Image source: Refugee Art Project
In December of 2015, I volunteered with CMS at a refugee camp in Slavonski Brod, Croatia during the Syrian refugee crisis. It was one of the most humbling and important things I’ve ever done. As I read the stories of countries welcoming Ukrainian refugees, I am relieved to see the kindness and support they are receiving. I am also panged with memories of the difficult experiences of Syrian refugees, and distressed by the stories of non-Ukrainian refugees being stuck in Ukraine without support to evacuate. Refugees do not choose their fate, and their lives are infinitely improved by those with the privilege to help stepping up and giving what they can. If you are in a place that needs boots on the ground volunteering, please do it. If you want to donate to refugees in Ukraine, and all over the world, consider UNHCR or Amnesty International.
Diary entries from the refugee camp in Slavonski Brod, Croatia
I am walking back into the distribution tent when I see a little boy standing inside the entrance. He is a bird of a child, and by his size and his baby eyes he can’t be much more than one.
He is so tired he barely changes his gaze to me, keeping a thousand mile stare even when he looks in my face, beyond my face, unblinking stare. His hat is twisted over one eye in a way that toddlers the world over will not, shall not, stand, but he has submitted to it, so exhausted that it doesn’t matter. His jacket is too-huge and the sleeves hang long and empty over his hands. His jeans are crusted with gritty camp mud, and the worst part is his feet. His jeans taper around nothing more than rumpled flippers of dirty, too long socks.
His father is crouched next to him, and sees me, and gives a quick nod to his bare feet. The Red Cross woman I do not share a language with is there in an instant, leaning over the railing and looking as the father’s fingers and then my fingers say size 20.
The boy’s back is to the wall and as I’m kneeling beside him he is wide eyed, surveying the hectic scene: people pouring in tired and cold at the far wall, Unicef descending on mothers and children to the left, families diverging to the right to scan the shelves and boxes for what they need, the harsh lights high in the arch illuminating everything in unforgiving brightness, people arranging and re-arranging all of their belongings as they try on warm things.
The police mill back and forth, chanting a firm refrain. It’s a breath in and then a strong bark “YALLA! YALLA! YALLA!- GO! GO! GO!” It punctuates the negotiations and searching and laden armed fumbling through the huge hallway set-up, people stumbling along together getting what they need as fast as they can before they are herded out into the cold again.
The carpet is littered with the detritus of so much harried human movement: a thin layer of the ever present gritty mud, tea cups discarded hastily while retrieving clothes, old broken shoes left behind, baby crackers dropped from tired hands and crumbled under muddy feet, various tags and wrappers from the small quantity of goods that have been donated new. And here again we have, at the end of this long tunnel of early morning activity, the little boy- a baby, really- standing next to me at the entrance, silent, swaying in sleepiness.
I sit on the ground and gently pull him into my lap to wait for the shoes as his father leaves in search of all the other countless things needed. I have become used to the trust of a stranger giving their child to you, a stranger, and having faith that you will do everything you can for them while they attend to other children, or help their wife get medicine, or find food. I have held and dressed and fed and passed off so many children, babies, held hands of older ones looking through the crowd for their families. This small one will not be the last.
His lightness is startling and shows me even more just how oversized his coat and socks are, just how new to the world he is. As soon as he is nestled on me he lets out a shuddering sigh and folds into the crook of my arms, still staring, still absolutely silent.
I can feel the warm thickness of his dirty diaper and smell how soiled he is. I pull back the too long sleeves and see precious tiny hands. His fingers curl around mine as I note how each small pearl of a fingernail holds a wide crescent of dirt and grime. Dirt shadows each and every crease in his fingers. I can feel his breath hot on my cheek and it smells sour. I know what his ears and hair look like without having to see.
The shoes come quickly and as I coo and ramble and rock him I imagine not being here in a harsh bright tent at 5:00 a.m., putting ‘these fit well enough’ shoes over dirty socks over dirty jeans. I don’t want to be here doing this at all; in fact, to be honest, I loathe it- so I indulge in a fantasy of what I want to be doing, where I would be instead, the place I wish he was.
