Chapter Two

Leaving Samos

Introduction

I had arrived in Vathy to start work with Samos Volunteers in March 2017 full of optimism and hope - genuinely excited to be helping people and taking part in what felt like historic events.

I checked into the Paradise Hotel which was lovely. The hotel gardens and buildings were a bit tired and in need of maintenance, but it wasn't expensive and several other volunteers were staying there.

As well as members of our team there were immigration officials, police and others working in the camp - the refugee business was good for the hotels of Vathy which used to be seasonal but were now full all year.

The Paradise Hotel was also used as temporary housing by some of the NGOs looking after the most vulnerable refugee families.

The whole atmosphere was very emotive - on my first night I could hear babies crying and Arabic voices coming from the room next to mine. I was reading Birds Without Wings, Louise de Bernier's historical novel about the mass population swap between Greece and Turkey after the First World War, and his epic story was fueling my imagination.

The agreement to move so many people was decided by the victorious Allied Powers as part of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne - the main parties to the treaty were the UK and France with Lord Curzon of the UK leading the talks.

By the end of The Great War the conflict between Greece and Turkey had created a cycle of ethnic cleansing and retaliation that involved villages and communities being attacked for their religious beliefs.

The Great Exchange, decided by the foreign powers, was designed to reduce this ethnic conflict and create religiously homogeneous states. At the time mono culturalism was seen as the solution to divisions caused by people of different backgrounds living together.

As a consequence of the treaty - roughly 1.3 million Christians were uprooted from their homes in Turkey and forcibly sent to Greece and around half a million Muslims, mainly Turks and Albanians living in Greece, were compelled to leave for Turkey.

A group of British and French government officials sitting around a table in Switzerland determined the fate of nearly two million people they knew almost nothing about - and who lived three and a half thousand kilometers away.

Unfortunately, their lofty ideas on how to create a permanent peace led to a huge number of civilian casualties. The cure was - not for the first or last time - more destructive than the sickness.

The forced marches alone caused at least 30,000–50,000 deaths and thousands more died later from disease, hunger or destitution after resettlement.

Perhaps one day we will all learn to live with each other and our politicians won't feel the need to interfere any more?

During the time of The Great Exchange about 17,000 Greeks fled Turkey for Syria and later - in 1939 when Turkey annexed the area around Alexandreta, now the port of Iskenderun, a further 12,000 Greeks living there moved to Damascus and Aleppo to join existing Greek communities.

The migration route being taken today by thousands of refugees as they make their way to Turkey and then into Greece was also used in reverse by about 20,000 Greeks, mainly from the Aegean Islands, to escape the Nazis during World War Two.

Prior to the Syrian Civil War breaking out in 2011 the Greek Orthodox Christian community in Syria was approximately three quarters of a million strong. Most were descended from old Arabic-speaking Christian families but roughly a fifth were descendants of the Greek refugees.

Not only is there a small though significant Greek population in Syria but many Greek families on mainland Greece and the islands have recent ancestors who were once refugees displaced from Turkey in 1923.

Perhaps that’s why they've been so tolerant of the people using their islands as a staging post to access Europe. They certainly were in the early days of the crisis though the atmosphere changed, on Lesvos particularly, in 2020 when the numbers held in the camps became unsustainable.

At the time of writing the islands seem fairly stable but there have been protests and problems which are described in a later chapter. Overall the Greek islanders have accepted the situation they've found themselves in with patience and extraordinary kindness.

De Bernier’s novel was set in the Turkish town of Kayakoy not far from Dalaman and about 200kms south east of Samos.

Refugees during the Great Exchange Greek and Armenian children Kayakoy abandoned in 1923 arriving in Athens

It felt incredible being there - so close to Turkey where such a terrible tragedy had taken place nearly a century before and on an island now at the heart of the current refugee crisis.

The feeling of being part of something that was both important and historic was shattered by the reality of walking into the camp for the first time. The reality was dirt, stench, squalor and deprivation - there is nothing romantic about a refugee camp or being a refugee.

The camp was the most dreadful place you can imagine.

The main road into the camp

No captions required

Despite the heartbreaking conditions within the camp I fell in love with Samos, the refugees, the local people, the other volunteers and the work we did from the very first day.

It was an overwhelming, immersive and very emotional experience. The island, apart from the camp, is beautiful and the islanders are warm, friendly people. The kindness and generosity of the locals was incredible and in my later dealings with the police it was apparent that the ones transferred in from the mainland were the nastier ones - most of the local guys were ok.

