13th October 2024

Sharing Circles

Hi Everyone

On Monday we were officially inducted into the first of our work placements and were familiarized with the local links to public transport etc.

The hostel is better than I'd anticipated and is situated off a relatively quiet street about 20 yards from the main road which isn't at all quiet, it's absolute bedlam. There appears to be precious few rules of the road. On our first outing we had a motorbike pass us on the pavement in order to overtake queuing traffic. It then crossed the road on a pedestrian crossing to continue up the pavement on the opposite side of the road. This type of thing is commonplace and bits of car bumpers, wings and wing mirrors are to be found freshly scattered on most of the roads.

The hostel itself is very comfortable and although hot running water was something of an issue for a few days, we were told that it's all fixed now. The absence of personal space requires something of an adjustment, both from a having it invaded perspective and from an invading of other people's too. There simply isn't any. I'm more comfortable with it after being here for a week, but it is strange to not have any and equally uncomfortable knowing that neither does anyone else.

The other people here at the hostel are lovely and come from all corners of the world. Many are actually former refugees and some are quite young people who are travelling, but everyone has a positive and sunny disposition.

The food is excellent(I like it anyway), except for the porridge at breakfast time. I was adding milk and eating it cold for the first few mornings which wasn't great ...a bit like deconstructed chipboard but with less flavour. Liz suggested we heat it up, but not only did this fail to improve the taste, but it added a quick drying cement-like characteristic to it. It almost sets in your mouth and if you don't wash the bowl immediately, you have to practically chisel it off.

My dormitory is quite small, but there is only one other male here so there is stacks of room for us. He great; a student from Walthamstow. Liz's bedroom on the other hand is heaving and she tells me that there is stuff everywhere! I don't know how many girls are in there but Liz says the girl's clothes, bags, cases, shoes, toiletries and underwear is strewn everywhere. Like some kind of modern installation.

The toilets are interesting. The girls have their own of course, but the men's are unisex, presumably because we are so tragically outnumbered that we have to share. The cubicles have almost no legroom; I'd say that there is around seven or eight inches from the front of the toilet seat to the cubicle door and virtually no room at all to the sides. I have given this matter a great deal of thought and have reached the conclusion that in order to remove your trousers and sit down, you have to either dislocate one of your hips or do what I've started doing is to lower your trousers outside the cubicle , then elbow the door open, shuffle backwards to the toilet and finally close the cubicle door behind you(a great look). I have no idea how the Greek people manage! In the last few days I have looked at many Greek legs to assess their thigh lengths and can say with some confidence, that whilst I might be on the tall side, if I was Greek, my overall height would have had to be around four foot shorter for my relative femur length to be suitable for these cubicles. And, what about Scandinavians! I can't say that I've detected many conspicuously obvious Fins, Danes or Norwegians down here, but they can grow to enormous heights. They'd have to seriously consider standing on the toilet seat with one foot on each side and just hoping for the best ...ridiculous! Pythagoras was a Greek and is credited with inventing a formula for calculating the length of a hypotenuse in a right-angled triangle, but since you can't even squeeze your knee diagonally into the corner of the cubicle without fracturing something, you have to assume contemporary cubicle designers could do with a lot worse than remembering the great man's work. Better still, they could combine Pythagoras's formula with the wisdom of Poseidon, the Greek god of sea, rivers and sanitary ware ... just to be on the safe side.

Our first placement was with Humanity Greece. It is run by local volunteers and does its best to provide food and essential items to Athens' enormous numbers of homeless people, some of whom are Greek, many more are not.

We hope to work at three placements while we are here in Athens and the second one is a mobile laundry which washes the clothes of homeless people. It's a lovely concept called Ithaca Laundry and seeks to maintain an element of dignity in homeless people while helping to keep them healthy and making them more presentable when they try to find work. They also distribute food parcels containing essentials. When we arrived at the nearest location that the authorities allow them to set up, there were already over twenty bags of laundry ready to be washed (see photo 2). We spent the day trying to work in the shade as the temperature was in the high twenties (apologies to Simon at Trevaylor Campsite) as we worked our way through the bags. We got through thirty-one bags by the end of the day. Ithaca Laundry also provide a hair cutting service and Liz and I were asked if we had any experience in cutting hair ...I know! Liz flashed me a glance but it was too late, I had already said that I had been known to cut hair (Liz subconsciously put her hand up to feel her fringe and adopted quite a forlorn expression of loss. Time is a great healer, I hope). Anyway, the lady running the laundry service asked around but nobody required my services, which she said was probably their loss. Liz wiped something from her eye and looked away.

