The Frontline of the Refugee Crisis..Linda Sourris - 24 Feb 2016

"We miss our families every day but we are so happy. We are free."

I will try my best to put into words what these past two months helping with the refugees in Samos has been like. It won't be easy… 

Hardest of all is managing your reaction to the monumental injustice.The war they’re fleeing that’s decimated their homes; the desperation that drives them to crossing the sea in a dingy they could die in; the humiliating treatment they receive at the hands of the stressed, overstretched people once they’re on the island.

It’s so horribly and deeply wrong.

In any volunteer activity you have to try to forget the deep fury you feel at these wretched wrongs. So that you can function; so that you can look into those tired, weary eyes and smile a smile of genuine affection and love that God would have you do. So that you manage to inject some of those behaviours that make people feel human and cared for in a situation when they are being herded and dehumanised.

Yet deep inside, no matter how calm you remain on the surface, the terrible injustice of it all is knocking away uncomfortably at your heart. 

You know you’re in a war zone. The best way to describe it; I think it's the sense of displacement. You help with food distribution, seeing the desperate hands grabbing for more than you have to give. You hug distressed volunteers who’ve given out kids breakfast but have been physically bombarded by men pushing past the children; grabbing the milk and running. They tell you through loving, tear-filled eyes that it was awful, but only happening because these men are so hungry too.

But then there is the beauty; a beauty much more striking for having blossomed out of this ugly, lost situation…

The look in the eyes of Syrians who got all the babies off their boat to safety, even though it landed on rocks; how men from a military boat beat them and the motor with sticks, leaving them bruised and the motor broken. The women sobbed, the children wailed. Fear gripped them all.  "For 30 minutes we faced death”, they said, but these men fixed the motor;  and they made it.

Then those smiles.

"We miss our families every day but we are so happy. We are free." This conversation is taking place at 1am at the port and it's windy and cold. I look down at the feet of one of the men and he is in flipflops."It doesn't matter,” he smiles. "God is good. We are safe. We are free" It's the beautiful smile of victory over evil. "We will never forget how we have been helped by people here,” they say. "it has changed my life, this kindness". 

I’ll never forget when a volunteer gave the shoes he was wearing to a refugee needing his size. He got back into the van barefoot laughing: ”This is what this work does; you lose everything for them; even your f***ing shoes!!" 

Then you drive back to your warm bed; that you now feel guilty about sleeping in; talking together about how it was, how it could be improved, how wrong the wrong parts are and how right the right parts are. And you hope as fervently as you have ever hoped anything that, for as long as it lasts, this never becomes “normal”.

You hope that you never lose the fire of injustice burning in your belly, because you know it’s driving you to do good. And you pray as fervently as you have ever prayed; for justice to be done for these lovely, displaced people, these shy women and dignified men who have gone through so much and yet - from all I have seen - have kept their humanity. 

May God bless them and go with them on the next step of their incredibly brave journey.