There's also a chore board and everyone has a job to do, like cooking, working at the cafe or cleaning bathrooms. You can't live there if you don't work. There's one exception: A volunteer told me there's a man in his 80s or 90s who tries to do chores, but they tell him he doesn't have to. Dinner is served at City Plaza, Athens' largest squat. Every night, refugees and volunteers cook a big dinner. Afterward, people either help clean up, go up to their rooms or hang out in the cafe. I wandered into the kitchen, where people were doing dishes. Ben helped wash. I helped sort. People were singing and dancing to "Get Lucky" by Daft Punk and Pharrell.
In the cafe at around 11 p.m., people sat around a table, talking and eating a batch of fried calamari that the chef, a Syrian refugee, made for the cleanup crew, Among them were Han and Maia, two volunteers in their mid-twenties from Poland and iphone case easy to remove Spain, respectively, who had just started working at the hotel the week before, There was also Ismail Bnaoe from Damascus, who wore a bandana tied around his long black hair and a T-shirt with pictures of guitars on it, It seemed like the common room at a college dorm, after a night out, with people just winding down..
Every refugee I talked to was worried about their long-term future: when the border would open or when they would be able to reunite with family members in other parts of Europe. But in the short term, they're struggling with boredom. People are in tents all day, trying to escape the scorching sun in Greece. Most of those I spoke with just wanted someone to talk to. They wanted to tell me about the harsh conditions at the camps, their lives back home, their hopes for the future. One 15-year-old boy I met, named Omar Osman, wants to be the next Justin Bieber.
Barbed wire surrounds the Moria detention center on the island of Lesvos, Others were happy to talk because they were eager to draw attention to the situation, They want to get the word out about how people can help, One of my favorite conversations was with Yahya Lagbouri, a 41-year-old from Morocco I met at the Moria detention camp on Lesvos: "Everyone can help with money or time or advice, Just smile to another person, This is help."One of the most moving iphone case easy to remove experiences was finding the so-called life jacket memorial on the north shore of Lesvos, Just as it sounds, it's a shrine made up of discarded life jackets that refugees used on their journey to Greece..
We searched for the place for more than an hour, armed only with pictures on our phones from blogs that had reported on it earlier and with vague directions from locals: "Drive west for half an hour. Make a left at the goat farm."I was expecting a pile of life jackets along the beach somewhere, maybe the size of a small room. I was wrong. The actual place was overwhelming. There were huge mountains of life jackets and scraps of rafts, maybe eight or nine feet tall. They were stacked on top of each other, with pieces of rafts and trash scattered about. The site itself seemed to be a landfill. The smell at some places was so putrid I had to hold my breath. Flies were everywhere.