One of the other volunteers at Ithaca Laundry is Konstantina Plessa (this is her actual name, most other names that I may mention have been changed). She is an artist and former teacher. She got her Masters Degree at University of Middlesex and is best known for her portrait of Isabella Teotochi-Albrizzi, who was a patron of the arts and benefactor of the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo who was born in Zakynthos. The portrait is part of the collection at the Ugo Foscolo museum in Zakynthos, Greece. 

We had received a message to say that there would be a “sharing circle” at the hostel that evening. I imagined that we’d all be sat around sharing our thoughts and experiences (which was pretty much what it amounted to), and I must confess that a considerable part of me wasn’t exactly relishing the prospect. I’m not naturally antisocial but my capacity for socialising was feeling seriously depleted by that point in the day and a significant portion of me sighed at the thought of it.

At eight o’clock we arranged ourselves on the various chairs and benches in the rear, paved garden of the hostel and Katerina, the Volunteer Coordinator who liaises with the various NGOs in Athens sat herself directly opposite me. She said that the idea was for each of us in turn to tell the group how our week had been, and she asked the young American girl on my immediate right begin. Laura is from Maine and together with two others (from Pennsylvania and Canada) has been working at an animal rescue centre in the hills overlooking Athens. She proceeded to describe her joy in working there, the animals, the staff, the environment, the challenges etc., and when she finished, Katerina moved the conversation to the girl to Laura’s right so that it looked like I’d be the last one to go.

It followed the same pattern until it got to Philip, my young roommate who had been working in the Refugee Support programme where Liz and I have applied to do the majority of our work. He is quite a reserved lad of around nineteen years old and said very little at all about his time there. His work in Athens will finish at the end of the week and he will be returning home to London. All he said was that the staff at the centre were kind and that he had learned a lot. Katerina did her best to encourage him to expand but he clearly wasn’t comfortable going to any place where he might feel vulnerable and Katerina therefore moved the spotlight along to the young woman to his right, Nadia.

Nadia is a twenty-four year old Palestinian from Tel Aviv who is studying Medicine at Haifa University. She is thin, with fine, naturally elegant feminine, olive features. She has shining but solemn black eyes and thick, black hair that hangs in ringlets around her shoulders in a casual, youthful cascade. Her manner, though always polite and occasionally well observed and witty is conspicuously guarded. She had been working on the Refugee Support programme with Philip but explained that since her first language is Arabic, her perspective had been more poignant because the young male refugees had been able to tell her in their own tongue what their experiences had actually been; their journey, the cost (emotional and physical) and their various states of mind. Katerina observed, quite innocently, that this was an interesting perspective… thereby merely seeking to encourage Nadia to elaborate, but those words unfortunately pricked something in Nadia and she verbally attacked Katerina with a sudden and shockingly unexpected venom.

She began by saying that she resented the fact that she’d been told that she couldn’t help to resolve a particularly heated dispute which had erupted between the young refugees while she was there. She had seen it play out, she could empathise. She was also fluent in all the languages necessary (Greek/Arabic/English), so felt ideally placed to mediate. She then accused Katerina …and her organisation …and the NGO …and the Greek government …and the Turkish government …and the UN of not doing enough, of not caring enough. She accused them of paying lip service and for hiding behind protocol and politics. She said that the young men had alleged that the Greek/Turkish border forces were nothing short of brutal in their handling of them. She claimed that this abuse wasn’t random or isolated but systematic and institutionalised. She said that unbelievably, whilst at sea, the refugees’ inflatables were fired upon with rifles by the authorities to sink them. She barely maintained any level of emotional control but she remained astonishingly articulate as she explained the trauma these people had suffered both in their home countries and then on their journey (some of which had taken months and even years) just to get as far as Greece… just to find asylum … just to then become incarcerated in a prison. She turned to face me and said that the Centre is nothing short of a prison. She said that for Katerina to describe this as an, “interesting perspective” was an ignorant, inhumane insult as it was the only relevant perspective that any human could possibly deem relevant.

When she finished, the late evening Athens air fell silent and heavy. She clearly still had the floor and so nobody spoke. But after a while, Katerina nodded in my direction while looking at Nadia and said, “…you know that Rob and Liz will be taking over from you and Philip at the Refugee Centre next week?" Nadia smiled and said she had already spoken to us and that she thought that would be lovely. She said that we would be totally welcomed there. I asked her if she thought she might return to the Centre in the future. Her smile melted and she looked down for a moment before levelling those deep, black, sad eyes at me. She said she definitely would, but she would pray that it would as a volunteer and not as a refugee.

Rob.