Day-To-Day: A Week on Lesbos
Monday was absolute grating insanity. Sixty children plus their mothers, most of whom couldn’t keep track of their offspring in the crowd, crammed into the center. Ramadan has started, and the lack of food mixed with the heat and the lack of personal space all made for bad tempers in everyone, and impatience from refugees quickly resulted in irritation from the four of us on staff that day.
I was on tea serving duty, as I have been for several weeks now, and was drained entirely and dead on my feet before noon. We went through 20 liters of tea, the Greek lady who organizes laundry got in a brief shouting match with a belligerent woman, and the balloons we handed out were quickly popped and used to make screeching noises by a hoard of gleeful little boys.
I got home, collapsed on my bed for an hour, then wound down by eating whatever mismatched food I could find (tzsiki sauce on bread, melon, and egg on toast), and listening to a Harry Potter audiobook while playing a computer game.
Tuesday was far preferable, with both less patrons and more volunteers. This lovely elderly lady from the same state as my grandparents facilitated art lessons, and I had enough time to paint for the first time in forever. The refugees loved being able to paint; one refugee lady plonked herself down and declared with a smile that she had a lot to express.
One woman painted her three children between trees next to a tent, another her home town, surrounded with palm trees and busy with the smoke from kitchen fires and the heat of a smiling sun. One boy painted a dolphin diving through colorfully populated waves, another depicted a man with face in Picasso-like twists, holding a gun.
Wednesday we hung up all the paintings from the previous week. People were pleased to see their art gracing the walls. One boy dragged several friends to his painting and pointed at it, beaming, until they praised his skill. One girl asked, slightly frantically, where hers were. When I directed her, she gazed at them for a long time, kissed her fingers, and pressed them to the picture. One woman, who loves depicting colorful sunset scenes over water, paused in the door when her daughter asked if she had painted that one? When she replied in the affirmative, the six-year-old declared, <<Mom, you’re an artist!>> to her mother’s beaming smile.
The day started off with two people there, but sped up a bit by midday. I organized more of the storage closet, cheerfully chucking varied pencils, markers, and pens in different bags, in preparation to the move to Moria where Gateways2Life is building a new and larger center with showers and, in the future, language lessons available as well as laundry.
Thursday I finally saw the aforementioned new center, which is currently not much more than a cavernous room filled with dusty construction and metal frames. The space isn’t much now, but I can tell it will be incredible when it’s done, with all the much-needed amenities it will offer, particularly the showers. The showers can be dangerous in Moria, and many women go months without. This new center will be male-free, and provide a safe space for women to feel human again.
I also had an English lesson with a woman who speaks only Kurmanji, and so cannot help but feel cut off from Arabic, English, and Greek speakers around her. She is catching on bit by bit, and I wish I could have more time to watch her communication blossom.
Friday turned out decidedly eventful. It started out pretty slow, so I took a coloring page and sat with some of the women, soon striking up a conversation in Arabic with one cheerful lady from Syria. She explained that while she hadn’t lived in the capital, she had visited often and loved the city. It had been beautiful, she told me with a wistful smile. Her siblings had lived there. She moved on to talking about their food, claimed that she could cook any of it, and described a sort of fried meat dumpling that I promised to try at some point.
A bit later in the day, the woman who always paints beach sunsets, a short woman with a wide smile, waved me over. We talked for a bit, also in Arabic, about the fact that I still wasn’t married at eighteen, that girls got married earlier in Syria, and that she firmly believed that was bad for girls of twelve, who moved suddenly from childhood to a life without contact from friends, cooking and cleaning in the house. She then told me about her six year old daughter, that the girl had been with her when ISIS burst in and began shooting down a crowd. She herself was shot in the shoulder, and her daughter watched with wide eyes. She had been unable to speak for a year, was scared of other children, and now her mother was taking her to a psychologist.
A boy of about ten who had been very well-mannered on his other visits to the center threw an extended fit when we told him we had stopped giving out balloons for the day. His mother was not there, so we couldn’t appeal to her authority, and he fell into more and more of a sulk as time went by. It escalated from asking repeatedly to throwing the foam pads we use for the children’s corner, then to tipping over the trash can at which point we told him he had to leave. He refused and ended up attempting to hit and thrash at the volunteer who tried to usher him out. Once outside the door, he threw rocks at the window and hit the unyielding volunteer again before finally leaving.
I don’t know what happened to change his normal behavior, but the situation was complicated. It is difficult to measure the balance between justice and order, restrictions that allow others to continue using the facilities, and mercy and understanding.
Saturday, the day I write this, I miss home. That’s the simplest description. My little brother is looking handsome in his suit for prom (he made a glass rose for his date), and I’m trying to call someone every day because my own thoughts can be decidedly lonely. I’ve realized that I am like a cat in that I want to initiate contact with people, but when there are no people around to simply be in the same room as me, maintain conversation with me, my thoughts and words either stagnate or swirl madly, unable to be pinned down.
I’m immensely glad I came, but I’m also worn out and glad I’ll be home soon.