Lesbos

by Jocelyn Henderson (New Zealand)

Making a local connection Greece

The young woman was pale and red-eyed, with two little boys in tow. She looked too young to be their mother, though that can be hard to tell. They were her brothers, we found out later. The boys were small and grubby, with shirts too big and pants with rips in them. They were more olive-skinned than their sister, but all had the same jade green eyes. Their sister had limped up to the van, and when she got in, she didn't want to put her seatbelt on. I gestured to it. The Greek police often stopped vans that they thought belonged to NGOs, so we were careful about being legal. She lifted her top up to show me a dark red scar dragging across her the pale flesh of her belly, and left her seatbelt off. We pulled away from the thick concrete walls of Moria, the old military prison that has become the one of the largest refugee camps on the Greek islands, and for many, a byword for horror. 'Welcome to prison' had been sprayed onto the grey walls by the entrance, under the barbed wire that curled along the top. We drove back towards Mytilene along the winding Lesbos coast, beside the sea that today was calm and silky but that sometimes surged grey and frothing against the rocks. Our little centre, a converted warehouse named ‘Showers for Sisters,’ was a place where women could come from Moria to have a hot shower with a clean towel, drink a cup of tea and relax while their children played in safety. It was a respite, just a small one, from the grim conditions at the camp. It was the first time the young woman with the dark scar had come to the showers. Most people didn't speak English, but with rough internet translations into Farsi or Arabic we could communicate basic information. I trotted off to get the phone, but when I showed her the translation, she gestured me away and looked distressed. ‘She can't read,’ another woman explained. It was one of those moments where your privilege and assumptions about the world are suddenly stark and glaring. The looping figures of the Farsi alphabet were as incomprehensible to her as they were to me. With the help of another woman who spoke some English, we learnt that she had had a caesarean section in Turkey, four months ago. Her baby had died. We didn’t know more than those stark facts. I don't know if she had a husband or parents with her, or if it was just her, alone, looking after her two little brothers in Moria. We couldn't do much for her, except try to get her a doctor’s appointment. The Médecins Sans Frontiers clinic moved outside Moria in protest at the conditions, and, placed just outside the gates, would only see children, or women who had been raped. Anyone else had to go to the clinic in Mytilene, or to another of the medical groups trying valiantly to provide a panacea to the thousands of people who came, wounded and hurt and scarred, through the islands in their quest for safety. We managed to get her an appointment. She had a shower, and the two little boys had a shower, and then I drove them back to the dusty grey camp. I saw her one more time after that, when I was picking up other people, and she came up to me and hugged me. I don’t know what happened to the green-eyed girl and her two small brothers. That was always the case – people might suddenly, finally, be taken to Athens, to the next step of their long journey, and we wouldn’t see them again, and we wouldn’t know where they would end up. Now I’m back home, a world away in New Zealand, and I see in the news that things have gotten much worse on Lesbos. I have no way of finding out about her, though I think about her a lot. I hope she’s safe. I hope she and her two little brothers have found somewhere with calm and peace and comfort, but I can’t know.