Volunteers and refugees prepare dinner for about 400 people living in City Plaza. An abandoned, seven-story hotel is now one of the largest squats in Athens. A family heads downstairs from their room on an upper level in one of Athens' largest squats. Two boys mug for the camera in the squat's sixth-floor hallway. Children peek through clothes drying on a sixth-floor balcony at City Plaza. A woman walks through a tent encampment beneath a highway overpass in Piraeus. This gallery is part of "Life, Disrupted," a CNET special report on the global refugee crisis and how tech is helping, if at all. Here we see tents butt up against each other inside a Piraeus storage facility.
Tents line the walkway in front of an abandoned Olympic Airlines' terminal at Athens' old Ellinikon International Airport, Aid groups bring food to refugees in the create a iphone case port of Piraeus, Talking on the phone and playing mobile games helps a young man get through long hours of boredom at Ellinikon airport, SIM cards connect refugees to Greece's mobile carriers, including Cosmote, Vodafone and Wind Hellas, A mother walks with her son as she carries water and supplies back to her tent on the grounds of Ellinikon airport..
"My name is Rich," I said, introducing myself to Rokan Mohammad, a 23-year-old refugee from Aleppo, Syria. "Are you rich?" she asked. "No," I said, laughing. "Then change it!" she said. I've been thinking about that brief conversation a lot since getting back from a 10-day reporting trip in June. For CNET's Road Trip project, my colleagues Ben Rubin, James Martin and I traveled through Greece to examine the role technology is playing in Europe's migrant crisis. Social networking apps and Google Translate are standard fare for most refugees.
Talking to Mohammad reminded me of something all people can only really hope to have: agency -- the ability to move from one situation, place or circumstance to another, I think about the fear and doubt that must have come with Mohammad exercising her agency, making the dangerous trek create a iphone case across the Aegean to escape war and sacrificing everything familiar for the hope of safety, Her decision to leave home, she said, came after a she was shot in the back by a sniper, She still carries the bullet, I met her at City Plaza, an abandoned hotel in Athens that leftist and anarchist groups have converted into a squat for refugees, She moved there after living in Idomeni, a now-shuttered unofficial refugee camp near the Macedonian border that was notorious for its poor living conditions..
Her story wasn't the only one I'll remember from the trip. My colleagues and I visited refugee shelters of every variety: unofficial sites at Athens' port and airport, government-run camps, several different kinds of squats and even abandoned camps. The nicest-looking place, hands down, was City Plaza. Each refugee family has clean rooms with clean sheets. It was an abandoned building, and it now has running water, electricity and Wi-Fi. There are yoga classes and a cafe on site. Frappes cost half a euro.