Here is what I want for him: It would not be 5:00 a.m. after days of boats and walking and trains. There is a bright bathroom. I want a tub filled with fresh water and suds and shiny bath toys bobbing while he plays and splashes and laughs. I want baby lotion and powder and the luxury of peeling a new diaper from a pile that has never had to be rationed. There would be just washed little pajamas smelling of dryer sheets with warmth still clinging to them. The room would be dark and safe and peaceful and I wouldn’t be on the hard, dirty ground giving nothing but a cold lap, the arms of a stranger in a loud foreign place. And when he drifted off to sleep he would be tucked into bed to dream in a place uninterrupted by train stops and distribution centers or the terrors that came before that.
He has endured my numb hand fumbling of the shoes, tugging and lacing and tying, without a sound. The room is clearing out and people are darting through now, late from registration and too late to find anything warm before the next train. The air is tense with the fear of being left or separated or not getting food before departure time. His father has gotten shoes for himself and socks for both of them and is back, jangling with nervous energy, reaching out and looking back, searching the crowds for his wife, for his other children. I know we don’t have a baby tent here where he can be cleaned and changed, and I know that his father will take him dirty and tired back out into the cold and back onto another train.
I don’t know when he won’t be waking up in the middle of the night to be registered in loud, cold, bright tents to be shuffled through endless lines. I don’t know how long he has been resigned to dirty diapers and chapped hands and bare feet, or how well he sleeps on trains in laps. I fix his hat, the hat he hasn’t protested this entire time, and stand up to wave goodbye to him and his father. He blinks back at me, too tired to lift his hand, and then they are gone.
I’m left struck in the doorway, exhausted, sad, anxiously angry. He is not my child, and I ache to give him something else. How must his father and mother feel? How can everyone not feel this? I picture my heart bursting with the volume of how much I feel it, my chest an explosion of thumping red which courses down my body and pools at my feet to mingle in the dirt, to cover the ground, to mark my soles and make a trail with every step. I desperately want everyone in that tent, everyone on those trains, everyone on those boats in the sea that may never make it to land, to know that there are people in the world who feel this for them, who ache with them, who want to help them.
I want all the people who don’t care to be able to reach inside of me and take this thumping red feeling and cover themselves in it if they don’t have it. I want them to come to this tent and be converted by a parent searching for shoes in the early morning as they are urged to go, go, go.
I want them to sit on the cold ground with a small child, under the weight of his need, surrounded by the churn of displacement, the humming engine of uncertain anxiety that powers all of this movement, and be immersed, baptized, changed, in the humanity of that moment.
As we approached the border, I got nervous. I had no idea what to expect of the camp, having only the stories and pictures of Presevo to guide me. I was told we would be staying in an apartment, but I didn’t know if that was on or off the campsite. I wasn’t sure about services or police presence or organization or cleanliness or treatment of refugees- it was all a big blank as to what we would be seeing. When I finally laid eyes on the camp, I was surprised at how big it was, and how clean and organized. The entrance was guarded with military members working a security station, and after clearing that we went into a brick and mortar headquarters building that was thrumming all over with police.
After the Red Cross tent we caught our first glimpse of the train tracks, the ones that brought up to four trains and, at one point, six to eight thousand people a day. Now, in the slower season, the numbers were down to three or four thousand. Still, looking at the tracks stretching to my right and left into the swallow of fog on either side, it was overwhelming to ponder the sheer amount of human traffic that had come through there.
Words like mass migration are thrown around but the mind struggles to understand the swell, even when the numbers are known and the pictures are flashed on the screen.
Even standing there in the cold silence with the signs of huge crowds all around me I couldn’t really picture the impact, the meaning of all of this movement, when it would stop, when everyone would be settled, what would happen.
There is something like a fog of human energy cloaking the entire camp, imprints of the thousands of people who have passed through. It’s palpable, and creates an atmosphere unique to the camp- something you notice when you come in, and notice when you leave. The air feels different.
We followed the tracks around to our final stop, the NGO supply shelter. Everything in it had the fingerprints of hours upon hours of painstaking volunteer labor. It was neat and tidy, with handprinted signs on cardboard giving a map for the shelves upon shelves of donations. Each box had been re-used tens of times, categories crossed out one after the other, so that you could read the history of contents on the side: underwear boy’s t-shirts towels women’s pants warm pullovers jackets.