When I brought my boat over from the Ionian she moored in Pythagoreio 10kms from the camp and I hired a moped to get around - the island soon felt like home and it was an incredibly difficult decision to leave Samos and Samos Volunteers after 10 months there.

Samos Volunteers did wonderful and important work and still does and I have the greatest respect for the organisation and vast majority of the volunteers I knew and worked with - but there were some things I found difficult to accept.

Humanitarian organisations follow standard aims and principles, as part of their core values they have policies on gender, age and other forms of discrimination.

As one of the older volunteers I got tired of the cult of youth promoted by Bradut - the senior coordinator and our leader - and his inability to consider the views of others. He ran the group as an autocrat and we all did as he said. I suppose being older it’s hard to be surrounded by young - often less experienced people - telling you what to do.

There were a lot of things that troubled me but these particular cases stick in my mind.

Part one

The cups for their tea

I described in chapter one how we provided hot drinks to the breakfast queue every morning.

We didn’t want to use disposable cups as that would add to the camp’s already chronic litter problem so we handed out small robust plastic cups that could be reused every day - they cost about sixty cents each from the local Chinese shop.

We served tea to the breakfast queue but as the camp food was so terrible, residents who had any resources at all soon found ways of preparing their own meals and hot drinks. New arrivals had no choice to begin with but to take the camp food and most mornings we had new people in the queue who didn’t have a cup of their own yet.

Obviously we couldn’t keep giving out cups to everyone every morning so we had to have a system to record who’d been given one already.

The first piece of paper issued to each person on arrival was an A4 size form with all their details - the smaller I.D. cards signifying their status were issued later but they always kept the big paper. The system we used was to put a dot with a marker pen on the bottom right corner of the page when we gave them a cup - if they already had a dot on their paper they couldn't have a new cup.

Of course if they lost their cup they ripped the corner of the paper off and swore blind they’d never had one - so we moved the location of the dot to a particular place in the middle of the page. It might sound a bit daft but when everything is so chaotic you need some sort of simple system.

Ours was - “If you want a new cup - show me your papers!”

Though I must say I was always a bit uncomfortable defacing, even in such a tiny way, an official document that was so important for them.

For some reason only people over the age of 18 were allowed cups. Apparently children didn’t need hot drinks and when Samos Volunteers first started the tea service they had decided the parents were so irresponsible there would be accidents if families got tea for everyone. So we had to go through all the individual papers of new arrivals and only put dots on the papers of those old enough to be trusted with one of our cups of tea.

One morning I watched a fifty year old man with a large family hand over a sheaf of papers stapled together to an eighteen year old volunteer who proceeded to examine every page for the dates of birth of each family member. Out of the twelve members of the family he was only able to put dots on four papers and eventually issue four cups.

This delayed the queue considerably and I could see how embarrassing it was for the poor man waiting for his tea.

I spoke to Bradut about giving every new arrival a cup - weren’t we supposed to be relieving the cruelty and indignity of the camp - not part of administering it?

He disagreed and was adamant children could not have cups. I offered to pay for 500 cups myself but he said that those types of individual sponsorships didn’t work - despite the fact that it was being done in many other cases.

We had a discussion at our weekly group meeting and a new South African volunteer said - “Let them share their parents' cups, children don’t need cups of their own.” We couldn’t agree, so for the first time ever the group voted on something - I was tempted to suggest that only volunteers who had children of their own should have a vote, but just for a change I managed to keep quiet.

The majority of volunteers were in favour so we agreed that in future we would put a dot on all papers without checking for dates of birth and issue a cup for everyone whatever their age - though we still wouldn’t serve hot drinks directly to children who were too young to carry them.

Bradut muttered darkly that if he noticed an increase in the number of our cups in the rubbish skips the new system would be stopped immediately.

If people arrive in a refugee camp, fleeing war with nothing and you're there to help them - why wouldn't you give them all a sixty cent cup?

It's actually a very tiny start in rebuilding a life and whatever anyone says - I still think a child deserves to have a cup of their own.

The cabin where we served the tea (and a few of the precious cups)

Part two

A little girl called Rania

One morning, a week or so after the big cup debate, a Syrian family I knew told me their daughter had hot tea thrown on her the night before by another child and they showed me her scalded back. We were at the old olive grove and the clinic in the camp had sent them away as they were too busy to treat a minor injury so we decided to get her to the local hospital.

