We’ve been here a week now and I promised I’d write a blog to keep people who donated and/or people who are interested updated. Sorry ‘bout that, been a bit distracted.
It’s been a peculiar week. My faith in humanity has been alternately dashed against the rocks and then heart-warmingly restored. I’ve bemoaned my own physical discomfort then witnessed the unimaginable agony of others. And I’ve feared for my life then feared for the lives of others and my ability to help them. Frankly, I’m bloody exhausted.
It quickly became apparent, to me and the other six or seven doctors who had arrived recently (some from as far away as USA) under the umbrella of the same particular organisation that I did, that they (the organisation) don’t have an effing clue what they’re doing with regards to sending medics into disaster zones. This would be because they’ve never done it before, have no medical expertise, and didn’t think it necessary to do a medical needs assessment. Tossers.
I won’t go into the details *here* (but almost certainly will elsewhere) but this has resulted in several emergency doctors traipsing all over Lesbos for several days without coming anywhere close to what they came here to do. And some of them are only here for a week and most have used their own limited annual leave and funds to be here. The organisation has no representatives on the island and consists of one person who is attempting to coordinate their medical response from Scotland. It’s fair to say that me and the head of the organisation involved have had ‘words’. Tosser.
Fortunately, there are other NGOs on this island who have got their shit together, and we’ve managed to hook up with one of them. We didn’t entirely waste our days prior to this though. We went to Mytilene to register with the Medical Society, and we painted a bathroom in the Hope Centre - a project by a local British couple who have rented a derelict local hotel and are renovating it for use as an eventual temporary reception camp for refugees landing in 'zone 1’.
The north shore of Lesvos is approximately 15km long and runs parallel to the coast of Turkey, about 5 miles way. At the western end is Molyvos - a beautiful little town where our hotel is. At the eastern end is Skala Sykmania, a charming little fishing village. Between the two the coastline varies between welcoming bays and rocky cliffs. Because of its proximity to Turkey, and its numerous bays, the northern shore receives a lot of refugee boats.
The road from Molyvos to Skala is a tarmac lane for the first 5km and a pot-hole ridden, cliff-hugging winding dirt track for the next 10 km. To assist in the practicalities of refugee rescue the coast has been divided into three zones: zone 1 stretches from Molyvos to the beginning of the dirt track, zone 2 from the beginning of the dirt track to a point called ‘Chapel’ (because there is a small chapel there), and zone 3, from Chapel to Skala.
When refugees first started arriving on the north shore of Lesbos about a year ago, there was no help for them. It was left to locals to pull them out of the sea, dead or alive. Then a few volunteer groups started arriving to help and over the past year the refugees that float up to the north shore are ‘received’ by NGOs that have emerged and grown out of little groups of volunteers. Various temporary ‘camps’ have evolved where refugees are provided with dry clothes, hot drinks and warmth before being taken by bus to the large camp, Moria, in the south.
In zone 1 the NGO ‘Starfish’ operates, and also the Kempsons, a local British couple. There is no camp in zone 1 yet.
In zone 2 is a relatively new camp funded by the International Rescue Committee (IRC). This is a largely US-funded organisation headed by David Milliband. It’s the only camp staffed by paid workers employed by the IRC, rather than volunteers. Unfortunately, I’m told (although I don’t know if it’s true), it’s been staffed by the right wing local council, and there are concerns that they don’t treat the refugees kindly. They’re certainly not very friendly - I know this because I’ve been there. Currently all refugees who arrive in zones 1 and 2 are taken by minibus to the IRC camp.
In zone 3 there are two camps next door to each other - one is called Lighthouse and the other is called Platanos. Both are run entirely by volunteers and have evolved over the past 5 months.
As far as medical cover is concerned, each NGO/camp has its own medical unit and doctors, in most cases provided by well-established medical NGOs such as MSF and WAHA. There are also numerous mobile medical units patrolling the northern shores such as ISRaid, a group of 12 Belgian medics whose name I forget, and, the week we arrived, also a group of 20 American medics from an organisation called International Medical Rescue.
