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.

More deaths might stimulate some EU action

Maybe, once refugees start dying
from disease, food poisoning, malnutrition or exhaustion, maybe then the world will take action.

The UNHCR had a little whinge on Friday. They said that they were seriously concerned about “sub-standard conditions at several sites in northern Greece. They added that: “the conditions of the some of these sites, to which the refugees and migrants are transferred, fall well below minimum standards.”

Yes. They do.

The UNHCR spokesperson, Melissa Fleming, explained : “Some of the refugees who had been living in Idomeni have been moved into derelict warehouses and factories, inside which tents are been placed too tightly together, so that air circulation is poor, and supplies of food, water, toilets, showers, and electricity are insufficient.”

The report stated that more than 1,400 people sleep all together in one high-ceilinged room filled with long rows of canvas tents. Though all windows and doors are kept open, the air is humid and smells of human waste. Refugees said that electricity is available for only a few hours per day, and at night the warehouse is pitch-black.

Food Poisoning

When I read about the food-poisoning at Piraeus yesterday, I cried. It takes a lot to make me cry, but I was very angry and very sad.  I ran restaurants for 15 years, and I know that most food poisoning can be avoided by simple hygienic procedures; the stories from Friday’s outbreak suggest gross negligence and laziness.

Spread the Truth

You probably won’t get anywhere with your MP, but you can get local. Lobby your council; talk to community groups – your local football club, the schools, the sports centres. Get the word around. Help ordinary people understand the scale of the crisis, because the media aren’t telling the whole story.

Talk to Faith groups, regardless of your personal beliefs, because these people can have international influence: the vicar, the rabbi, the imam, in your local churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Together we have a voice that can be heard.

Alternatively; wait till people start dying.

Thousands died already

Thousands already died trying to reach Europe, if a few hundred more die in the camps, it might finally tip the balance to initiate serious, practical, humanitarian action.

It's a terrible thing to say, but I don't think the governments of the EU will do anything until more refugees die. 

More families. More children. 

More desperate people who have only their lives left to lose 

- because they have already lost everything else.

We need action if we are to stop putting lives at risk.

The Party's Over

They're closing camps and shipping people around, but not a whisper from the EU about where everyone will be going - eventually.

How long does it take to relocate 8,000 people who have been living under canvas for months? According to the spokesperson for Migration in the Greek Government,  the evacuation of the camp at Edomeni should be completed in a week. 

They have promised no violence but took the precaution of evicting all journalists and political activists before they started on the relocation process, just to make sure that no record would be made of any regrettable excesses of police enthusiasm. 

This also means that there will be no photos of grateful refugees smiling and thanking their rescuers, in the way that the ordinary people of France noisily welcomed the Allied troops into Northern France in 1945.

But such scenes would not have been taking place in Greece, anyway. 

Violence is far more likely.

When it comes to getting people to move, the violence is not always physical, but it is inhumane: like limiting the water supply to drinking water only, and turning off the water supply to sanitation and showers – as happened at Vial camp on the island of Chios. 

I find myself haunted by images of Jews being relocated in the film, Schindler’s List, with the persistent dehumanising of people through the assertion of authority.

" A modern welcome ! "

At a far less disturbing level, it’s like being back in the Security queue at Logan Airport in Boston. The officers of the laughingly-termed “Department of Homeland Security” are permanently stony-faced. 

When I have attempted any touch of normal sociable interaction I have been taken to one side and have gone through more searches and the ignominy of that awful full-body X-Ray scan. 

There is no connection, no interaction, and not the slightest hint of humanity. This is the way government employees treat the public. No wonder the phrase "Civil Servants" has more or less disappeared from modern English usage.

I should be grateful that I face the positive racial discrimination that comes with being white, and which still creates a degree of preferential treatment in many parts of the world. But I don't like it, and it made me very uncomfortable to come through Heathrow a couple of years back, and see the smartly-dressed black businessman off my flight, being pulled aside for further interrogation and a check on his hand-baggage.

