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

                                                                                                                        

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

 

It felt incredible being there, so close to Turkey where such a terrible tragedy had taken place nearly a hundred years 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 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 a few months later she moored in Pythagorieo 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 10 months later. 

 

 

Part 1.

Deciding to leave.

 

Samos Volunteers did wonderful and important work and still does and I have the greatest respect for the 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 co ordinator 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 2.

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 60cents 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 the middle of the page.

 

So far so good, it sounds 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 their 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.

 

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 humiliating 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.

 

The proposed change was carried and in future we would put a dot on all papers without checking for dates of birth and issue a cup for each person 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 60cent 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 cups!)

 

Part 3.

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 up to the camp entrance because of the number of children playing in the road so I took the little 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 one of my daughters.

 

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 masters degree which involved regular visits to Istanbul. 

 

Kuwait doesn’t accept refugees and has no domestic asylum system. Like all the AGCC States Kuwait has not signed up to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and being born there or in any other AGCC state 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 plane as Qatar recently offered to.

 

They all allow hundreds of thousands of non AGCC Arabs to work for them but only as 2nd. class citizens. This causes quite a lot of resentment amongst their poorer neighbours. 

 

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

 

After more than 10years 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 were running out of money and would be told to leave Kuwait soon. So they arranged visit visas for the whole family when mum was next due in Istanbul and once there they joined the refugee route to Europe.

 

Under the Refugee Convention you have to physically be in a country to apply for asylum. There is no other route from Kuwait to Germany, where Rania’s parents teach now, without actually getting into Europe first. 

Turkey is a party to the 1951 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 and a half million displaced people in Turkey work illegally as unregulated labour.

As a cheap source of labour they make a positive contribution to the overall economy, which helps Turkey pay for being the largest host country for displaced people in the world. 

 

But being your host country's cheap labour isn't so good for the individual refugee.

The vast majority of these people are from Syria.

 

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

 

To help 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 from friends and relatives his father sent him to the UK to apply for asylum. 

More on this and a full explanation of why so many asylum seekers are young men in later chapters.

 

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 very 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 categorized 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?