Anyway, it quickly became apparent that there are an awful lot of doctors here and, as the organisation that sent us here doesn’t have a clue what it’s doing, it would be up to us to try and find somewhere to work in an area already brimming with medics.
In brief, the medical need here is not as great as I, or I imagine you, believed it to be, and what need there is appears to be pretty well covered. Fortunately, after a pretty frustrating few days, we (and by ‘we’ I mean myself, Grace and a doctor friend we’ve met here called Jenny) drove to Skala and met up with the people who run ‘Lighthouse’.
I actually can’t praise this organisation enough. They are warm, welcoming, compassionate, well-organised, democratic and effective. They welcomed us and invited us to become a part of their team, by being part of the medical team as well as helping as general volunteers.
The volunteers were a little gloomy on the day we met them because the body of a four year old, thought to be from a boat that had sunk some days ago, had been washed up on the beach adjacent to the camp. A local nurse had come across it whilst walking her dog. A four year old little girl and nobody knows who she is. Somebody’s baby. This is a mightily fucked up world we’re living in.
Most refugee boats leave Turkey after dark so arrive in Lesbos sometime between midnight and 11am so the day before we started work at Lighthouse (day 5) we got up at 4:30am and picked up a young Norwegian NGO worker who agreed to go with us to ‘work the beaches’. This basically involves driving along the dangerous dirt track between Molyvos and Skala, looking out for boats that may have landed. There’s a pretty efficient telescope ‘look-out' system (again, run by volunteers) that spots most boats so they can be guided to a safe landing spot by the coastguards, but occasionally, especially at night, the boats arrive unexpectedly. This is because they have no lights and make no noise because they don’t want to be spotted in case the Turkish Lifeguard takes them back (or sinks them).
I was a bit grumpy, to be honest, as I drove gingerly along the track in the pitch black. This was because (i) it was 5 am, (ii) I was driving along a track which is dangerous and that my car insurers had specified neither the car nor its occupants were covered to drive on, and (iii) I felt that the whole exercise was no more an attempt to shut me up by the stupid organisation that sent me, because I’d been so gobby about their incompetence.
As we drove along a stretch literally feet from the sea, Grace spotted something on the road in the beam of the headlights. Up ahead, huddled together in the pitch black and wearing bright orange lifejackets were a group of about 40 refugees. They had literally just landed and had managed to get themselves out of the boat. They were soaking wet and the temperatures were close to freezing. No-one else was there but us. ‘Thank-you-for-coming-thank-you-for-coming!’ cried one man, as we tried to check that everyone was OK. ‘Baby baby!’ cried another and a large bundle was passed overhead to me and I realised that this tightly wrapped and swaddled parcel was a baby. It was cold and rigid and as I ran with it to my car, shouting to Grace to put the interior lights on and open the back door, I thought ‘What the FUCKING FUCK am I going to do with a dead baby in the middle of fucking nowhere in the back of my car in the pitch fucking black?!’ There’s not much that can be done to resuscitate a hypothermic dead baby in the back of a car with your bare hands, no matter how highly skilled you might be.
I lay the bundle down and tried to get to its face - it was so well wrapped in hat, several layers of clothes, then lifejacket, then blanket, that it was difficult to get at it, but it was completely unresponsive. I pulled the blankets away and put my ear to its face….. and felt a tiny wisp of warm breath. I pulled more blankets away and it wrinkled its nose, opened one eye and let out an almighty squawk. It was well pissed off to be woken from its sleep by a crazed middle-aged woman with spiky white hair and I’ve never been so relieved to hear a screaming baby in my entire life.
We piled the baby, its Mum and toddler sibling into the front passenger seat, plus another woman and her three children in the back, and put the heating on full blast. They were all soaking wet and the older children, who sat on Grace’s lap in the back, were covered in vomit. We drove them to the IRC camp, back along the track, and they sent minibuses out to pick up all the others. We were greeted by a surly and unsmiling middle-aged man who ushered them into a big white tent without saying a word. As we left the women hugged me and the children clung to Grace’s hands.
This was our first intimate encounter with refugees, and I hope it won’t be long before they encounter warmth and kindness again. Fuck you, David Cameron, you ham-faced wanker.