Row after row, stacked almost all the way to ceiling, boxes on top of boxes, all labeled with cardboard tags and literally hundreds of different handwriting. It was here, of all places, that I felt the first pang in my heart, and my eyes misted over with tears. That little storage space was absolutely overflowing with a daunting amount of donations, and in the dim light you could feel the ghosts of all those volunteers all around you. The hours sorting, piling, folding, labeling, cleaning, packing, stacking, re-doing, making lists, taking in bag after mixed bag and sifting it all down into organization.
Every item had been donated used, so the presence of the people who had donated their things to others was there, too. And lastly, there was a moment of awe at just how much stuff, how many things, there are in the world. There is more than enough to go around, if we just had the systems in place to get it into the hands of those who need it. I was humbled and grateful to be a part of that human chain, throwing my small bit of energy into the work of making that transaction happen successfully.
Last night when we left our shift, we had to wait on the road for the train that was departing, full of the people we had just helped. In the cold night the train was laden with mist and condensation, and the windows stamped bright boxes along the side of the cars, framing different tableaus. All the carriages were what I would call packed, filled with people, babies on mother’s laps, men standing in doorways, children standing with noses pressed against windows the way children love to do when looking out. It did not look comfortable, and in the warm space of our comfortable car I felt a rush of guilt.
There was nothing, nothing at all, that differentiated me from those people other than the sheer luck of the coincidence of my place of birth. A random lottery chance that fell on me and gave me to America ensured that I was the volunteer, the helper, the driver in a warm NGO car on the way back to a clean apartment, and not a four year old with a runny nose on the lap of a tired mother, or a young man in dirty jeans leaning out the window to see the night covered landscape of a country he may never have planned or wanted to see at all.
So much yearning, leaving, anticipation, streamers of grief for what was lost, facing an uncertain future, marking paths on the human scale of boats, and trains, and tired feet. The nights feel heavy with the weight of human striving, the scale of displacement tilting everything out of whack.
Imagine winter clothes shopping for your children like this: you have been woken up on a train after sleeping in your clothes without a shower. You might not know where you are and won’t be told if you ask. It’s very late or very early and you have been traveling for weeks or months on this kind of haphazard sleeping schedule. You and your children are cold and probably hungry. You are going through the transit camp that might have what you need if you can get it, but you do not speak the language, and you have about an hour, max, to use the facilities, get food, get clothes and shoes and medicine, and get on the next train.
You know that you are choosing from a selection of used clothes under the pressure of there potentially being only one pair of jeans for your 12 year old daughter or one winter coat that is the right size for your 5 year old son. You have to assess size and suitability with only a glance and a “hold it up and see if it looks okay method”, testing the material with your numb fingers, taking whatever you can get. You struggle to maintain eye contact with the volunteer who is helping you as other volunteers rush back and forth and you stand in a line with hundreds of other refugees.
As a parent you are reduced to a narrow line of opportunity to provide for your child, who might be tired and frustrated and exhausted with the moving, who might be one of four other small children you must diligently keep gathered around you like chicks, lest they be lost in the crowd, which is made up of many other people who all share your same single-minded focus and purpose, who are scanning the shelves and boxes, who might be quicker than you to ask or to see. You might see someone reach out a hand and take the most perfect one piece ski jumper for a two year old and you have a two year old and you know now he won’t have that.
In the background you hear the police urging you to go, go, go, keep moving. And after all of that, you might still leave empty handed, or not have enough time to get all you need, so that you exit the camp still carrying the burden of needing to provide for your children.
When I have helped parents in this situation in the camp, it is their eyes I can’t forget. Huge and grabbing and taking in everything, searching searching searching, looking for what their child needs. And when I can pull something from the pile that is perfect- it’s warm, it’s clean, it fits and allows the child to move quickly through lines and camps and food stations and registration- the relief and happiness that roll over a mother’s face or a father’s face or an older sibling charged with providing for a younger one never fails to reach out and pierce me with a feeling of similar relief. It’s been taken care of. It’s okay. You did it. She’ll be warm tonight. He has clean clothes that fit now. Your baby has warm pajamas. This is one less thing you have to worry about in the mountain of things you have to worry about right now.
