Immigration and Assimilation

African migrants crossing the Mediterranean

I watched a news video made by MSF (Doctors without Borders) this afternoon. It showed a large inflatable boat being intercepted by the MSF rescue ship and the passengers being transferred and taken ashore. Every one of the passengers was a young African man, probably in his twenties. They didn’t look travel-weary, or stressed out by the destruction of their home towns, villages and city districts; these migrants looked like nervous young men courageously seeking their fortune and a better life. I can empathise with rural Europeans who might find these arrivals intimidating.

Perhaps they were coming from the trouble-spots of Southern Sudan, Eritrea or Nigeria. They had certainly experienced a frightening journey, - but they were a complete contrast to the Syrian families in Athens. 

Refugees in Victoria Square on a wintry March morning

All around Athens, you meet displaced people from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 

There are well-dressed children, young teenagers, babes in arms, pregnant mothers and anxious fathers. Parents with pushchairs, children on tricycles.

Smartly-dressed young mums at Piraeus

 They are all confused and bewildered by the complexities of seeking asylum in Europe. Many are professionals; all just want to get started on building a new life, -  especially for the sake of their children’s education and future.  

Most would return to their beloved homeland if they could, but their homes, towns, villages and cities have been destroyed: flattened: reduced to rubble.

It is one thing to absorb whole family units into European society; it is a very different matter to integrate hundreds of single young men from rural Africa. 

Industrialised countries faced a similar scenario a hundred years ago, when young men (and women) came from the country into the cities to seek their fortunes, believing - in the words always attributed to Dick Whittington - that the streets of London were paved with gold. They had diplomas and certified qualifications, and the cities needed their skills

This was when the YMCA and YWCA flourished, offering safe accommodation and respectable social activities to young men and women who left home for the first time to migrate to the cities and advance their career all over Britain. This was how my own father was able to be an economic migrant from Hull to London, furthering his career in advertising and initially lodging at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road.

But what skill-set do these young men from Africa bring to the British economy? More importantly, how many of them have long-term plans to become British citizens, as compared to how many are making money for family back home, to whom they plan to return after a few years? Not that there's anything wrong with doing that in order to accumulate a nest egg: - there are hundreds of British expats doing precisely that in the Gulf and in Asia-Pacific.

My culture teaches me to reach out and help the dispossessed, the poor, the homeless, the refugees and, if I should so choose, it teaches me that I can seek to better my life by migrating across the country, or across the world. My children have had those options and made those choices.

My culture also teaches that this option should be available to anyone in any part of the globe, a right that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter.

The people who made the decision, won't have to live with it!

The EU referendum has little to do with my last remaining years on this planet and everything to do with the world of our children and grandchildren, nephews, and nieces. 

Their options have been decimated by the selfishness, short-sightedness  and ignorance of their parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts who have now blocked the young generation’s European opportunities with their “LEAVE” votes in the referendum.

The verdict at Glastonbury.

We don’t own the world we live in; we are its custodians, and in time will hand it on to the next generation. 

Some of us have failed future generations by voting LEAVE; some of us are bitterly disappointed by a result that betrays our grandchildren.

We now have to make it all work, and maximise the value of their inheritance. 
But it's not about money, jobs, and opportunities, it's about the ethics that we teach and the ethics that we demonstrate in the way we treat the planet and all its inhabitants. 

Scavengers and Scroungers

Someone's "Home Sweet Home"

The apartment building in the next street has basement rooms. It’s not entirely below ground: I suppose the basement floor level is about 4 feet below the pavement, with steps leading down from the street. There are iron bars set into the wall at street level, which allow light in, but it is unglazed and has a makeshift curtain of an old piece of faded fabric which keeps out some of the dust and fumes churned up by the traffic. If I peep in as I pass, I can see a clutter of oddments of furniture, with mismatched cushions and a small table lamp with a feeble, low-wattage bulb that gives out yellow light. Sometimes an old woman is sitting on lightweight sun-bed, such as one might take camping or to the beach, and there is an old couch with sunken cushions, that probably serves as her husband’s bed at night. It is very dim and reminiscent of the room-set in a museum, displaying “how poor people used to live.”