In Skala over the next few days we have encountered many more refugees. In the early morning the boats arrive one after the other. The sight of a boat overloaded with people, with expressions of hope, terror, anxiety, weariness, desperation and helplessness, bobbing precariously towards the stony shore, and the wet-suited rescuers crashing through the icy water to greet them and guide the boat in safely is simultaneously utterly heartbreaking and utterly heart-warming, and every time I see it I have to blink back tears and swallow a little sob. (It's my hormones. I can’t help it.)
Volunteers (including Ai Weiwei one morning) form two parallel lines up the beach and guide the refugees up over the pebbles to safety. Some are crying, some are close to collapse, some are confused, some are joyous. All are very very cold. The medics look out for anyone in need of medical attention - the babies, the quiet ones, the still ones, the grey ones - and they are taken to the warming tent or the medical bay. The others are directed to the warmed changing tents in the camp, where they are provided with clean dry clothes and then they go and warm themselves around three large oil drum fires and are provided with hot sweet tea and soup and sandwiches. When they are all dry and warmish they are taken by bus to the big camp in Moria, in the south, where they must register. Huge efforts are made not to split them up because the boats often contain groups of large families and if they get separated before they get to Moria they may never find each other again.
The boat crossing from Turkey in the rubber dinghy is *supposed* to take about an hour and a half, but most of them have been on the water for at least four or five hours before they arrive. If the boat sinks and there is no rescue boat to pull them out within a few minutes then they will drown, as many have already. The water is very very cold. If they make it to shore then most will survive, although there have been some deaths from hypothermia. So, the main medical problem is hypothermia and the priority is to get people warm. Aside from that there are many other less serious medical problems that need taking care of. Many of these people haven’t had access to medical care for weeks or months. Many have spent several days in the freezing Turkish mountains. Many have been beaten by the Turkish police or smugglers. Some may have pre-existing medical conditions such as cardiac problems etc. Some are heavily pregnant.
Various nationalities are arriving - not only Syrians, but also refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The two main languages spoken are Farsi and Arabic. It’s hard to assess a patient when you don’t understand each other. Fortunately there are some volunteer interpreters (one of whom, a lovely bloke from California, was an Afghan refugee himself when he was a child) who are an enormous help, but there’s a lot of gesticulation and miming going on.
When there’s no need for a medic I’m doing general volunteer work. Grace is mostly working in the women and children changing tent - this is pretty chaotic because it’s not a large area and trying to help freezing people out of wet ones and finding them suitably sized dry ones, often using only head torches because the generator has packed in, is not easy. It’s pretty chaotic in there, and afterwards all the wet clothes need to be bagged up, and the shelves of dry clothes need to be restocked from the storage tents and the whole area needs to be cleaned in preparation for the next boat. On Wednesday eight boats came in to Skala in succession, each carrying about 30-40 people. I think back in the autumn they were sometimes getting twenty to thirty a day, into Skala alone.
The boats tend to stop coming after about 11 am so after that there is other work to be done, such as general sorting and storing of clothes, cleaning, cooking and collecting firewood. Yesterday afternoon we had a ‘socks on the beach’ party, which wasn’t as much fun as sex on the beach and was quite a lot smellier. Basically when collecting discarded wet clothes they are sorted into bags containing shoes (tied together), socks and gloves (paired), and all other clothes. Every few days an NGO called Dirty Girls comes and collects them all and takes them off to launder them in industrial washing machines and tumble driers. The clean clothes are then sorted according to gender/size and delivered back to the camps for use by future refugees. It’s a fantastic initiative and I can’t imagine what would happen to the mountain of discarded wet and dirty clothes if they hadn’t come up with it. Go Dirty Girls.
But we all know what happens to pairs of socks in the washing machine, so before they take the socks, the bags of paired socks are emptied onto a large tarpaulin on the beach. If you can imagine that these 8 or 10 bin bags full of wet socks have been festering in plastic bags for several days and prior to that have probably been worn for days if not weeks on a journey through all kinds of terrain and conditions then you can probably get some idea of the smell. They need to be sorted into three pairs of roughly the same foot size and pinned together with a safety pin, then re-bagged for Dirty Girls to take off and launder. It wasn’t the most pleasant of jobs but many hands make light work and it was quite a laugh, in a mild-hysteria kind of way.
