Broken Spectacles
One of our Syrian refugees, a lovely woman in her thirties, has a son who is very short-sighted. His glasses got broken and another volunteer took them away to get them fixed and somehow, between the lot of us, they got lost…
A Rainstorm
Yesterday was a tiring and stressful day. It rained on Friday night and most of the tents are not waterproof so everyone was wet and cold in the morning…
Asylum law
This morning – another soft, warm, spring morning – we arrived at the camp early, met up with a couple of our Syrian friends and walked the three miles across the fields to Idomeni camp. The first part was an easy stroll along mud tracks cut into flat fields of new wheat; then we came close to the railway line which runs right to the (now closed) border crossing…
Rice Pudding
Yesterday a woman from an anarchist group who provide food for the camp every day, asked me if we could take over the distribution of rice pudding to the children. I asked my co-volunteers and everyone said we should do it…
Twenty buggies
In the small town of Polykastro about 15 minutes drive from the camp, there is a warehouse where all the clothes which have been sent from other European countries are stored. The quantities of clothing and nappies are astonishing…
Protest
What a day! It’s 7.30pm in Macedonia, but 8.30pm 2 kilometers away in Greece where I’ve just come from, on foot, enjoying the dusk. Now I’m sitting in the hotel dining room, about to tuck into chicken soup and baked potato. All home-cooked to order, very good and cheap…
The Woman with Dyed Red Hair
As I took my aisle seat on the plane from Gatwick I saw that my companion in the window seat was a Greek woman of about my age. We exchanged smiles but didn’t speak at first. While the hostesses were selling paninis from their trolley, she got out a home made sandwich. She had dyed red hair and sat coiled in her seat as if she wanted to weld herself to the side of the plane…
Arabic Grammar
I’m sitting in the canteen at work, struggling my way through a headline in an old copy of Al Quds, an Arabic newspaper. It’s ten years since I last used Arabic regularly, but the language is coming back, little by little…