Except that there would have been no flickering old television, no gaudy nylon and polyester, and no shaggy rug with the pile caked into odd lumps. But how could one keep clean a room that is level with the gutters of a dirty, dusty street? There are three similar adjacent facades, but those gratings are shuttered, the doors are boarded and there is no sign that these basement rooms have been occupied in at least the past decade or more.

 

Throughout this part of Athens, there are big galvanised wheely-bins for refuse, parked at 100-yard intervals along the roadside, with an occasional blue bin which is theoretically for recyclables. 

In practice, I suspect that anything that ends up in any bin goes to landfill while anything that could be recycled is scrounged, hoarded and sold to scrap merchants by an army of bin-divers. There is an extremely untidy protocol about garbage in Athens. 

It seems that people only put into the bin things that could have no value to those who make a living by recycling. The area of road and pavement around the bin is piled high on a daily basis with furniture, carpets, curtains, clothing and bags of plastic bottles: anything that might fetch a few euros or a few cents. 

Yesterday, a man was cross-legged on the pavement, assiduously unscrewing the hinges, handles, and locks from a discarded internal door, to sell as scrap metal, while a woman was sorting through a heap of clothes and putting children’s items to one side. Further down the street, a man with a Vespa 3-wheeled pick-up was roping down a stack of flattened cardboard cartons that towered high over me as I passed. These would go to the mill to be pulped and – inevitably – remanufactured into more cardboard cartons.

Everything is filthy. The pavements are cracked and the kerbs are uneven. By the pick-up point near the Metro station, the gutters overflow with cigarette butts emptied out from car ash-trays by drivers, while they wait to pick up partners coming home from work downtown. In a side street you can come across the empty shell of a once-magnificent, fin-de-siècle  town-house. That’s depressing, but even more so is the empty shell of a brand-new hotel nearby, that has never opened.

Some streets remind me of Indian cities like Bangalore, or Cochin, where investment has poured into gleaming new developments, but no one has thought to make provision for a maintenance budget. For the first months, the marble gleams and the chromium shines, then the dust and grime gradually take over, and the developer’s dream quickly loses its sparkle. 

Athens Metro below ground

That’s how it is in the Athens Metro. The stations and rolling stock of line 2 are spotless, but as you come up to street level you see the grime on the stairs, the escalators, and the lifts. How tragic to build a new Metro line where every single station is totally wheelchair accessible, and then to forget to budget for cleaning the lifts, so that the efficient glass cages are gradually becoming grubbily opaque.

Athens downtown - street level

When the Wednesday street market closes in late afternoon, the scavengers keep a few yards ahead of the bin-men. There are plenty of oranges, onions and potatoes to be scrounged from the gutters, and even the occasional tray of peaches or tomatoes; but who are these people? 

There is a family of Syrian refugees, the children scampering up and down the pavement, enjoying the game of collecting unsold free food. Meanwhile, the expressions on the parents’ faces show their dismay at the shame of being reduced to this. Father wears quality clothes and looks professional; when will he be employed? They seem to be wondering how long it will be before they can get back to living a normal life.

The lady from the basement apartment – if one can use such grandiloquent language for an urban hovel – goes home with a magnificent cauliflower and a bag of carrots. An irritated horn toots; it is a gleaming Mercedes Sports that impatiently nudges the woman and the refugees out of the way.

Cheek-by-jowl is the story of life in Athens. There are the middle-class ladies out shopping with their friends, who see their world covered in grime and un-cared-for, and there are the homeless refugees who squat under the trees in Victoria Square by day and go back to the tents on the tarmac somewhere to sleep at night. We used to bring them a hot meal every evening, but the police stopped that six weeks ago. They never gave any reason, but we suspect that the municipality was desperate to prevent the situation becoming normalised.

The fortunate ones stay at the Plaza, courtesy of an Anarchist group

The fortunate few are in the Plaza Hotel, which has been commandeered by the anarchists, and is fast developing as a self-governing community. There is plenty of food, education and playgroups, language classes and, yesterday,  even a concert of traditional Persian music.

