Things I’ve Learned
By: Sophia Sheera
Tags: Asylum Seekers, Volunteering, Athens, Europe, Refugees

Last August, amidst a global pandemic, I packed my life into a suitcase and checked-it in onboard an EasyJet flight to Athens. I went to see what was happening at the Mediterranean border, the gateway to Europe for millions of asylum seekers. I chose Greece because I’d seen pictures of the filth that characterised Moria camp, Lesvos, but in the end it was Athens I flew to. I didn’t know whether I could handle the misery of the islands.

The first flat I lived in was off Victoria Square, in the centre of Athens. Platia Viktorias is notorious for its makeshift migrant population; back in August, an odd two hundred people were sleeping rough on its dirty greens. This is the first bit of Athens that I saw. I got off the Metro, suitcase in one hand and guitar in other, and found myself amidst a mildly apocalyptic landscape. Teenage girls were breastfeeding babies next to blackened bicycle racks. Little brown boys were chasing each other round the handrails. Around the square are burger bars and souvlaki stations, where white folk where grabbing a bite to eat whilst little Afghan kids sold drugs.

Over the next few days, one thought kept popping up in my head which I recognised as pretty problematic. That thought was: this can’t possibly be happening in Europe. Injustice like this, I had presumed, isn’t allowed to happen in the Global North. In fact, people risk their lives crossing the perilous Mediterranean because Europe supposedly discovered human rights. Democracy was borne in Ancient Greece. The people of Europe will understand, and they will help us, is what one young man from Sudan explained to me. They are educated people; they know that we had no choice but to flee when civil war broke out. I will not be ignored any longer in Europe.

The first thing I learned in Greece was like a blow to the stomach. We, in Europe, think of ourselves as civilised; we are the great upholders of common human rights, which function irrespective of skin colour and nationality. But the brutal reality is that human rights don’t work if you don’t have an ID card. Coincidentally, no one in this position is white or European.

There are officially 120 000 asylum seekers in Greece, according to the UNHCR. On top of that are 50 000 recognised refugees, and tens if not hundreds of thousands more migrants who are completely undocumented. The structural violence done to these marginalised peoples is particular to their differing legal statuses; to give you an idea, let’s say you are a single man over the age of 18 who applied for asylum pre-2019, back when it was a lot easier for your claim to succeed. Having spent some months — maybe even years — stuck in a verminous camp on an Aegean island, your asylum claim is accepted. You’re subsequently stuck onboard a coach and ejected in Athens, the first step towards ‘independent living’. However, to get a job, you need a tax number and a bank account, neither of which your legal status allows you to access. You don’t speak much Greek yet, and your English is patchy. Institutional racism is rife. When you were still an asylum seeker, you participated in the UNHCR ‘cash card’ scheme; as a single man in government-provided accommodation, you were entitled to 75 euros per month to live off. One month after your asylum claim is finished, that cash card is cut off. So you have no job, no money, and nowhere to go. You spend your nights on Victoria Square, downing Monster energy drinks to stay awake, because it’s too dangerous to sleep. During the day, you nap in parks and search desperately for work and try to forget the past you’re running from.

Most of the people I work with in Athens actually aren’t recognised refugees: they’re mid-way through their claim, but were perhaps released from the polluted camps early due to perceived vulnerabilities. Others entered Greece via the land border with Turkey, and then began their asylum claim once they reached Athens. However, the asylum process literally takes years, leaving people stuck in a limbo-land to which there seems to be no end. I know men whose interviews are scheduled for 2022, and in the meantime, they can’t find work so they can’t pay rent. When you finally get to your interview, you might be rejected because the government couldn’t find a real translator, so your story didn’t make sense to the officials. One man I know was rejected first time round because they couldn’t find his village on Google Maps, so they figured he was making it up. And it’s not enough to cite the Taliban as a reason you left your country; unless you can prove that your head was personally wanted on a plate, you will be stripped of your legal rights. If you get two rejections, your case is over. The government won’t deport you to Afghanistan, but they will take away the slip of paper that keeps you out of prison when the police ID you. You become a ghost: unable to work, to access healthcare, slipping in and out of prison because your existence is a criminal offence. This is what I mean by structural violence.

So how do people survive? Well, some of them try to get smuggled to elsewhere in Europe. They can see that there is no way to forge a new life in Greece, so they spend thousands and thousands of euros trying to get onboard a plane or underneath a lorry. They dream of better futures in Germany, where the police won’t beat them. Most of the time they get caught; if they get caught on the Balkan Route, they get beat so bad that they might return with whip-scars all over their stinging black bodies. Many of people who try to cross by boat from Greece to Italy drown at sea. Others, if they’re small, climb into the little nook made for a lorry wheel or clutch onto the metal framework under the vehicle. You probably want to smuggled if you’re undocumented in Greece, given each migrant is the responsibility of the first EU country they land in. If you spent your first year in Europe in a festival tent on Chios island, then you’re legally bound to Greece; if you’re undocumented, you could get out of Greece and never have to come back. But even people with their fingerprints saved on EURODAC (the European fingerprint database) end up desperate enough to risk crossing into Italy or Albania illegally. For so many, there’s simply no way to earn money for food in Athens; some people additionally have family back in Sudan hungrily awaiting cash. So off we go, maybe trekking through the jungle by night for three weeks, in search of a life elsewhere, a home to rent. In Greece, Syrian men with law degrees are lucky to work 12 hours picking olives or building walls for 15 euros a day. I hope that they are treated with more respect further North.