Taxis wouldn’t come to the camp entrance because of the number of children playing in the road so I took the girl on my moped the half kilometer to the nearest taxi while her parents jogged beside us and another volunteer looked after her younger brother.

The little girl, whose name was Rania, was eight years old and she was treated at the hospital and made a good recovery - I remember her particularly well as she shared the same birthday as my youngest daughter.

Fortunately - the incident didn’t involve Samos Volunteers’ tea or Majida’s Cafe and the cup used wasn't one of ours. Who knows what the consequences would have been if our change of policy contributed to Rania’s injury.

Rania’s family were very interesting - both her parents were teachers and had worked in Kuwait where she and her brother were born. As well as teaching, her father was a talented artist and calligrapher and her mother was studying for a master's degree which involved regular visits to Istanbul.

Kuwait doesn’t accept refugees and has no domestic asylum system. Like all the AGCC States Kuwait is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and being born there or in any other AGCC country does not qualify a person for citizenship. It is also extremely difficult to become a naturalised citizen of any of these countries.

Most countries in the Americas including the U.S. and Canada have unrestricted birthright citizenship while most European countries including the UK have qualified rights such as one parent having to be a citizen.

The six AGCC States are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi etc.) - they all have small populations and massive oil or gas wealth which they don’t share easily.

Unless of course they want to buy Donald Trump a new Boeing 747 for four hundred million dollars as Qatar offered to recently.

They all allow hundreds of thousands of non AGCC Arabs to work for them but only as second class citizens - which causes quite a lot of resentment amongst their poorer neighbours. Society in all these countries is structured according to race and nationality and they all operate a form of apartheid - but their immense fossil fuel wealth seems to make them immune from criticism.

Their own people are given priority in all areas of life and quite often jobs will be given to a local rather than a foreigner - even if they are not as well qualified or experienced.

After more than ten years teaching in Kuwait both of Rania’s parents had lost their jobs as they were being replaced by newly qualified Kuwaitis. They had no income, there was no social security for foreigners, however long they worked there, and they had no home to go back to as both sides of their families had been displaced by the Syrian Civil War.

Their rent was expensive, they would eventually run out of money and when their residency permits expired they would be told to leave Kuwait - so they arranged visit visas for the whole family when mum was next due in Istanbul - and when they got there they joined the refugee route to Europe.

Under the terms of the Refugee Convention you have to be physically in a country to apply for asylum. In theory it was possible for a Syrian to fly to Europe but in practice it didn't work at all so the only feasible route from Kuwait to Germany, where Rania’s parents teach now, was to actually get into Europe first.

Turkey is a party to the Refugee Convention but conveniently has a geographical limitation and only grants full refugee status to people fleeing from, rather than to, Europe. Non-European asylum seekers, Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis etc. are only given temporary protection and it’s extremely difficult for them to get a permit to work legally.

Most refugees forced to go there don’t want to stay in Turkey but either it isn't safe for them to return home or they can’t afford to leave - and most that do stay try to find some sort of work. A high proportion of the three million displaced people in Turkey work illegally in unregulated poorly paid jobs.

As a cheap source of labour they make a positive contribution to the overall economy - which helps Turkey pay for being the second largest host country for refugees in the world. Latest figures suggest Iran has approximately 3.8 million refugees (mainly Afghans) to Turkey's 3.1 million (mainly Syrians) - that's an awful lot of people for both these countries to cope with - and makes the UK's problems look small.

But being your host country's cheap labour force isn't so good for the individual refugee who works without any sort of legal protection.

I've recently been helping a 21 year old Syrian boy in the UK whose family home was destroyed in 2017 during fighting which also killed his younger brother. His father no longer had any work and as they had no home the family moved to a camp close to the Turkish border just inside Syria.

To support his family Hamid went to Turkey at the age of 13. He mainly worked in clothing factories and was paid much less than the locals and often not paid at all. After borrowing a huge amount of money from friends and relatives his father sent him to the UK to apply for asylum in the hope he would find legal work and be able to help his family.

For Rania’s family the boat trip from Turkey to Samos was pretty terrifying and they ran out of fuel just before reaching land.

When they arrived the camp was full and they were given two small tents for the family of four to pitch outside the camp - I spent an afternoon with them digging a shallow trench around their tents to try to divert rainwater flowing down the hillside.

