What did you do at Ritsona Refugee Camp?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know a ton about the Syrian crisis until this week.  I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what is happening.  What I did know is that there are thousands of people in limbo because countries are closing their doors.  Going into this trip, we tried not to have too many expectations, and I’m glad we came into it with that perspective.  I tried to go into this week with eyes wide open to see and learn about this population and their needs.  

I’m a doer.  If you hang around me long enough, you realize that I like to get S@$# done.  So, it can be very much against my nature to simply soak in an experience and not look for a solution.  I can’t say I did that completely because by the end of the second night I was already searching online for ways to get even more involved.  BUT, I will say that as a whole, I did well to soak in the experience and learn.  

While I didn’t have any major expectations for the week, we did actually get our hands dirty and help with some tangible things for the residents of the camp.  

Ritsona is one of the better camps from what we’ve heard, but there are still many practical needs that need to be met for the families living there.  With so many people living in one place, there need to be systems in order to help out, and our team was there to help implement many of these systems that these great NGO’s have in place.  Our CCS team helped out at a few core areas and the team leaders did a great job of mixing up our responsibilities each day so that we got to work in a couple of these different jobs.  Here’s a quick overview of the different jobs we did as a team:

Shop:  

The Ritsona Shop is a hodgepodge thrift store that is filled up completely by the charity of others.  They have done a great job of turning the concrete jungle of a space into a colorful place that is organized by women’s, men’s and kids’ clothing.  Shallow plastic crates are labeled in English and Arabic (Kurdish coming soon thanks to a new resident from who had a successful career in fashion merchandising!).  Based on how many donations we got delivered from the offsite warehouse, we would fill these crates up with needed items.  There were some bins that were completely empty all week.  

Every individual at the camp is given a certain amount of “points” to shop with and each clothing item type is giving a specific value of points each month.  Some of the coveted items like black leggings for girls and shoes have a limit of only one per month, but everything else can be unlimited as long as they have the points saved up to buy them.  Points could be shared among family members and there was one time each month for each family to shop.  

As volunteers, we helped man the door, checking appointment times with teh schedule when a family would arrive to shop, folding and refolding clothes to keep the store feeling like a positive space, being “cashier” and counting/folding the items at checkout, and recording the points used in a laptop.  

The goal in the shop is to help make clothing distribution a humanizing experience, as well as fair for any/all residents.   The fair part is what gets hard when you have people who complain that the selection wasn’t good on their appointment day, or if they had to go to Athens to the doctor on their day, or whatever other story they tried to tell you.  Many people would tell you stories and try to finagle for a second chance to shop.  And while it was hard to look them in the eye and tell them they couldn’t come in, you also saw teh looks in others’ eyes when they found items they really needed.  Being fair was not always fun.  

Laundry

The laundromat was an experience!  CCS does the laundry for the residents and they aren’t allowed to get into the “hot box” as we liked to call it (it was truly just an oven all day long).  Most of the machines are labeled in Greek or English, and understanding how to use the machines would be difficult for most of the residents.  The electricity and plumbing to the hot box was also spotty at best, and so it was best for the organization to manage this operation.  

Residents could line up in the morning with their laundry baskets and on a typical day, we could take between 65-75 loads of laundry each day and we always crossed our fingers that we had enough water in the water tanks to finish them.  

The day I helped in Laundry, we had a power surge and that reset all of our machines for the first loads of the day.  This means that almost all of the machines errored out on us, causing us to spend almost an hour resetting all of the machines.  After finally getting all of the machines going, we got a second load going in many of the machines.  However, about 45 minutes after that the water tanks ran out, leaving us with over half of the dirty loads still dirty.  

We had been warned that people get very angry when this happens, and I get it.  They’re frustrated that they can’t even get their clothes washed.  I’d be frustrated too.  (They CAN wash things by hand in their trailer, but you can imagine that this can be very difficult longterm.)  Thankfully, water was down in other places around camp, and I was with a fellow team member who could explain in Arabic that we tried to do it but there was no water to finish.  Most people were very gracious about the situation and left their laundry there for the next day.  

Residents then picked up their clean (wet) laundry in the afternoon and would hang-dry it outside of their trailers.  The whole experience being only slightly different from what we experience back home.  ;)

Distribution

There are a couple days each month where CCS distributes some basic items:  hygiene items like shampoo/body wash and tea/boxed milk.  Every trailer gets a certain amount of these items and they have to come up to a window to pick them up. We got to help prep these items  one of the days, which involved bagging up a certain number of milk boxes and tea packets based on family sizes.  Then, for a couple hours, we were runners grabbing the right size bags based on the family size.  

Family Friendly Space (FFS)

Working in the FFS was not something I got to experience myself, but we had three females who did.  Those that were assigned here were in this space all week for continuity.  The FFS was a opening again after a hiatus and CCS had just recently taken responsibility for managing this space.  The FFS consists of two white trailers where women can feel free to take their head coverings off and interact with other women.  One trailer was full of four or five sewing machines and some fabric.  The other trailer had some spaces for learning languages and other interaction.  They had a futon and rugs and more decoration, with the intent that conversation and community can form in these two trailers.  

Even though this was the first week “under new management,” the FFS had a few regulars come by each day.  Many of them were excited to have a creative outlet and a chance to make something productive.  Others were soaking in the English lessons.  They knew that to be successful outside of the camp, they needed to learn English.  

Fence-Building

The FFS was surrounded by a fence at one point and when there was the gap in management, residents took pieces of the fencing to build their own patios and awnings.  So, the fence had to be rebuilt to help provide some privacy for this space.  We had a group of college students on a summer trip on our team and they built a new fence the week prior to our arrival completely out of existing materials.  Pallets are the main source of wood and came in very handy with this fence.  During the week we were there, teams worked each day to paint a colorful design to the fence.  

At one point in the week, someone questioned if the painting makes a difference and really helps.  I get why you ask this, because handing out milk and soap and clothing feel like more tangible ways to help.  However, when you consider the amount of PTSD and depression that runs rampant in the camps, I can’t help but believe that a brightly colored fence that has been lovingly painted can encourage and bring a glimmer of hope.  

There are a few other NGO’s around this camp that ran preschool classes, language classes, security, managing incoming residents, managed the facilities/electrical/etc., and more. There is even a soccer team that they formed and plays regionally in a Greek league.  

While we got to be doers this week helping around with these various tasks, we also got to see a lot.  We got to hear stories and observe.  All of that is priceless and really difficult to put completely into words.  One of the biggest things I learned this week was how this life at a refugee camp is just a chapter in a much longer book.  It may be a short or a long chapter, but the process to resettle in another country, learn new cultures and languages, process loss and trauma, and keep putting one foot in front of the other are many other chapters that haven’t happened yet for these people.  

There are people living these chapters out all over our globe.  They may not be from Syria, or Iraq, or Morocco, and they may be living out different parts of their journey, but they are walking through chapters that are still full of challenges still.  The questions I’m trying to answer now are what can be done to support my neighbors who may be walking in these other chapters of the refugee story.  

SaveSaveSaveSave