The hell of refugees in lesbos, second part: cold and abandonment

Las previsiones que auguraban temperaturas gélidas, en ocasiones por debajo de cero grados, se han cumplido y Kara Tepe, el campo de internamiento en la isla griega de Lesbos al que fueron trasladadas más de 7.000 personas tras el incendio de Moria, tirita de frío. Es el último y más urgente problema de una larga lista que se comenzó a escribir en el antiguo recinto. La situación, cuentan refugiados y organizaciones, es límite y sus consecuencias en la salud mental de los que allí malviven, preocupantes.

Ali Mustafa, a 20 -year -old Afghan boy, says on the other side of the phone that in recent days people barely left stores because it was cold.The field, located next to the sea, is very exposed and the only thing that separates them from outside is a plastic tent.Everything they have to protect themselves from the cold are layers of clothing and blankets.“We have no heater.We don't even have electricity in our store.We have a generator that turns on from seven to ten in the morning, ”he says.

“Lesbos temperatures have lowered a lot and it's very cold in the camp.The water is cold, the interior of the stores is wet.Everything is wet, even blankets and warm clothes, ”says Katrin Glatz-Burbakk, of the Children's Psychologists team without borders (MSF) in Lesbos, in a statement published Thursday.

At first, many of the stores lacked facilities to use these energy sources, according to Shirin Tinnesand of the NGO stand by me.Some asylum seekers who worked as electricians in their countries of origin, under the supervision of the field management, formed a team and got to work to adapt them.However, adds Tinnesand, the capacity of the available generators is insufficient and more powerful devices would be needed to use heating.

To the cold you have to add the wind and the rain.When the sky discharges water, not having an adequate drainage system, the field becomes a lodazal and humidity penetrates the stores and the refugee body.

An EU working group, however, has offered a different vision.In a report, to which the German newspaper Die Welt had access in January, they say that Kara Tepe's conditions are better than those of Moria.They defend that the stores are prepared for cold and rain, that there is a water management system to move it away from the tents and that there are heaters available.They also remember the provisional nature of this settlement.

A few weeks ago, different organizations such as Stand by Me Lesvos and The Hope Project collection of shelter clothes and blankets.Groups such as the MCAT, the Awareness Team on the Coronavirus to which the young Afghan, or Moria White Helmets belonged to the packaging and distribution.Mustafa says that they need many things because the field is new and have practically nothing, but that the most urgent is to have heat sources.

In that practically nothing that speaks, practically everything considered essential: there is no current water available 24 hours, the bathrooms are few, deficient and are cleaned only once a day, there are not enough showers and, until recently, not evenThey had hot water.“They have been bathing with cold water.There are some men for women, who filled a 20 -liter bucket, they went inside and had to throw that water above, ”says Tina Dahl, head of Nursing of the Physician Clinic Without Borders (MSF) in Moria.

All shortcomings also translate into long waiting tails.Waiting, in its two most common meanings, is what summarizes life best, understood only as the fact of being alive, between the fences and wires that delimit the field.

Mustafa arrived alone in Greece in December 2019 and, after having made the interview last November, they await them to communicate if he is a beneficiary of international protection.“I have a friend who lives with me and he has not yet received an answer.He is worried and thinking all the time, thinking what will happen if they reject him, what he will have to do ... It is a very stressful process, ”he says.

The uncertainty and the conditions in which they find themselves have been in the mental health of asylum seekers caught in the islands.At the end of December, the NGO International Rescue Committe (IRC) published a report stating that one in three people attended had suicidal thoughts.One in five said he tried to take his life.

"That is the result of waiting so much in the refugee field on this island," says Omid Mohammad, also Afghan and a member of the McAt.He no longer resides in the settlement, but continues to support those who are still there.“When people come from their countries, they know nothing about the conditions they are going to face.The asylum process is truly slow and are obliged to remain in this place with hundreds of miseries, ”he says.

IRC has been developing for two and a half years a mental health program on the islands in which, according to Dimitra Kalogoopoulou, director of the organization in Greece, have seen problems sleeping, depressions, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.The arrival of the COVID-19 and the confinement worsened the situation and found an increase in, for example, psychotic symptoms and autolesive behaviors.

Mustafa has seen him with his own eyes.He does not feel good most of the time.Apathy, frustration, isolation and discouragement extended in the field as the virus did it out of it.

“I even tried to hang me, but my son saw me and called my husband.Here I think a lot about death, which would be good for my whole family, that if I could put a medicine at our food and we all would be a release.But then I look at my daughter and think that it is not her time, ”says the testimony of a 32 -year -old woman collected by IRC.The little ones are not oblivious to the suffering of adults.“Parents, families and caregivers are not well and this, obviously, deteriorates the mental health of children.It is a kind of vicious circle, ”says Kalogeropoulou.

The MSF Child Mental Health team in Moria has treated children with anxiety problems, who have suffered panic attacks, wet the bed or with suicidal thoughts."Now, at the beginning of the year, we have already seen three more children who have tried to commit suicide," says Glatz-Burbak.“It is not a site for children with serious traumas.They have to be evacuated.And it has to happen right now. ”

To the shortcomings that everyone suffers joins educational.Kara Tepe's little ones do not go to school.Asylum seekers themselves, with initiatives such as Moria Academia, have launched informal schools within their own stores or outdoors, when time allows.They do not have adequate spaces or the necessary resources, they do not reach all children, but they know that it is that or nothing.And nothing is not an option.

The only aspect in which this enclosure seems to have improved with respect to the previous one is security.There is a better division of space and more police control.According to Dahl, which refers to recent interviews with single women and men who came from Moria, they feel more safe in the new location, while men usually perceive the opposite.This is not the case of Mustafa, who claims to feel safer.

When the flames consumed Moria, some housed the hope of finally being relocated in other countries, of being transferred to the continent or having at least a ceiling in conditions under which to continue waiting.However, after spending days in harves and parking lots and seeing how the new field was built in a hurry, the illusion was giving way to resignation before a new mandatory internment.

For Imogen Sudbery, Director of Policy and Promotion for Europe of IRC, the situation in the Greek Islands is a consequence of the defects of the European asylum and migration system."It is a crisis made by man, so to speak," she says by phone in allusion to the inability of the member states to agree on the necessary reforms that give rise to a more human and sustainable scheme."One of the main cracks of the EU policy, in addition to the Dublin agreement, which prevents a fair distribution of responsibility in Europe, is the lack of safe and legal channels to request protection," she says.

As for the situation of those that are already in the islands, Sudbery speaks, among other measures, to solve the deficiencies of the settlements and accelerate the asylum processes maintaining all the guarantees.Also that more countries are added to relocation programs and that these commitments are fulfilled."In the long term we need a system that ensures that the people who arrive are quickly realized," he says, "but meanwhile, we have a population of around 15,000 people who have been in the fields for months and years and who need to be transferred immediately."

While waiting for that transfer and for the responses to their asylum requests, they want no one else to have to spend another winter in those conditions and continue to face, with few resources and much will, to the problems and indifference.

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