But there is limbo. Nobody knows how long this will continue, and nobody knows how it will end. There are tens of thousands of people in search of a better life, while the EU fails miserably to offer any kind of solution. And still they arrive; - or fail to arrive; - and drown.

In Britain, UKIP displays a huge poster of an army of tough young men of Middle-Eastern and African origin, marching menacingly onwards. In Greece, I see whole families with women and children, who have lost their homes and their entire community has been flattened. . . and the world looks the other way. 

Does anyone have the courage to ask WWJD? I’m afraid the religion of the world today is selfish consumerism. That is what the governments encourage and - worse - that is what we teach our children.

I have written before that I am ashamed of my government. By contrast, I am proud of my people. There are so many twenty-somethings who have put their lives on hold while they come to Greece and try to help solve the problem. Many are from UK and Northern Europe, but they come from all around the world. Many who don’t come in person raise large sums of money.

One amazing woman with whom I have worked a little here in Athens posted this on Facebook. It explains the attitude and the frustration:

Thessaloniki airport. 

I'm sure I'm not the first, and won't be the last, to sit here and seriously consider my life decisions that got me here, and that are pulling me away.

I've helped start up and been coordinating a project getting food to 10,000 refugees a day. People looking for safety and ending up in disused, falling down warehouses, being given appalling food from the military, with no hope of the situation improving soon.

It's going to take years to relocate the 50,000 refugees in Greece. What can follow this? How can you do anything but more of the same once you've been here, seen it, and been a real part in making it a bit better?

Every new “problem” is seen as a challenge and an opportunity. When Samos hospital was running out of syringes last week, the message went out on Facebook, and someone, somewhere air-freighted boxes of syringes that arrived the next day. That is one tiny example of the attitude and achievements of an amazing army of young people who are passionate about putting things right.

So, please, next time you see someone collecting for Oxfam, or Doctors without Borders (MSF) or UNICEF, don’t reach for your small change; reach for your wallet. 

We are their jailers: What is their crime?

They have committed no crime. 

They can no longer live safely in their home countries 

and they are searching for a new life. 

I posted these pictures on Facebook recently and there was an immediate reaction, and they were “shared” many times. I don’t think many people realise the size of the problem.

I want to write about the "camps" where refugees are now effectively incarcerated. Not the squats administered by the Anarchist Solidarity movements with education for the children and language classes for all, but the government internment camps where refugees have inadequate food or drinking water, erratic electricity supplies, inadequate sanitation and limited healthcare.

I have tried all day, but I am overwhelmed with sadness, anger and feeling impotent to make any meaningful intervention. 

People in such camps need to establish and prove their status as refugees seeking asylum from the conflict in their home countries. Let me try to outline the processing system, as I understand it. The first stage is to apply for asylum in Greece. If this is granted, it will then enable the refugee to proceed to other EU countries (most refugees want to settle in Northern Europe.)

The asylum application process is by live interview via a SKYPE (video-call) link. The officials are mostly Greek but may be from other EU countries. There is limited availability of interpreters to participate in these interviews; some languages are available for two or three hours per day, others are available just once per week. 

Remember that there are over 50,000 refugees seeking asylum each one needing to start their application by going through the Skype interview and application process. If you do the sums, you can see that this could take years, - even if everyone was fluent in a common language. 

A Greek and a Syrian speaking second-language English to each other is not a formula for the reliable communication of accurate information. That’s not any kind of criticism, just a realistic observation.

Then there’s a lot of misunderstanding about smartphones and Wi-Fi. Back in the UK, many of us think of internet access as something of a luxury that provides easy access to emails and entertainment. For refugees, it is an absolute lifeline. There are very few “internet cafes” now that a majority people have access to the internet in their pocket. If you don’t believe that, travel in India and you’ll see how the world works these days. Everyone has a smartphone and top-ups can cost just pennies

This is why refugees need to own a smartphone to access the internet through a Wi-Fi hotspot. The internet is the prime source of any information about immigration, residence, and every other aspect of relocating to a new country. It is also the only way they can keep in touch with family, friends and relations whether back in their home country or elsewhere in Europe. 

