“It was a clear morning, it was just about an hour flight from Athens into Mytilene … and as we were coming down I could see the Aegean Sea and the shoreline and the life jackets that were littering the shoreline,” said Elora resident Janice Gerrie, recalling her recent trip to Greece to work with refugees.
“Something just went through my heart … the collision of beauty and pain that is really hard to describe … like two worlds colliding,” she said.
“You see so much beauty, like the gorgeous Aegean Sea, it’s blue, it’s sparkling but it’s claimed so many lives and it’s meant life or death to so many people.”
It was hearing about the “rocky shoreline that was abandoned” and the refugee arrivals that originally encouraged Gerrie, 26, to pursue a volunteer position working with the refugees in Greece last year.
She said the photo of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on the Turkish shore after the boat smuggling his family from Turkey to Greece capsized last fall, spurred her motivation.
By Jan. 29 Gerrie was on a flight to Greece, having bought her plane ticket just one week prior.
“I’ve always kind of had this thing for actually a long time, it seems kind of weird, like I would love to work in a refugee camp or something like that,” she said.
“So it was a neat experience, definitely kind of addicting. I kind of think about maybe going back one day.”
Originally Gerrie was expecting to work on the shoreline as the refugees landed in Lesvos, Greece after travelling across the Aegean Sea from Turkey.
However shortly before she left, she heard the new need was in transition camps along the coast.
Gerrie was part of an 11-person team, comprised mostly of volunteers from the U.S., that was under the umbrella of the non-governmental organization Euro Relief. The entire team was assigned to a large transition camp on the shoreline where refugees arrived after their trip across the water from Turkey to Greece. The camp often had approximately 2,000 incoming refugees a day.
“They come off in the little rubber boats completely soaked and at that point they’ll either go to another camp or come to our camp depending kind of where they land along the shore,” she said. “There’s a few different camps in the north and the south.”
One of the challenges with the influx of refugees is treating each as an individual, Gerrie said.
“It’s … just realizing that every single person has an individual story, an individual trauma that they’ve faced and … it was almost just too much,” she said. “It was just like ‘wow,’ so just being able to still, in all of that, treat each one individually and treat their needs individually, that was definitely a big challenge.”
The majority of Gerrie’s volunteer shifts were from 5pm to 1am working with vulnerable people – for example, families with small children and the elderly. She would help them find rooms for the night, get them settled, give them clothes, hygiene products, food, etc.
“It was just a little better accommodations … still definitely far from a five-star hotel,” she said.
The building consisted of different rooms, each with about 10 bunk beds, washrooms, showers and heat.
“It was probably I think my favourite part of the camp and yet it was difficult because you’d get to see … the suffering on the young faces and … for me that was the most difficult and the elderly, like these very old, elderly people that can barely walk anymore and they’re just coming in,” she said.
“The fact that they’ve been chased out by death itself, it’s just, it’s hard to process.”
Gerrie said some of her favourite moments were after families arrived.
“You watch the families come up with little kids … they’re carrying everything on their backs … the whole family they’d be exhausted, tired and you’d watch them come up, they’d get inside the camp, you’d help them carry their bags back and get them settled and just seeing them come out and start playing and laughing like kids that was … probably one of my favourite moments,” she said.
“It’s like finally these little kids that have seen way too much are allowed to be kids again and we’d give them candies, play with them, balloons, bubbles, soccer, things like that and just seeing the laughter and giggles and high-fives and stuff that could happen so quickly.”
Throughout the month she was in Greece, Gerrie didn’t have the opportunity to see a boat coming in, but she did see the aftermath on the coast.
“I would see [the boats] after they came in. As far as the deflated boats along the shoreline, they’re just everywhere,” she said.
The refugees arriving in Mytilene were coming illegally and paying smugglers between US$800 and $3,000 for passage, Gerrie explained.
When they arrived on the Greek shore they would be awarded refugee status through the European Union at the transition camps. From there they would be able to travel along the predetermined refugee path to other parts of the European Union.
However, according to international News sources, a new agreement has been reached between the European Union and Turkey stating that after March 20 any refugee landing illegally on the Greek shore will be sent back to Turkey.
When Gerrie left Greece she took the 12-hour ferry from Mytilene to Athens, which is part of the route the refugees travelled while she was there.
“So that was neat to do a little bit of their, I mean really not, but a little bit of the same journey they take,” she said.
She returned home on Feb. 28.
Though the trip was sometimes overwhelming emotionally, Gerrie said one of the things that pulled her through was the refugees themselves.
“Honestly their resilience and their courage,” she said. “Suddenly you’re sitting with them and they’re laughing and talking and you’re like ‘how can you be?’ but it’s how they deal with it and they have so much courage and so much bravery happening right there.”