But that’s nothing to what these heroic survivors in Greece have been through; these brave refugees of the horrific conditions in Afghanistan and Syria.

The normal behaviour of people interacting with refugees involves the automatic and involuntary assertion of a differential in status: I am a legitimate European: you are intruders, and if you expect us to help, you’ll have to behave yourselves. 

Stand in line. Don’t push. Wait your turn.

If you want to feel the full irony, look back at the videos of tearful families landing on the beaches of Samos and Lesvos and falling to their knees to give thanks to God for their rescue, their safe arrival, and the prospect of a secure and happy future. This is painful irony.

Syrian refugee praying his thanks for arriving safely in Greece

I could feel the false authority that the refugees invested in me, when I was handing out polystyrene beakers of hot food in Victoria Square. 

They formed an orderly queue, avoiding eye-contact, resisting excessive laughter and lowering their voices respectfully. 

They were like the infant class at a primary school, learning how to queue, learning how to behave, and learning how to respect authority.

But mostly, the refugees who waited in orderly queues weren’t children: they were a cross-section of humanity, some with far higher qualifications than mine, with far more money than I have ever seen, (on deposit in a bank somewhere,) fluent in two, three or more languages and just wanting to join their friends and relations in making a fresh start and creating a new life for their family. This link will take you to a short video of refugees being interviewed. https://vimeo.com/magnacartatv/refugetrailer

Demonstrations in London in March this year.

The latest UK survey published last week, showed that Britons are more willing than almost any other people in Europe to welcome and absorb refugees. So what is it that the UK government is afraid of? I am back to where I was a month ago: ashamed of my government and ashamed of the European Union.

But the bureaucracy lumbers on, and here in Athens a bizarre mix of volunteers, comprising idealists, anarchists, evangelicals, radicals, liberals, and New Age Hippies will eventually disband and disperse. These twenty-somethings with tattoos and dreadlocks put smiles on children’s faces, and bathe babies in the Piraeus caravan that serves as a temporary child-care facility. They are ingenious and street-wise, and keep one jump ahead of the police, so that when they were no longer allowed to cook in the port, they found a local Piraeus restaurateur, who opened up the flat roof over her premises to create a new kitchen for them to cook meals for refugees.

They are now on the hunt for a vacuum packing machine, so that they can create food with a longer shelf-life, packed in 20-portion sealed bags which can be transported easily to detention centres outside central Athens.

These are the same crowd who not only got English Language classes up and running at one of the Refugee hostels, they also found enough teachers from within the refugee community to ensure that this project will be self-sustaining almost from the start. Nobody told them to, and nobody pays them. 

They work for smiles.

Meanwhile all Europe is worried as to whether the EU really is such a good idea after all. For most of the volunteers, this is a no-brainer: Europe needs to reach common policies and common legislation in many areas of everyday life. But, at the same time, we don’t need straight bananas or straight cucumbers, and we certainly don’t need Health & Safety legislation that makes it illegal just to act sensibly without having constantly to check on legislation at every step of the way.

Keeping the children amused

Volunteers in Athens have consistently moved swiftly to meet new challenges in rapidly changing situations. Almost all the refugees who arrived on the beaches of Samos and Lesvos were greeted by volunteers who were in Greece at their own expense. They met them with love, compassion, dry clothes and blankets. At least a dozen names should be on the Honours List, in recognition of their dedication to humanitarian causes.

But dreadlocks and tattoos don’t generally go to Buckingham Palace to be acknowledged for their dedication to humanitarian causes, and dreadlocks and tattoos don’t generally go to the Palace of Westminster to decide how to resolve the humanitarian crisis.

Dreadlocks and tattoos get stuck in and make things happen, and Westminster is not run by dreadlocks and tattoos, so perhaps whatever needs to happen will go back to the Committee Stage and be bogged down for more months, while children miss another school term, and a pregnant mum hopes she'll have a home by the time baby arrives.