They were rehoused in the winter when they were categorised as vulnerable because Rania’s mother was pregnant with her third child. I've no idea whether they tried to conceive just to be moved to better accommodation - but who could blame them if they did?

Imagine being respected professionals one minute then living with your children in tents in the winter the next. I've camped all my life but could always go home if the weather was bad. How do you live permanently without warmth or proper shelter and how do you raise your children?

On the hillside in winter

Part three

The child with the pretty shoes

As winter approached we organised several mass distributions within the camp. The first one was extra blankets but the biggest was warm clothes and shoes for women and children.

Handing out blankets

Stats from the SV Facebook page

The clothing distribution was a very big event and needed huge stocks of all items so we cleared one of the cabins in the middle of the camp to set up a “shop” which we opened straight after the breakfast queue finished.

The shop was stocked with large boxes full of socks, hats, gloves, pullovers or shoes. Each customer had a ticket stating which items they could have and they were allowed to choose one piece only from each of the boxes they could select from.

The stocks were continually replenished from the main warehouse and every box had volunteers to monitor what was needed next and to help the customers.

Another group of volunteers moved along each area of the camp issuing tickets and explaining to the residents they should go down to the food distribution point we were next to. All our international and community volunteers took part and there were around thirty of us involved altogether.

I was part of the small team controlling the flow of people into the shop and sat at a table in the alleyway between the fence and cabins checking tickets and ID papers. Once they had their clothes they left on the other side of the cabin.

In order to keep things moving there had to be a strict “no returns” policy - they chose their clothes and left quickly as we had hundreds of people to deal with. Around mid afternoon a disgruntled man did return some clothes - he threw a big bag of them over the fence as he was upset they weren’t new.

Otherwise it went like clockwork and we gave out clothes and shoes to nearly seven hundred people.

Looking back on that day and having been involved in hundreds of distributions since - this was definitely one of the best organised and most efficient. It really was great and at the time I was very impressed with how well it was done.

By 5.30 we were finished and tidying up, with Bradut high fiving and having lots of media photos with his “young and energetic team” inside the cabin. They deserved their self congratulations - it had been an amazing day.

Meanwhile I tidied a huge pile of tickets and bits of paper at my desk - the walkway around the containers that had been full of people all day was finally deserted.

I looked up and a teenage girl, on her own, was in front of the desk holding a pair of shoes.

The girl was about fourteen and the shoes were lovely, not quite new, shiny patent plastic (leather lookalike I suppose) with a gap between the toecap and the single strap to go over the foot. I’m not an expert on women's footwear but I think these designs are called court shoes. They were very pretty and ideal for a young girl to wear to a prom or party - but not great for winter in a refugee camp.

I’ve no idea how she chose them in the first place, presumably she came to the shop on her own - but obviously the girl had been sent back by her parents to change them for something more practical.

I took the shoes and went in to see Bradut but he refused to discuss an exchange - “We have a no returns policy otherwise the day will descend into chaos.”

I went back to explain but the girl stood her ground and started crying - I think she was too scared to go home without exchanging the shoes.

So I tried with the boss again - we had finished for the day, there were boxes of shoes still in the shop and there were no other customers around to see what happened, what harm could it do?

No joy - Badrut simply refused to help the girl and continued having his photo taken.

With my head down I walked out leaving the girl holding her useless pretty shoes - I can still see the expression on her face as she stood there crying.

A child made a mistake, got told off by her parents and we were too heartless and too busy telling ourselves how great we were to actually help her - I was deeply, deeply ashamed.

Children at a distribution - and being distracted by Elias and another volunteer

When I told the group I was leaving a few months later Bradut asked to see me and explain why - and I cited this case as one of the many reasons - I put it like this -

“I can imagine this girl twenty years from now in her thirties successfully settled somewhere in Europe, being asked questions at a dinner party about her experiences as a child refugee. One of the stories she will tell is how she chose a pair of impractical shoes and got told off and sent back by her parents to change them, but the volunteers who were there to help them refused to let her change the shoes for a more sensible pair. They wouldn’t even engage with her.

I imagine this will stick in her mind as she grows up as a memory of a completely pointless, perplexing and uncaring act - and what use are we as humanitarians if we don’t actually care?”

He replied that it was surely not the worst thing that had happened to her as a refugee but didn’t seem to understand that it was so unnecessary and heartless - he missed the point entirely.

