BY JOHN THORNE AND ELLIN SPENSER
Winslow is a nightmare of checkpoints and secret police, and Lynwood Center has been bombed to rubble, while violent extremists have overrun much of the western U.S. and Canada. So you gather your remaining family members, fill a backpack with clothes and the last of your heart medicine, and set off on foot to seek refuge in Mexico. You don’t speak Spanish.
That, roughly, is the experience of hundreds of thousands of refugees struggling into Europe from conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia, cast in Bainbridge Island terms. We met a few of those refugees recently while volunteering as aid workers on the Greek island of Lesbos, a bottleneck where United Nation figures say about half of the one million migrants and refugees who have reached Europe by sea over the past year have transited.
The good news is that a relief effort exists, involving coordination among U.N. agencies, national governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The bad news is that resources are stretched thin.
On Lesbos, for example, much of the work to provide food, shelter, transport and medical care to new arrivals is shouldered by NGOs and grassroots volunteers.
Meanwhile, Greece has been struggling economically since before the influx began. Yet as long as war and oppression continue in their countries, refugees will keep coming.
Refugees like the Syrian man who visited a medical tent where John was serving as an Arabic translator; the man told how his foot had been mangled in an apparent rocket attack a year-and-a-half earlier and explained that he hoped for corrective surgery in Europe. Or the Syrian father who told Ellin (through a translator) how he and his three young daughters had been forced to flee for their lives after ISIS abducted his wife, whose fate he didn’t know. Or the young Iranian who delayed his journey to offer Farsi translation for aid workers.
Then there were the two boys pulled unconscious from the waves one night by the Greek Coast Guard. One died on the quay and the other was reported to have died in an ambulance, despite the best efforts of doctors, including those in John’s team. The boys were among roughly 3,700 people who are known or believed to have died last year trying to enter Europe by sea, according to U.N. figures.
On behalf of the people described above and countless others like them, we’re asking for your help. One option is to volunteer your time and skills with NGOs taking part in the relief effort. Medical expertise, language abilities or just a willingness to lend a hand are needed.
Another option is to donate to those NGOs, or to relevant U.N. agencies, or to the many online fundraising campaigns by individual volunteer aid workers.
Help is needed more than ever as winter deepens and conditions get increasingly tough. It snowed recently on Lesbos, even as arrivals continued.
Bainbridge Islanders generously support many worthy causes both here and elsewhere. Please consider supporting this one, too.
John Thorne and Ellin Spenser, both from Bainbridge Island, recently volunteered with medical missions to Lesbos carried out by Salaam Cultural Museum, a humanitarian NGO based in Seattle.
