing and project managing emergencies is a zero-sum game, and it’s rigged. These governmental gains or advantages mean intentional, clear losses for people on the move, and the public sees no benefits, no improvements. The end of those two weeks climaxed into a spectacular nothingness and a hard reset on whatever normal life was. The main road was cleared of most debris, Lidl was open again, the road was used for cars, and the police checkpoints eroded into half-assed monuments.

The UNHCR was cutting the ribbon at the inauguration of the new camp, and if you listened closely enough, you could hear a few weak claps from over in Turkey.

Every decision I made during those two weeks choked me in my sleep. I felt tremendous guilt and shame for everything I did and didn’t do, even though I understood to whom the real guilt and shame belonged. I became a paradox myself, and completely fell apart. If I could find a flaw in something I did, I could convince myself that my friends and colleagues having to register themselves in the new camp was my fault, and could punish myself accordingly. But if I believed I did everything I could have, and stood my ground until the last possible moment, then nothing I could have done would have kept them safe, and it will never matter how hard I work or how much risk or danger I provoke, because the people who have enough power to change the situation enough to make things better won’t do it for all the shit reasons we already know. And that’s haunting.