Providing aid to refugees fleeing Syria and other Middle Eastern countries is different than other disaster relief programs, Haines resident Eric Kocher said last week from the Greek island of Lesbos.
Kocher has been in Greece since early November, working as an EMT on the islands of Chios and Lesbos, where wave after wave of refugees are landing in jam-packed rubber rafts after crossing over five miles of the Aegean Sea from Cesme, Turkey.
In 2010, Kocher responded to the Haiti earthquake that killed about 100,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. With natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, Kocher said, the damage is more finite and comprehensible. The number of refugees fleeing conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, on the other hand, seems endless.
“Here, they do not stop,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine the numbers and how constant it is.”
According to a New York Times article published Nov. 4, more than 600,000 people have crossed into Greece from Turkey. In October, about 8,700 people were landing in Greece per day.
Kocher spends his days on a 10-kilometer-long stretch of rocky beach, waiting for the black rubber rafts to arrive. Smugglers in Turkey charge refugees exorbitant fees for a spot in the rafts, which are about 20-25 feet long with a piece of plywood on the bottom for stabilization. The primitive craft have outboard motors, which the smugglers instruct one of the raft occupants to operate, Kocher said.
Sometimes, four rafts arrive per day; sometimes 50, he said. On Nov. 9, one of the rafts Kocher met had 70 people in it.
“They have escaped an unspeakable terror in their home country, gone through all the agony of wondering if and whether to undertake the journey out, walked away with no more than a backpack, placed their children and themselves at great risk from the violence of the journey, and faced the final gamble, crossing the five miles of open sea from Turkey, not knowing whether the winds and waves will threaten their launch,” Kocher said.
“And then to suddenly, as their destination appears on the distant horizon and gets closer, to finally experience the euphoria of realizing that they will make it, the land is just 100 yards, then 50 yards, and now the raft scrapes the sandy beach and they can step out into the water just feet from shore and safety.”
Some of the refugees don’t get to experience that feeling of euphoria. According to the Nov. 4 New York Times article, a boat carrying more than 250 migrants capsized near the northern shore of Lesbos on Oct. 28, killing more than three dozen people. Other recent accidents – 11 people near Samos, two near Rhodes, six near Lesbos – add to the mounting death toll.
Kocher’s team includes a doctor, a paramedic and a nurse. They represent a nongovernmental organization Kocher declined to identify because of the conflicting sentiments surrounding the refugee crisis in Greece right now. (Already a fragile point, the issue is even more charged now in the wake of the Nov. 13 Paris terror attacks, which, according to major news outlets including Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, included a perpetrator who entered Europe via Greece’s Isle of Leros using a fake Syrian passport).
“The locals are frustrated at some of the impact of all the volunteering and all the refugees, but they are also very compassionate,” he said.
Kocher’s main duty is screening people for injuries or other medical issues. Other volunteers offer food, water, blankets and clothing. Some volunteers spend nearly all their time dealing with the one-time-use rubber rafts – which need to be punctured and removed from the shore – and the thousands of discarded orange life vests choking the beach.
“There is a whole volunteer crew who just cleans the beach of rafts, of engines, of life vests. The beaches are totally littered,” Kocher said. “If you didn’t clear up the rafts and life jackets, it would be difficult for the boats to land.”
The outboard motors are being collected by various people, including “scavengers” who Kocher has been told sell them back to people in Turkey.
Every day brings new people with new stories, Kocher said: A newborn baby, birthed in the mountains of Turkey a day before its mother crossed the Aegean; two men who said they had been beaten with metal poles, burned with a cigarette and held captive for two weeks before escaping on a raft; a 9-month-old baby handed off by its father to a student doing a documentary on the refugees, because the father couldn’t get a spot on a raft.
Kocher recounted the story of a 14-year-old girl traveling with her 12-year-old brother and a cousin. “(She was) carrying a heavy garbage bag of her belongings. She exclaimed how scary the trip was. I asked if she needed help and where her parents were, expecting that they were somewhere in the crowd of refugees at the harbor.”
It turned out the girl’s father had been missing for the past three years. Her mother, who began the journey from Afghanistan with the three children, was stopped by police along the way and detained. At the time her mother disappeared, she was in the car with another married couple, who continued traveling with the three children.
Kocher took the children to the medical clinic because the girl was having trouble breathing and her brother had a pain in his ear. “(The girl) recounted that she had left Afghanistan because of the bombings and war all around her, of the Taliban killing people, and because an adult male relative had been violent and abusive to her, her brother and mother,” Kocher said.
The girl told Kocher she learned English by reading newspapers and books, and by using a dictionary.
Almost all the refugees are thankful to be arriving in a European Union nation, Kocher said. Many jump out of the raft before it lands, scrambling to the shore.
Once the people receive food, dry clothes and necessary medical care, they must walk to either the east or west “collection points,” where they are met by a bus that takes them to a camp a few miles away. At camp, they are issued a piece of paper assigning them to a particular bus that they take to a registration site near the town of Mytilene, a ferry port. From there, they ferry to Athens and undertake the remainder of their journey. Kocher has heard many of the refugees are headed to Germany.
“The Syrians – because of the active war – are entitled to immediate asylum. The Afghans have to go through a longer process to establish their entitlement to residence in the European Union, but others, such as those from Jordan or Turkey, do not enjoy that status and have to travel undocumented and are subject to deportation if they are identified,” Kocher said.
Kocher has been posting daily diary-like entries and photos on his Facebook page. He said he has received a lot of support from Haines residents, and that he finds it rewarding that he can at least give people a realistic portrayal of a crisis that may otherwise get lost in the noise of the 24-hour news cycle.
Kocher is scheduled to fly out of Greece on Monday to meet his children in San Antonio, Texas, for Thanksgiving. He said he is considering returning to Greece after that trip.