We woke to snow spattered Athens this morning. Having packed for warmer weather I had to rummage through four of our five carefully stuffed donation suit cases to find a jacket to borrow for the week.
Unfortunately the zipper broke on the one I chose on the way to the bus stop. Trying, in vain, to fix it occupied a fair amount of my attention on the ride to the camp.
It turned out a number of other volunteers were on our bus so when we got off we just followed the stream of passengers from the bus stop in the direction of the camp. We veered off from the main group, having arranged to meet Matt our volunteer leader at a nearby café for a briefing. As I sat at the small round table, looking out the large window to the petrol station and busy road outside, listening to Matt and asking questions with a paper cup full of steaming peppermint tea in front of me, I felt really lucky to be able to be here. When travelling I’m often looking for community and less than 24 hours after arriving in Athens we’d walked into what seems like a pretty cool and purposeful one.
Matt told us that there were over 3000 people in the camp but that it didn’t feel like that many. After walking around today I have to agree. The icy conditions probably played a role. But the fact that an average of over 7 people live in each small demountable hut probably also has a fair bit to do with it.
He also told us about the strategies in place for distributing goods. It seems like they have a large amount of clothing donations but sorting and distributing them is a cumbersome process. He said it was important that we don’t bring our own things to distribute because it is unfair when only some people get something. I was struck by the ‘fact’ that things ‘have to’ become impersonalised when working on such a large scale, it somehow still doesn’t feel right though. Especially considering what these people have already endured. I was also surprised to hear that so many NGOs are involved in this camp. There seems to be at least four or five on the ground here. A number of them are unstaffed at the moment due to the Christmas break. Later in the day one of the volunteers said that she found the people in the camp not to be so grateful of the volunteers and organisations because the large number of them means that the help has just become expected.
Before leaving the warmth of the café and heading back down the quite side road to the camp, Matt told us that a lot of people there, especially the teenage boys, seem to be bored. He said that there had been a few incidents of destruction, theft and annoyance from this group recently.