Night Shift & The Life Jacket Graveyard
Last night I worked my first night shift, from 12 am - 8 am.
I spent the first part of the night shift in the New Arrivals rub hall. Most of the men were sleeping by the time that I arrived, but there were 4 guys who smiled at me and beckoned for me to come to come over to their side of the tent. It took me a little while to get their names down — there was Sub jalahee, Jalal Baloch, Salal Baloch, and another guy whose name I never learned. They were 22, 23, 24. I asked them why they had come to Greece, and they told me that they had fled Pakistan because they were journalists who had been reporting about the conflict between Balochistan and Pakistan, and it had become dangerous for them to remain in the country because of repressive government censorship. I had never heard of Balochistan before, so Salal showed me a picture on his phone. He swiped right, and the next picture on his iPhone was a political cartoon depicting the Pakistani army stepping on Balochistan with one foot, and stiff-arming a journalist. "Pakistan does not want any press to know what is going on in Balochistan,” Salal informed me. He swiped again and showed me a fuzzy video of a group of shadowed figures firing machine guns into the air. “They are freedom fighters from Balochistan,” Salal explained.
They taught me how to play a Pakistani game which was very similar to the Korean game yoot-no-ri, so I was able to pick it up pretty quickly, but my team still lost 4 / 4 of the games that we played.
At 3 am, I left the relative warmth of the rub hall to rotate with the volunteer who had been stationed in the Olive Grove. There wasn’t much activity out in the Olive Grove, so I paced around in the frigid darkness to stay warm and drank in the austere nighttime beauty of the Greek countryside under the stars. After all the frenetic activity of the past few days, the silence and isolation was a refreshing lull in the storm, and I was glad of the opportunity to catch up on my thinking and praying. But as the hours dragged on, the boredom became something of a trial in itself… At one point in the night, a stray dog materialized from the darkness and trotted over amiably. I gave him a good scratching, and for the rest of the night he patrolled silently behind me. I was grateful for the company. Since he's a Greek dog, I named him “Timothy,” after St. Paul’s greek protege.
Around 4 or 5 am, the cold started to become unbearable, so I found myself curled up in a porta - potty, a keep-warm strategy I had learned from another volunteer… In retrospect, there are a dozen better ways I could have kept warm, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
During the day, a few of the members of our team rented a card and drove to Molivos, on the other side of the island, to visit the life-jacket graveyard. Molivos is the part of Lesvos that has the shortest crossing to Turkey, so it is the destination spot for most of the refugee-laden rafts that have been crossing the Aegean, and so thousands of life-jackets have accumulated along the shore, and the local government has deposited them in a valley in the hills. It is a surreal sight, to see shredded boats and a mountain of life-vests surrounded by sere mountains like the detritus of some apocalyptic disaster. The sheer number of life-jackets is overwhelming.
Fernanda, a volunteer from Brazil, said what was on all of our minds, “It’s crazy that each one of these life jackets represents a person. And God knows all their names.” The mood was subdued and solemn as we moved between the massive mounds, thinking of all the faces of the people we've met in camp, and wondering about the people who didn’t make the crossing. We spent some time praying together before heading back to the Next Wave ship.
Visiting the life jacket graveyard gave us our first chance to get out of the city of Mytilini, and as we drove from one end of the island to the other, I was treated to a breathtaking glimpse of the scale and beauty of this island. We drove through hills alongside of stunning blue harbors and rambling green pastures, past sheep pens and olive groves, rustic villages and ruined Ottoman castles; we even saw an occasional flamingo fishing along the shore.
One of the unexpectedly heart-breaking things about the crisis has been its devastating effect on the local tourism industry. In general, I think the Greek people have been really great and generous towards the refugees, and many of the refugees are actually very appreciative of the Greeks, especially since their treatment in Turkey is so horrendous in comparison. But the refugee crisis has caused tourism to plummet, and I think the local populace can only bear the economic strain for so long before something needs to change. I think the popular media is largely responsible for this; tourists are scared to come to a place that the news has sensationalized as some kind of refugee Heart of Darkness.