Homesick, Homeless
These last few weeks, I’ve been incredibly homesick. The camp across the road, Karatepi, emptied out when a load of people got approved to move on to Athens. (This is good news, since they are moving forward in the asylum process, but it’s a bittersweet goodbye.) Now a new load have arrived from Moria, the hellhole of a camp that is now 8,200 people past its original capacity of 1,800, but before the new group found out about the center we had a week of dead space in which only a few people came per day. In that pause, I was forced to confront how much I miss home.
I’ve started planning what I will do when I get back: who I want to hang out with, where I want to go, what I want to do for my nineteenth birthday. I’m eight weeks through my twelve total, and my mind is already skipping ahead to everything I need to pack for college and the road trips I want to take in Tunisia and America and the family I will see and my cat and my friends and how I’ll take a magnificent long hot bath when I… get… home.
I stopped in the middle of my shower and realized what I was doing. I wanted a hot bath when I got home because my shower right now has a drain that clogs too fast and a hose with a shower head on the end. When I get home… They don’t have a home to go back to.
It hit like a kick to the chest, knocked the wind out of me.
That ten-year-old boy who ran into the center and made a beeline to give me a hug just because I had played a few games with him, those tween girls in headscarves who do their families’ laundry and get really into English lessons, the baby boy swaddled in meticulously clean pink castoffs whose mother can’t find a bed for him… they can’t go back home.
Some of them have scars on their arms, on their necks, pink and raised and angry, from bombs and fires, houses that caved in, even torture. One teen boy has a chunk taken out of his cheek, one woman has pink streaks running mutilated down her leg. The others carry their wounds inside.
Tim told me that once, before I arrived on the island, a Greek fighter jet screamed over the center. The effect was immediate. Over half the children in the center started screaming or whimpering, the older boys and girls dove for cover, some wet themselves or sat trembling in terror as their mothers, shaken themselves, tried to calm their children.
One woman, an attorney, walked from Syria over the mountains and through Turkey for weeks, fourteen days post C-section. She says her home city was a prison until they were freed; after that it was a sea of homelessness.
I just finished reading Slaughterhouse Five, which deals with the horror of war and PTSD after witnessing the bombing of Dresden in WWII. Similar to how the author never directly describes what he saw there, no one has tried to tell me what it was like to have your home reduced to rubble. I imagine it like the book, like a moonscape. Like shock. Like dull acceptance, reduction to base needs. Like anger.
An Afghani girl with a quiet voice and calm blue eyes smiled when I showed her a photo Dad took in Tajikistan, near the Afghani border. Her gaze roamed the mountains and she explained that her aunt and uncle have a farm in Afghanistan. The photo reminds her of home. She had to leave them behind.
They can’t go back home. I can know it, know the dictionary definition of refugee, but that is not the same. I can realize it now and feel the truth of it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have a home to return to, and the people I serve every day don’t.