Humanitarian work is supposed to be about helping others in practical ways and giving them dignity - not glorifying yourself and looking good on a Facebook post that only your “friends” will see.

Part four

Those thieving refugees!

Bradut was living with his German girlfriend by the end of the year and one day she had her rucksack and laptop stolen - or at least she thought she did.

She left the Alpha Centre one afternoon and went home, took a shower then realised she needed her laptop so went back to where she worked at the Centre to fetch it. When she couldn’t find it she told her boyfriend who was naturally very upset.

A frantic search of the building took place with all the volunteers helping. We searched to no avail - it had definitely gone.

Volunteers were sent straight away to the camp to check with one of the communities thought most likely to have taken it and there was even talk of a cash reward - it was really quite dramatic.

A succession of WhatsApp group messages with advice and rule changes followed almost immediately. Obviously, we had to take more precautions against theft in future.

Security was always a bit of a problem and to be expected when working with over 2,000 people who have few possessions, no money and live in very bad circumstances - they can’t all be angels and temptation is exacerbated by abject poverty.

I always kept my phone on me and was careful not to leave anything valuable lying around. I wasn’t too worried about my tools but was still reasonably careful with them - they weren’t good enough to sell and the refugees probably didn’t have much use for drills and jigsaws in tents without electricity but I still took precautions just in case.

A young volunteer from Liverpool had a more relaxed view. He said if anyone stole his phone they obviously needed it more than he did and he could always get another one - he was a lovely guy and a good humanitarian.

One of the changes announced immediately was that no community volunteers (refugees) were to be allowed in any classroom or room where anything valuable was kept unless accompanied by an international volunteer.

Ok - it’s possible the laptop was stolen by one of “us” but this put the suspicion firmly on “them”.

Our community volunteers had responsibility to run activities and helped as teachers or teaching assistants and I had recently started helping Farid, one of the Afghan refugees, teach basic computer keyboard skills. He had worked in IT and had a lot more knowledge than me so I was happy to be his assistant.

Farid took this new rule very badly and refused to work with us ever again. He thought it was an affront to doubt his honesty just because someone else was a thief. I can’t say I blame him really - I’ve never been keen on witch hunts or mass punishment.

The following morning a few of us found out what had actually happened.

Bradut's girlfriend had taken her laptop home in her rucksack and put it down while she unlocked the door of the apartment they shared - then she forgot to take it inside.

A short time afterwards, while she was in the shower, a neighbour saw the rucksack and knocked on the door but got no answer so she took it into her own flat for safe keeping. As the neighbour went out for the evening she tried again but still no one answered so she knocked again at 11pm when she got home. The rucksack and laptop were then returned to their owner.

Now - anyone can make a mistake and that was all this was, but the reaction to the "theft" fractured a lot of the trust and friendships we had with the community we were there to help.

Over the following days we tried to persuade Bradut to relax some of the new rules which he gradually did. But he refused to explain the truth to all the other volunteers and our refugee helpers.

Some of us felt that everyone - especially those whose honesty had been questioned - deserved to know what really happened - and to receive an apology.

In the end we told them ourselves and it was another week before Bradut would publicly admit it was all a misunderstanding.

Even then it was no more than a mumbled "mea culpa".

Face saving and never admitting to being wrong seem to be perennial human characteristics.

For a lot of people the most important thing when something has gone wrong is covering up the mistake - even at the cost of magnifying the consequence of the original error.

We see it all the time - especially in public life - Why can't people just be honest?

~~~

This incident caused irreparable damage and I felt our leader was missing the point of us being there - and there were many, many other problems arising on an almost daily basis.

Watching Bradut's distrust of the refugees wreck our relationship with them, having to argue for children to have a cup of their own - or to watch a young girl who made a mistake cry and be unable to help her when it was so easy to - these were not the only things bothering me.

Whilst I was looking forward to the challenge of the laundry project and helping the MSF scabies program, which would be my most important role so far - I had to consider whether my feelings for Samos, my colleagues, the people we were helping and the work we were doing were strong enough to continue putting up with what I felt was pointless and demoralizing nonsense.

Rightly or wrongly and with an incredibly heavy heart - I left Samos in early 2018.

After a three month break including a visit to my eldest daughter in the U.S. I joined One Happy Family at their community centre near Mytiline - the capital of Lesvos.

Before moving on - here is a selection of photos from Samos in 2017