This week, the refugees might be sweltering in their tents pitched on tarmac; then the seasons will change and they’ll be soaked and shivering. Meanwhile the first million emigrés who were absorbed into Germany are earning, spending and paying taxes.

Would Jeremy Corbyn have handled things differently? I’m not sure, but I’ll guarantee that the dreadlocks and tattoos would have had it sorted out by now. How do we make the changes, how do we "Be the Change" without a revolution? Maybe, in the end, it will have to be revolution. I hope not: but I do hope and pray for radical change.

As of yesterday, there were 54,469 refugees officially registered in Greece

Many thousands more are unregistered.

The line between Kifisia, to the north of Athens and Piraeus to the south-west is the oldest Metro line in the network. It’s not been bored, deep below ground but, like London’s first Underground line, the Metropolitan, the initial section was constructed by the self-explicit trench and fill method. While the airport line is new, with gleaming, spotless coaches built by Hyundai in South Korea, the Piraeus line has old rolling stock with wooden seats, the outside of the carriages decorated with crazy spray-painted patterns in garish colours.

The Piraeus Metro

It trundles out through the suburbs, past the Olympiakos football stadium to arrive eventually at a high-roofed, fin-de-siècle station that is reminiscent of a more genteel kind of tourism.

If you look around the carriages, you’ll probably see at least a couple of refugees, curled up sleeping on the bench seats. The regular ticket costs just over £1, and is probably the cheapest place to sleep under cover, in Athens in the daytime.

Across the road from the station are the gates to the port, where complimentary shuttle buses wait to transport passengers to their inter-island ferry-boats. They take a circular route, so each bus has an eclectic mix of passengers, island residents going home after visiting relatives in Athens, tourists island-hopping across to Hydra for a change of scenery, back-packers heading for Samos from where they can take off, as I did forty-odd years ago, heading across Turkey and Iran, with the ultimate destination of Kashmir. And, of course, there are refugees, heading back to the sprawling camp.

As the bus approached Gate E-One, the police boarded and demanded to check the papers of anyone with a dark skin. They were dispassionate and efficient, but I felt a chill down my spine. Now, I always carry my passport here in Greece. Last time I felt obliged to do that was Checkpoint Charlie, East Berlin, November 1961.

When I came down to Piraeus last month, there was a substantial camp around Gates E-2 and E-3, but these settlements have now been cleansed so that tourists setting off to the islands are not affronted by the sights and smells of poverty. The only campsite now permitted in Piraeus is here at E-1, way down more than a kilometre along the quayside, Here, little nylon igloos are pitched on the tarmac or in an empty warehouse, or under the flyover, and stretch into the distance, literally as far as the eye can see. 

Refugee tents - as far as the eye can see

The numbers have gradually dwindled as more and more refugees are relocated out of town. A month ago there were about 5,000 living here; now it’s nearer 1,500 who are fed by a team comprising both refugees and volunteers.

Volunteers prepare about 1,500 meals every day

There are always new rumours, of borders opening, of new enormous detention centres opening on the islands, and of what will happen in Piraeus. They say that the authorities want to continue emptying this camp and relocate the remaining hundreds of refugees to secure accommodation outside Athens. The refugees just want to get out of Greece, where the police and military are increasingly aggressive. 

The only countries that seem to understand the opportunities created by the crisis are Germany and Portugal – but while Portugal wants refugees, refugees don’t want to go to Portugal, which is an unknown country for them. Over the next four years, Germany is planning to invest 93.6 billion euros in integrating refugees to boost the German economy. Germany seems to understand, but as ever – Britain is an island.

Meanwhile, the volunteers keep working, trying to make life bearable for families living in tiny tents on tarmac.

A Syrian teacher is teaching Arithmetic in a makeshift open-air classroom.

Meanwhile, a luxury cruise liner is moored just across the harbour.

There is no lack of willingness to learn

Volunteers also organise games and races for the children to stop them from being bored

Priority is given to women and babies,
with volunteers manning the caravan for baby-bathing

All these children want is a safe home and an education