I find it very difficult to imagine the absolute cruelty of police and army who have been known to confiscate phones when they move refugees to new locations.

Plenty of fresh food for lunch at the Plaza

You may have seen video footage of holiday resorts and tourist hotels that have been converted to refugee accommodation. 

The Plaza Hotel in Athens has often featured, but you need to know that this is not a government enterprise. The Plaza is a model operation with classes and activities for everyone. It is run on philanthropic lines with great care and democracy by the Athens-based anarchist Solidarity movement.

Camps run by the Greek army tend to be less generous and philanthropic in their management, partly because the Greeks are restricted in what they are able to provide. The EU is telling the Greeks to provide bed and board, but is not providing anything like sufficient funding for the Greek government to be able to do a proper job.

When the camps started to be occupied, whether on the islands or the mainland, very few had all the basics in place.  Water, sanitation, and electricity have rarely been available in adequate supply. The insufficient provision of food is disgraceful, and drinking water is often rationed to one litre per person per day – which is half the recommended consumption for temperate climates – not the 40+ sunshine of the Greek summer. 

More information is all over the internet. Here is a typical story 

No, please don’t shrug your shoulders, because there are things you can do. For a start, you can talk to your Town Hall, and get them to declare a clear policy on Refugees. 

Then you can approach the Faith leaders in your community about promoting the idea of “Refugees are Welcome Here.” By Faith leaders, I mean not only priests, ministers, pastors, rabbis, and imams, I mean the hierarchy above them who need to feel pressure coming up from the grass roots level.

We are not getting the leadership the country needs from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, nor from the Chief Rabbi, nor from the heads of the Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities. 

We are not getting leadership from the TUC or the CBI and we are not getting it from any political party. I have lost faith in Westminster!

• Westminster no longer represents the people, and we are looking for an honest alternative.
• Maybe they should start worrying about that.

The Volunteers

People Who Come Out as Volunteers

I had a message this week from someone called Alan, who wanted to know how he could get involved with a volunteer project in Greece. He told me that he’d written to several projects and posted on several Facebook groups, but hadn’t had any response, and wanted advice as to what he should do next. I had a message from another volunteer, Helen; and I knew her from working alongside her in Athens on a couple of occasions in April. She asked me if it was worth returning to Greece, since the government is closing in on volunteer activities and she wondered if there would be any opportunities to get involved if she came out later this month.  Where does one begin to answer enquiries like these?

I then read an online article a mix of volunteers from a wide variety of backgrounds. There was nothing too complicated about the situations they described, they said nothing too controversial in their comments about the Greek government, and there was human interest in the tragic stories from the refugees with whom the volunteers had been working. But it isn’t all like that.

My favourite refugee-volunteer was an 18-year-old Syrian guy who’d completed his school exams and was now hoping to progress to college and university. You don’t get many refugees working alongside the volunteers, but he wanted to keep speaking English, and help in any way that he could. 

On several occasions, he helped us to serve beakers of hot chickpea stew from the back of our van in Victoria Square (before the police banned us distributing food in public areas.) His whole attitude was to grasp every new experience that life tossed at him. He’d crossed the Aegean from Turkey in an inflatable supplied by the people-smugglers, and had loved every minute of it. “It was wicked! Real James Bond stuff, you know, like making the big get-away to escape the bad guys!”

Who are the Volunteers?

They come from all over the world. Some commit to a month or more; others volunteers drift in and drift off. When they are part of a team like the “Bristol Group,” there is a self-imposed discipline that makes them totally reliable.  They say they’ll be there at 8am and they are there on the doorstep at 7.55. Then there are always extra pairs of hands to be found from students who like to combine a holiday with a bit of volunteering, but while there is always something to do, all the teams prefer to have members who are going to be around for a month or more, as this gives the project some operational stability.

Unless you arrive as a member of a major organisation like MSF (Médécins sans Frontières) it’s hopeless trying to plan life as a volunteer. Right now they need volunteers on the islands, but that could change in a matter of days. My advice to anyone coming out is to be flexible, be prepared to move around, and be humble – these people have suffered more than you can possibly imagine.