If boats are coming in in quick succession then they are received alternately by Lighthouse camp and Platanos, which is the camp next door. Platanos operates a similar system to Lighthouse but is a little messier - it is run by anarchists (literally) who are wonderful people apparently although I’ve not yet had a chance to get to know them. The Lighthouse camp is beautiful (well, as beautiful as it’s possible for a volunteer-run and donor-funded temporary refugee camp to be). The tents are positioned in an ancient olive grove and meandering gravel paths have been constructed and lights strung through the branches. They have a camp black sheep called Carolina who likes to curl up on someone’s lap in front of the fire. There are Portaloos and washbasins with toothbrushes and soaps and sanitary protection and nappies provided. There is a swing and a small children’s play area.
This is in contrast to the IRC camp in zone 2 which is stark and even to me has a sinister vibe - I can’t imagine how it must feel to a refugee. It’s also in stark contrast to the nearby ‘stage 2’ camp, and also Moria, both of which are UNHCR run and both of which exactly resemble prisons, complete with 3 metre barbed wire fences and herding pens. It really is a fucked up world.
The problem with working at Lighthouse is that it is in Skala and our hotel is in Molyvos. Aside from the hideously dangerous dirt track, the only other route to Skala is the mountain road, which takes about 15 minutes longer as it climbs high into the mountains before dropping back down into Skala. It’s a tarmac road but full of hairpin bends and precipitous drops. We go back and forth by this route because my car isn’t insured for the dirt track, and it’s a bit nerve-wracking. But the weather has been incredibly cold and a couple of days ago it snowed and rained. We heard that the mountain road was dangerous so the next morning we chose to risk falling into the sea rather than falling off a mountain, and took the dirt track. We’ve been starting work at 7am so it was barely light, and because it had been rainy and 4x4s had been patrolling it, it was basically a quagmire.
It wasn’t my favourite ever drive into work, if I’m honest. Basically my heart was in my mouth and my foot was hovering on the brake the whole way. We may have got out of first gear once or twice and we also slid into a ditch, but we made it there safely in the end. I don’t think there’s much chance of kidding the car hire people that I didn’t use the track though. Plus there are salt stains all over the seats from when we had the wet refugees in there the other night. I think I’m going to be charged pretty heftily for cleaning. (You might imagine that a huge multinational company such as Hertz might donate these cleaning costs to the refugee crisis, mightn’t you? In an un-fucked up world, anyway.)
The following morning the temperatures had come up a bit so we took the mountain road. Big mistake. It was fricking terrifying, particularly the descent into Skala. There was ice everywhere and I drove with one wheel on the gravel kerb the whole way. I never got out of second gear and used a LOT of petrol and a LOT of adrenaline.
In the evenings we’ve mostly been going down to the harbour in Mytilene for something to eat. It’s a weird sort of vibe because it’s a beautiful Greek fishing village in freezing winter. In the summer it would be heaving with holiday makers and in the winter it would normally be closed for the season. But it’s open, and full of volunteers. I guess the locals must be partly pissed off that volunteers are taking over their island and partly massively grateful for the help and the trade. They are very friendly and welcoming though and offer cheap rates for volunteers, and the food is great.
Today we have a day off, hence I’ve found the time to write this blog. I’ve been giving a lot of thought about how and where to spend the donation money. One thing that is a vital ongoing requirement is the ability to warm hypothermic patients adequately. I’m looking into the cost of the heating blankets called (Bair Huggers) used in the UK. The problem is the difficulty with electrics - if you plug too many things in in the medical unit the electrics trip and cut out. The other thing is gas bottles - gas heaters are used in the warming tents and are expensive to run. They also need a decent trolley bed in the medical unit and some scoop stretchers to transport moribund patients quickly and efficiently from the beach to the medical unit with minimal disturbance (important in severe hypothermia). Also hot water bottles…..lots of hot water bottles…...
