After meeting the Syrian refugee in Verona I paid more attention to the news. One night Channel 4 broadcast a filmed report from the Greek Dodecanese islands. I watched local people help traumatised men, women and children as they stumbled out of flimsy boats crashing onto the stony shore. Exhausted adults were helped to their feet; dry clothing was handed out; and scared and crying children were cuddled while their parents recovered. The kindness shown was beautiful. There were no aid organisations to be seen; the locals were on their own.
The rubber boats had left the Turkish shore, just seven or so kilometres away, always at night, pushed into the black water by greedy smugglers who packed too many people into each boat. Sometimes, one man said grimly, too often, the boats didn't make it to the other shore. Then only body bags -and a brave heart- were required.
My own not-so-brave heart tugged at me. I wanted to help. But would I, at my age and lacking any training, be a liability? I thought about it. The people on the screen were of all ages, some of them clearly older than I was, and their only qualification, compassion. Maybe I could be useful.
Where to start? Who to ask? I had no idea. And so I did what any confused person with a laptop does- I Googled. Google led me to Facebook. I typed Refugees and Volunteers in the search bar and several groups flagged up immediately. Most of them were for aid going to Calais, but I started asking about Greece and eventually I connected with Autumn, a lovely midwife from Bristol who also wanted to go to the Greek islands.
And so it was that a month later, in September, and despite having to overcome the dreadful travel anxiety that had held me back too many times before, I found myself leaving Gatwick airport in an orange glow- yes, I was on Easyjet.
Autumn and I had agreed to go to the island Kos. It's a small island and it's easy to get around without a car. It seemed like a good place to start.
I still wasn't sure how much help I would really be; and I wondered if I'd actually like doing it- but I figured if worse came to worse, and I hated it, well, hey, at least I'd be on a Greek island in late summer. That couldn't be bad, could it?
Turned out it could. The next morning when I opened the summery white curtains I was greeted not with dancing rays of golden sunshine as I expected, but pelting, cold unforgiving rain. Buckets of it. I had packed a lightweight summer mac. The rain merely laughed and went straight through it. I was soaked to the skin in 5 minutes.
Wondering quite what I had done, I paddled through ankle deep water to the waterfront which was the where the refugees were camped. I passed groups of damp, forlorn ill-dressed people huddled in every place that offered any shelter at all. They were refugees.
I wondered what I should do. How could I help in this deluge? How on earth would I find Autumn? We had loosely agreed to meet at the waterfront. Would she even be here? The rain was coming down so hard, it was bouncing back up again and causing a mist.
And then as I stood there dripping and wondering, an apparition appeared in the watery gloom. A woman clad in sensible waterproofs cycled up and stopped in front of me. Pushing back her sturdy rain hat she peered at me over misted glasses, smiled and said "Maggie?'
By some miracle, it was Autumn.
"Lovely to meet you!" she chirped. "Come on, there's lots to do!"
And with over 1000 stranded people getting soaked, indeed there was. For the rest of that morning, we distributed as much dry clothing as we could find in the Kos Solidarity warehouse, food, drinks and anything else that would help.
At lunchtime I gratefully splashed back to my hotel room where at least I could get warm and dry for an hour.
By the time I returned to the waterfront there wasn't a raincoat or umbrella to be had on the whole island so I stopped at a grocery store and bought every single roll of bin liners on the shelves. I recalled that when I worked on the fairgrounds in the US, we used bin liners as makeshift raincoats, by tearing three holes- one at the top for your head and one each side for the arms. They're not pretty, but they work. And for 10 minutes or so while I handed them out to the soggy souls at the shore, I was the most popular person on the island; possibly even Greece. I soon became known as the Bin Bag Lady.
Having apparently lost what little sense I have, I went out again in the evening. Every day people left Kos on the ferry for Athens, where they would submit their claims for refugee status and wait for interviews.
Volunteers would gather at the port to see them off and hand out shoes, bags, coats- anything that would make that twelve hour journey better. That night, only three volunteers turned up. I was given a box of dry shoes and told to guard it with my life (shoes, I learned, are always at a premium). I sheltered under a flimsy plastic sunshade as the rain continued to thunder down, while another volunteer cycled off into the dark night to ask who needed shoes. He'd return with a list of sizes, and I would rummage in the box to find them. Then he cycled off to deliver them. He did this over and over again until the box was empty. He preferred to get soaked so the people going on that ferry could at least leave with dry feet.
The volunteer on the bike was- the rather fabulous Oscar, and I'll tell you more about him in the next post.
Autumn and Oscar. Two lovely people who have since become my good friends, I hope for life.
* if you'd like to read an account of the first two days that I wrote at the time, and see some photos, just scroll down until you reach the posts titled
1. Kos the rain
and
2. Kos photos.
There are not a lot of photos because I couldn't let my camera get wet, so I had to leave it in the hotel after my first venture out. Most of the photos were taken after the rain finally finished.
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