A day of solidarity, fun and community.

This is my third day in Kavala working for Northern Lights Aid.  As ever, it feels like each day is a week.  The camp I am working at is a Military camp just outside the beautiful coastal town of Kavala.  Set back and not visible from the road is a small camp, populated by Syrians.

The residents here used to be located at the notorious ‘snake pit’ camp a few miles away, they were there for a grueling 9 months.  Snake Pit Camp was situated at the bottom of a working quarry.  Incredibly hot with the added torture of an adjacent rock crushing machine.  As the name suggests, the snakes were in the camp in large numbers, all in all life here was pretty unbearable.

The Military moved the people from Snake Pit Camp to Kavala around a month ago due to pressure from Jenni James, an unstoppable humanitarian I first met in Lesvos.  The tents are inside an old army buiding and the basics such as food, water, toilets and shower are funded by the Ministry of Immigration.  The food is brought twice a day and consists of’ croissants, rice, bread and occasionally some chicken.

Northern Lights have been working at the camp to improve conditions and provide some dignity, as the wait for asylum is predicted to be a long one. Very few have left Greece through the official channels, the ‘good news’ stories are about people who have managed to pay to be smuggled out.  One family have recently been given relocation to Latvia, however they have been waiting in Athens for months due to bureaucracy.  Latvia have been forced to accept a small number of refugees by the EU, but there have been protests around the country against accepting any number of refugees, however small.

The camp has a very different feel and atmosphere than the camps I worked in back in April/May time.  The children are not as needy, they seem calmer and more settled.  Things are much improved on this particular camp from the days of the unofficial camps, which is a relief.  The people here have gone from arguably the worst camp in the area to one of the best.
Even saying this, people here are still waiting, waiting, waiting.  A beautiful lady I have spoken to a number of times told me how she had to leave Syria.  The bombs falling day after day, after her parents were killed in an air strike, she left with her young children and husband.  She is 7 months pregnant, and is desperate to be settled in Holland for when her  baby arrives.

The most amazing thing about this camp is the input of the local community.  I was blown away by this.  There are many local people who have been working hard with Northern Lights to  improve conditions.  Yesterday I was honored to attend a party on camp.  The children were all in their best clothes and cleaned up for the occasion.

It was organized by local people who brought amazing freshly cooked food and organized entertainment.  My donors paid for pizzas and refreshments which I thought was a great use of the money.  Some local teenagers provided live music and speakers were put up to play music.  The dancing was amazing, both Arabic and Greek music was played and smiling faces were seen across the whole camp.

To see the residents of the camp dancing and laughing with local people and volunteers from around the world was incredibly emotional.  This is what solidarity is about, this is what being human is about.