Organising Volunteers is like Herding Geese

Anyone who has ever volunteered to do anything will know the challenges of coordinating a team. Whether it’s the tombola at the School Fete or the Harvest Supper in the Village Hall, it is almost impossible to have people agree on either Organisation or Process. My own experience has been that the willing helpers fall into two distinct groups. There are those who want to be told what to do and how to do it – and they will then just get on with it in a spirit of quiet efficiency. Then there are those who take offence at the idea of being told how to do anything less complex than brain surgery and will do things their own way, regardless of anyone else. Working with volunteers to serve refugees is no different, and organising volunteers can be exhausting.

And since they are all less than half my age, I am immediately disqualified from saying anything that they would find worth listening to.

I exaggerate (poetic licence) but I did soon decide that I was most happily occupied in a quiet corner where I could sit calmly, peeling and chopping my way through a 25kilo bag of onions.  As for the music that the volunteers seem to require as constant background wallpaper, - I unplugged my hearing aids and was a Happy Bunny, murmuring to myself that one day they’ll grow up and discover that the entire pop music industry since the early 60s has been part of a CIA Mind Control programme. They can’t think, you know, totally brain-dead, probably just the way Allen Dulles planned they should be.

The Long Wait for an Answer

I have learned that the most frustrating aspect of being a refugee / migrant / asylum seeker is the endless waiting, day after day, for the appointment, the interview or the phone call that might, –just might, – take them closer to the start of their new life. This might be asylum, and the first faltering steps towards normality; it might mean a return to full-time education and the potential to plan a future career; it might mean a long-awaited family reunification. Through these weeks of limbo, there is utter boredom, and I soon realised that my feel-good-factor from chopping vegetables and feeding the hungry, was blocking one or more refugees. Any one of them could take my place at the chopping board and know that they were actively participating in their personal survival and progress towards something better. Anything would be better than the indefinite wait.

Handing over my Chef’s Knife

When Iokasti’s Kitchen closed, I had no qualms in handing my best chef’s knife to the kitchen team in one of the refugee accommodations and turning my hand to various desk-bound projects which I had shelved for lack of time and opportunity.  My time in Athens has introduced me to an amazing band of young people whose lives as voluntary nomads are focused solely on helping the involuntary nomads who drift westwards from Syrian and Afghanistan, having lost everything in their homelands. Many of these volunteers – the Dreadlocks and Tattoos as I called them in a blog post a couple of weeks ago – have put their own lives on hold for weeks, months or even years while they focus simply on giving less fortunate people a new start in life. You’ll find this eclectic tribe of twenty-somethings working in communities around the world, happy to be free, and happy to postpone their personal settling -down for a few years.

For my part, I have rejoiced at the opportunity to be involved and make a contribution in different ways. The funds that I raised bought van-loads of vegetables, rice and pulses that we cooked and served to refugees who were sleeping rough. I also bought hiking back-packs from importers in England and had them sent them to a UK warehouse from which goods are shipped out to Calais and beyond. As any walker knows, if your load is on your back, your hands stay free.

Telling it How it Is

Since the police closed down our cooking, I have been able to research more about the refugees’ long journey and make time to write this blog, which tells a few hundred people what it’s really like over here. 

From the emails that I have received, I know that this modest occasional scribble of mine has opened a few eyes to the realities of the Refugee Trail. 

I endeavour to remind them that last week the world press talked far more about a gorilla being shot than about a thousand people drowning in the Mediterranean. 

I try to put things in perspective.  

Tackling My Next Project

My time in Athens has also enabled me to progress with the development of my project, working with a group of slum schools in Bangalore, and the creation of a scholarship programme that will help lift some of the pupils of those schools out of poverty. For a commitment of £25 per month for 10 years, people in Europe will be able to fund a scholarship for a promising infant-school child. That scholarship will cover all their education costs including uniforms, school meals, all teaching and materials for the full 10-year span through primary and secondary education.

It’s an exciting project, and the story will be a continuation of this blog later in the year, because it’s another tale of being:-

In Search of a Better Life.