Life Jacket Graveyard

­Over 80,000 life jackets piled in a hole, punctured and filthy and bleached by the sun, feels like poetry, like tangible words. It feels like memories sealed in plastic, like sorrows under the sun.

They rest in a hollow between shrubbery-strewn hills, beneath a gray wisp of sky. Low plants with nail-length thorns all around, along with clusters of minuscule blooms like the crayon drawings of a child. The cawing of gulls, the buzzing of wasps, the corpses of stories, all lie discarded together.

This is my first time on my own, away from the shelter of my parents’ home and the comfort of familiarity. I am the first intern for a fledgling NGO, one of a line of strip-mall-shopping-centers-turned-community-centers that is not exactly sound absorbent what with its past life in the realm of capitalism and industry leaving only the concrete walls and floor behind. They make it as inviting as possible but no one has much money around here, even the Westerners whom refugees assume have stacks of cash as a financial airbag. The result is fold-up tables and chairs, cheerful kids’ crafts taped to walls, and noise that fills the room like an avalanche.

I stare down at the mounds of life jackets, attempting to comprehend the enormity of the wrongness at which I chip away every day at the center. I face a mountain with a spoon, tasking myself with moving the whole of it.

There were millions more than these, and these were the lucky ones. They made it past the coast guard, the rough waters, the black rafts exponentially past capacity.

Those rafts, now in ribbons before me, are the product of an age-old industry of profiting off of pain. 600 USD might buy you a spot on the overcrowded raft, the ‘expertise’ of the smuggler for three of the six nautical miles across the Mediterranean from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesvos, and a life jacket. The jackets rarely have the correct amount of padding, often only two of six layers. Babies might get a floatie meant for the arm of an older child, placed around their middle.

Our guide plucks an encrusted jacket out of the pile. A smaller, child-sized one is attached to the front. “This is a story,” he says with sorrow in his eyes. Each one of these is a story.

I struggle to reconcile the discolored heaps before me with the stories I’ve been told.

<<We came across the mountains from Syria, my mother and my younger siblings and me. We walked. I’m the oldest, fifteen.>> She smiles at me, an easy, shy smile. Her eyes are a beautiful hazel under her vibrant blue headscarf. She keeps the words simple, making sure I understand with my disused Arabic, a different dialect from her own.
<<We came over in the boat at night. There were too many people and the waves were over my head.>>
<<Were you scared?>>
Her smile diminishes.
<<Of course.>>

“It took us maybe two hours to cross,” he explains, “Longer than most. There was a storm that night, and it swept us so far off course that we almost missed the island. There were maybe sixty people on that boat, women and infants… The smuggler told us that once we got there we’d be fine, but just not to die in the meantime.” He gives a wry smile. “We sank about that far away from shore.” Maybe half a block away. “I carried a baby from the boat.”
They put him in Moria at first, everyone goes there first. He decided he would follow Jesus there, and Moria is not a good place for such a decision.
His American friends found him twice, sprinting down the street in the middle of the night, beaten badly for following Christ in a camp poisoned by ISIS ideals. Eventually he got moved out of the camp to escape the beatings, but now he has been refused asylum. He will self deport back to Iraq, face beatings again, and very probably be killed. He is nineteen years old.

<<There is no freedom in Kuwait,>> she insists, eyes flashing. <<I have to have someone with me, a mother or older sister, just to go out on the street. We have to wear this.>> She picks at her cheetah print headwrap, then her vicious expression softens. <<It’s not the hijab itself. It’s that I can’t choose not to wear it. And I want to go to school more, I want to be educated! But we are stuck between Daesh (ISIS) and the sea. There is no getting out.>>
<<Why can’t you go to university?>> I ask, clumsily. <<Why not go in Europe?>> I flap a hand vaguely in the direction of the mainland.
Her expression sours. <<My mother,>> she says flatly. <<She wants to go back to Kuwait to my father, or to Iran. She loves Iran.>> She shudders. <<I can’t live with my father again.>>

<<My son saw Daesh behead people back in Syria. He and my younger son have nightmares, wet their beds.>> Concern in her eyes, she was well educated and well respected before the war turned everything on its head. She ignores the social stigma around mental illness, hopefully to the salvation of her children.
<<They are going to a psychologist, but I’m still worried about them. Too many of us have seen things we wish we hadn’t,>> she laments. <<My friend’s son made it so far before the Turkish police shot him during the crossing.>> No film of tears fills her eyes, but they seem deeper. They seem unfathomable. <<His mother was with him,>> she explains, then lapses into silence.

<<I had to take my children out of school,>> she admits, surrounded by them. Six to sixteen, they have the same round dark eyes. <<Bombs were coming down, and I never knew when Daesh would come into the schools and take girls.>> Her daughter, twelve years old, drops her gaze to the ground as the smile slides off her face. <<They took my daughter…>> Buzzing fills my ears as I blink back tears, trying to ignore her words, caught by her fervent and desperate gaze. <<They almost killed her father and her brother. She saw their blood, and now… her mind is hurt.>>
The girl certainly seems in another world, oblivious to the words and anger of her mother. She reaches out, face dimpling in the smile of a much younger child, and touches my short blonde hair. <<You’re beautiful,>> she whispers. I smile, blinking hard, speechless.
<<I thought it would be better here,>> the woman whispers, shaking her head. Her children wander off, lured away by the games and puzzles and internet access. <<It’s not. Moria is hell. If anyone wants to die, he should go to Moria. We have to share a tent with another family, there’s no privacy, and they stole our blankets. We have two blankets for six people and Eurorelief can’t help. They don’t have enough. I can’t ever let the children outside, it’s too dangerous. I don’t know what to do.>>

I don’t, either.

So many stories. It’s like living under a waterfall, pounding overhead. I wash down into the pool below, process during the afternoon and weekend. Then I climb again into my time at the community center, serving tea and playing games with children and listening to stories, unrelenting pressure and barely concealed sorrow and trauma bearing down on me.

I pull myself to my feet, dust myself off. Graffiti overlooks this graveyard of useless plastic, proclaiming “No human is illegal,” “Shame,” and “Borders Kill.” There’s more to it, I know. But what do I say in response? How do I help when all of this seems so far beyond my control?

I close my eyes and hug my arms around me, remembering the tearful goodbyes of the energetic nine-year old, the one who called me a cheater and had a ring in her nose, when she escaped the island bottleneck and moved on to Athens. Her loud, prickly exterior fell to the concrete and she squeezed so tight, whispering “I love you” into my ear. I remember the cartwheels of the boy who played Jenga with me on the colorful mats, clasping his hands to his mouth as our tower wobbled, yelling “Teacher, teacher!” and setting the blocks up again the moment they fell in a heap. I remember the smile of a child who finally warmed up to me, the chubbiness of his cheeks, the beaming pride of his mother.

It’s not my job to stare at the mountain and move it with my inadequate spoon. It’s my joy to see people as people, to hear their stories, and not to sink into apathy. I turn in a circle one last time, fixing the multicolored mountains in my mind, and think of the waves lapping on the shore.

The beauty of soaring birds and bright wildflowers shock against the faded mounds of cloth. I reach down and pluck a bloom, twirling it between my fingers. I tuck it between the pages of my journal and follow the gravel trail.