The story feels very different when it’s not strapping young men you’re facing, but women and children. The women I’ve met in Athens are the strongest I’ve ever known. Some of them have taken five children out of war-zones and onto European shores, all without knowing how to write their own name. When I was teaching at an educational NGO called ANKAA, I ran a beginners’ English class for adults who were illiterate; most of them were middle-aged women from Afghanistan. I had those women, survivors of war and rape and abuse, tracing their ABCs for an hour and a half a day. One of them told me it was the only time she didn’t worry about her children. It should’ve been them up there teaching me: how to lift a child over barbed wire by night; the meaning of loss. But the official reason that brought together our makeshift community was English class, so English is what we learned. We played Bingo and Happy-Man (my adaptation of Hangman) and sometimes we ate cake. They eventually stopped standing up when I entered the classroom, and would sometimes even shout out the answers towards the end. When lockdown happened, I couldn’t stop imagining my beautiful, powerful women stuck inside their festival tents, no excuse to escape overbearing husbands; that was the first time I cried in Athens.

After a few months, I decided that I didn’t want solely to teach English anymore. I started working at a maternity centre called Elna. It’s a five-floored building, each room inhabited by one or two families who moved in from the streets. In total, there are about 30 women and 45 children who live in Elna, all communicating in a hodge-podge of English, Arabic, Farsi, French and Portuguese. Some of those three-year-olds have seen more than I will ever see. But they’re also kids: sweet, wicked, outrageously loud. Working with them gives me inexpressible hope, as I watch them absorb English and Greek like sponges. But it also reminds me of how desperate this situation is. I’m not a social worker; I don’t know the first thing about dealing with childhood trauma. I’m still not great with changing a nappy. Why on earth would these mothers possibly trust me, a 21-year-old British volunteer, to hold their heaving baby?

But that’s the thing with this situation. There is no one else. You can’t reach social services because they don’t pick up the phone (nor will they work with anyone who doesn’t have a tax number). You certainly can’t go to the police, because they’ll just yell at you and tell you to go away. All these people have for help are small charities and collectives, who are populated by people like me — people who are filled with good intentions and who are by and large clueless. Two of the three people who set up Elna are 24 years old. They were 21 when they started renting the building, because there was literally no one else doing it. Sometimes people I’ve met in Athens call me late at night to say that they need a lawyer, a doctor, a psychologist; their baby has jaundice, they’re hearing voices, their elderly father has been missing for two weeks. It goes without saying that I am completely unequipped to deal with shit like this. Yet they call me because I’m the closest link they have to the authorities. I have a passport and cash in the bank and a flat to live in; maybe I have the power to get their baby into the hospital, too.

Once, attempting to practice my crackly Arabic, I asked a little Palestinian girl where she came from, and she replied in fluent English that she came from her home. Sometimes childhood simplicity is a beautiful riposte to the shittery of the world. But children do bear the scars of their perilous journeys across the sea and months wasted upon the sewages of Moria. The chances are that if you say the word ‘police’ to a Syrian child, she will cry. Some of the children at Elna are scared of everything: the dark, loud noises, big men. Others will jump around and laugh as they tell you that they used to have older sisters, before the bomb hit. A couple of the kids have never learned how to be soothed; their parents are so busy, or mentally gone, that their children cry silently because they don’t expect anyone to pick them up. I always make sure to lift up those children. But this has its own dangers too, because like all volunteers, I will one day walk away from Elna and never see those kids again. These children will grow up learning that everyone who shows them love will one day leave.

I don’t think that this situation can go on forever. When Turkey threatened to open its border with Greece, my first flatmate told me, everyone in Athens thought that it was the end. But then Covid-19 happened, and the borders closed everywhere. The asylum service, too, shut its doors, and doesn’t plan to open until earliest March 2021. No one can claim asylum for a whole year, and that’s a long time if you’re sleeping on a bench. When two Afghan teenagers burned down Moria, we thought again that something was about to shift. Their message was loud and clear: look at how we live and see that we will stand it no longer. Instead of listening, the Greek government sent a bunch of armed officers down from Athens to Lesvos, where they proceeded to round up migrants and build a new camp. Many did escape, though; there used to be 22 000 people on Lesvos and now there are reportedly only 5 000. I guess some of the escaped will go to Victoria Square, where there might be a community that supports each other.

When the situation eventually explodes, I’m going to be here, raging and exulting. I’m not going to say that this can’t go on from a moral standpoint, because it has and it will. But when some part of this broken and dysfunctional system crashes for good, maybe I’ll write a part two to this post. The thing is, as my flatmate told me one night, this is all happening in the name of the European people. It’s to protect European resources and wealth and identity that over 40 000 human beings have died crossing the Mediterranean. I guess that this post is my public retaliation against policies made in our collective name. If, at some point during the New Year break, you have a minute to reflect on that too, please do.

If you want to donate to Elna so we can continue giving apples to small children, this is our PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/elnamaternity.