Because of this high pressure focus on things like jackets and jeans and shoes, parents might not have time to inquire about other details, so the volunteers scan the crowd for need and offer certain things before they are even asked for. Hats and gloves and scarves go longer than you take the time to think about when it comes to comfort against the cold. Over and over, more times than I can count, I’ve leaned across the clothes boxes to put on a bright warm hat and wrap a scarf around each child of each family, feeling a rush of satisfaction with every knitted slide against cold hair and exposed necks.
Sometimes they beam up at me and clasp their hands over my hands, over the hat that is covering their now warm ears. Sometimes they proudly say thank you in English followed by another language for emphasis. Sometimes they walk off waving and blowing kisses, or fluttering the ends of their scarves like a flag. Sometimes you look down in your hands and see a pile of hats and gloves and think about how much depends upon something as simple as the coordinated intersection of you and those donated things and a bareheaded family of children on a cold night.
The one thing that sticks out to me about last night is the family with four small children, all of whom needed hats and scarves. One by one I gave them out, and the kids bowed their heads down for me to put them on their heads. Each one put their hands up on my hands, still on their head, and gave a big grin and a smile. At the last minute, as the police were saying Go, go! another boy came up, the fourth child, and he wanted a hat, too. I was digging through the box that was sorely lacking in boy’s hats, the police were herding them off, and the boy sadly shook his head and walked away.
All I could think was that I desperately did not want him to remember this as the night his sisters got bright, warm hats and he left cold and empty handed.
A red hat was found at the last minute. I gestured him back over, miming apologies to the police shouting GO! GO! and I quickly slipped it on. He ran off waving.
Given the ability to bring resources together, it’s heartbreakingly easy to make a child so much more comfortable with just those few things. It’s unconscionable to not do it. There is no reason they should go without.
When you drive to the camp, there is a feeling of foreboding, the anticipation of the wall of emotions that hits the tent, tensing up to prepare to greet hundreds of desperate, hungry, tired, cold, beleaguered people. It always goes the same way- easy chat in the first few kilometers to wake up, to check in, then as we get closer the conversation dwindles off. I have never pulled into the camp without pensive, reflective silence. Some sort of reverence, a meditation, an acknowledgement as we go through the gates that we can freely come in and out, and we are the helpers, the privileged to help those who are streaming through a system of railways and empty fields and rocking boats on endless waters.
I was working near the scarves when a tall man in his twenties came up and pointed over the railing to a small, crumpled up, unimpressive piece of cloth. I was confused as to why he would want it, and pulled it out. It was just a tube of fabric, and in an instant he had fashioned it into a head covering that was warm and as stylish as something you would find on a hipster in New York. I complimented him on his eye, and he responded back in confident English and an easy manner. I also gave him gloves, and socks, and we were joking and talking back and forth the whole time.
At the end of our interaction, before he left, he gave a huge smile, filled with relief, and said “Thank you so much, my sister. Where are you from?” I told him, and asked the same. Afghanistan, he said, and I wanted to change the whole world into something that was different from what had happened. I didn’t know what else to say, so I just said “Well I think you’ll be warm and stylish on the next part of your journey- I hope you stay safe.” And when he left with another smile and wave, I realized that he would be safer than he was in his own country, and that he had to leave his because of mine. He was in the last group of people we helped, and the sun was well up now. We had worked from before midnight until 8:00 a.m. the next morning, and the light was somehow both weak and watery and far too harsh.
James, who had witnessed our interaction, asked me how it felt when he said Afghanistan. “I wanted to vomit” I said instantly. And not just for him- for everyone involved, for the civilians killed, for the men and women of tens of countries killed and put in harm’s way, for the rippling effects of being there.
The weight of his saying Afghanistan made me want to lie down in the muddy field where I was standing, under the fog filtered light, and cry. The relentlessness with which humans continue to find ways to kill each other made me dizzy.
My handing out a pair of gloves to a man with cold hands seemed laughably insignificant in light of drones and air strikes, but it’s all I can do.
If you want a reputable place for direct donation, you can donate here as well. This is an organisation run by a former colleague of mine, a Ukrainian woman currently in Kyiv.
