Athens | Story no2Walking together

I am from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan and was born to a semi religious family that had the privilege to possess an exemplary social status in the religious structure of the country, so most people treated us with respect, and generally we were privileged with access to anything we wanted. Later when I became an adult I had some problems of survival because I was persecuted and eventually had to leave. So now I am an asylum claimant. I still find that I have some privileges here, since I found good employment, I am being paid, I have family and friends safe around me and my children go to school. Yet there are many challenges on how a refugee survives here in Athens. Working everyday as a humanitarian actor in the refugee camps I bear witness on how life unfolds in the camps. I can say that people in the camps face a grave lack of human rights, in reality there is constant infringement of the rights of refugees, and in actuality they have deprived them of rights.

Since I was very young, I liked to discover things, explore different aspects and now I am in a city that is full of things to explore. First of all I am among people I never thought I’ll meet. The people that I deal with, the refugees, come from Maghreb countries up to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is an exciting meeting, I find it so challenging and I like being in such a multicultural and multinational environment because every day I learn new things from different people.

I am here since February 2016 and I am very familiar with the situation at the camps. I would like to start with an apparently paradoxical situation. There are many cases when a family of refugees that resides in the camp is given the right to live in a proper flat in the city. Yet, when transported there in less than 2-3 months they cannot stand life in the flat and they want to return to the camps. At the beginning, it was incomprehensible to me how could this happen. But then, I realised that the real reason that people request to return to the camp was because all this time in the flat, the people felt marginalised. Moreover after all these months or years in the camp people have their friends and neighbourhoods, and third there are forms of vulnerability, some suffer from chronic medical conditions and thus they need to be able to access various services that in the flat were not directly available. In the camp there are social workers and doctors from various NGOs that can be of assistance at any moment, whereas in a random neighbourhood without knowing anyone the isolation is detrimental. Instead they need to call to request for a social worker to reach them, and when one becomes available to visit them. They don’t have friends or acquaintances around; they are foreigners in a foreign neighbourhood so they are afraid and feel insecure in the flat. For those who do have children it is paradoxically a lot harder to send them to school. They feel awkward to take their kids in school and social workers are not enough to care for each family. In contrast, at the camp a school bus together with the appropriate social workers picks up and delivers the kids with safety. Daily contact with public services is also harder. Again, whoever lives in the camp and needs to access a public/civil service is usually accompanied by a social worker. If you live in the city, in a flat, although supposedly you are more flexible to choose when to go, for example for your AMKA (social security number), social workers are not available anytime. Thus the refugees visit the social services on their own and consequently do not get served and instead they face a range of bad behaviours from state employees.

However, progressively the situation in the camps deteriorates due to funds being cut and consequently available services become scarcer. Of course I do believe that if someone wants to find their way, they will do it independently of whether they live in the camp or in a flat. For example there are various people which are situated in the camp but spend all day in the city because they have jobs and they just want to sleep in the camps. Since these people stay there and work in the city and return at night only to sleep, sometimes even their neighbours think they left because they see the container locked all day.

Anyway I believe that the argument that people need to leave the camps and live in flats is not that simple. Every situation is different and depended upon a complex set of factors. For example, I am considered privileged living in a flat with my family in Kypseli. Nevertheless I have to confront the micro racism of the neighbours on a daily basis. Every day when I leave the house to go to work, my downstairs neighbours keep telling me to watch out my children because they make noise, or because they litter, or that clothes fell from the drying rag and that I should learn to buy pegs. All of these are petty reasons but they do constitute a racist atmosphere that eventually has an effect both on me and my children. Where I live I don’t have any Afghani neighbours to share similar mentalities. For example last night that was the longest of the year we have a special event, a celebration called YOLO. People usually gather and celebrate yet my family did not because we are alone in the neighbourhood. In contrast at the camp they organised a great celebration, this is especially important for the way a refugee feels in a foreign land. Generally one could say that there is a community feeling in the camps which is greatly missed if you live in a flat. It is so also so much easier to participate in lessons of languages, art and sports. There is an allocated space for the little children, a football field, special reserves of clothes, shoes and various small things that are of particular necessity, especially for children. The camp in a sense is the full package and if you live in a flat you don’t have these amenities. Mind you, what I describe is relevant to the camps that are relatively close to Athens. For the rest of them that are more distant like the Malakasa or the Thiva, the Lavrio and the Elefsina ones, the situation is extremely dramatic. Refugees are afraid during the night, there is a lack of security and if there is a need to go to the hospital you have to pay a fortune for the taxi. They are isolated places in the middle of nowhere. So, when we talk about camps you have to know that not all are the same. For example in Larisa, refugees feel so pressured and trapped that suicide attempts are common. So I will insist arguing that not all camps are the same. I would not suggest to any refugee to live in the Malakasa camp, Lavrio or Elefsina. From what I’ve seen I believe the best camps are in Schisto, Skaramaga and Eleonas.