[MGSA-L] The Athens lawyer who became a guardian to refugee camp children

June Samaras june.samaras at gmail.com
Sun Dec 13 21:36:07 PST 2015


Use the link to access the full details with pictures

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/13/athens-lawyer-guardian-to-refugee-camp-children

The Athens lawyer who became a guardian to refugee camp children
Among thousands of refugees in Greece, the most vulnerable are the
unaccompanied children. Daniel Howden meets Christina Dimakou, who gave up
her job in the capital to care for them in Lesbos

Sunday 13 December 2015 07.30 GMT Last modified on Sunday 13 December 2015
09.25 GMT

Christina Dimakou is not yet 30, but she has four children, one of whom is
17. She shares neither a nationality nor a past with any of them. Two of
them are from Syria: the 17-year-old girl fled Damascus after soldiers
attempted to kidnap her and her brother, who escaped conscription; there’s
a 10-year-old from Iran who longs to go to school for the first time; and a
young girl from Afghanistan who has lost her family. For now Dimakou is
their guardian.

She cares for them within the confines of Moria, a makeshift hilltop camp
for refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos. Her charges spend their days
behind chain-linked fences where a discarded Minnie Mouse in a torn pink
dress, caught in the razor wire, is the only indication that this is the
children’s area.

More than 700,000 refugees have entered Europe through Greece this year,
most of them wet and bedraggled arrivals on its eastern Aegean islands.
Their coming has shaken Europe and changed the life of this determined
lawyer.

I’m trying to convince children as young as nine years old to listen to me
and not the smugglers

Instead of practising law in Athens, where she passed the bar exam, Dimakou
has moved her life to an island now famous for the refugees who wash up on
its shores. It’s a life with few of the trappings of the metropolitan
middle class with whom she grew up. Her working outfit is an aid worker’s
bib, her hair tied back. She shuttles between the crumbling neoclassical
architecture of the port city of Mytilene and the crowded refugee reception
centre at Moria in a battered Toyota loaded with translators and the dirt
from a thousand strangers’ shoes.

She is one of only a dozen members of the guardianship network, a
fledgeling programme run by the Athens-based charity Metadrasi, designed to
help the countless lost children who have arrived alone. Some have been
separated from their families while fleeing Syria, others have taken it
upon themselves to strike out and find a new home for relatives who will
follow later. Many of them have been told they carry their family’s only
hope.

To explain her decision Dimakou uses the allegory of the little boy and the
starfish. Every day he would go to the beach and throw a few of the dying
starfish he found back into the sea. When asked, in the face of the
thousands of starfish that would wash up, whether he really made a
difference, he would reply: “I make a difference to the ones I throw back.”

“I cannot save the world or make everything better,” Dimakou admits, “but I
can affect the things around me. If everyone does this then the world
becomes better. And we become better.”

In legalese her starfish are known as “unaccompanied minors” and no one can
be sure how many of them there are. It is the responsibility of officials
from the Greek police and the European borders agency, Frontex, to ensure
that all under-18s who arrive are taken into care if they are found to be
without a parent or relative. The reality is that since the surge began
earlier this year only a fraction of the true number of lost children have
been caught in this shredded safety net.

Dimakou’s role is to take responsibility for individual children, to be
their anthropos, the Greek word for person. She advises them of their legal
rights, helps them access medical care and tries to steer them to an
informed choice rather than submitting themselves to the dangers of the
smugglers’ march through the Balkans.

But on Lesbos she is struggling against a human tide of panicked arrivals,
most of whom believe that the door is closing on a historic chance to reach
the promised land of northern Europe.

“I’m trying to convince children as young as nine years old to listen to me
and not the smugglers or their friends,” she says. “To convince them to
follow legal procedures to be reunited with their relatives.”

An exchange in one of the dormitories with Ahmed shows how tough this is. A
willowy Afghan boy who would look younger than his 15 years without the
shadow of hair that connects his eyebrows, he has begun to chafe against
his confinement. One of the boys received a message saying that Europe’s
borders will be closed within a week and Ahmed wants to know if this is
true. Dimakou replies that these are just rumours. He is not pacified. “On
Tuesday they say I leave on Wednesday. On Wednesday I leave Thursday. But I
am still here,” he complains.

Dimakou moves closer and stoops to the boy’s eye level. There has been a
ferry strike she explains and this has delayed everyone’s departure. The
boy, who has used his suspicion and distrust like armour to survive the
three months since leaving home in Afghanistan, is not mollified. “Have I
ever lied to you?” she asks with pained sincerity. “How would I know?” he
replies with a shrug. Whatever the temptation to tell a reassuring lie she
is adamant that only the truth, with its complexities and disappointments,
can win the children’s trust. Ahmed needs another half-hour’s conversation
to calm down.

You have to let them tell you their stories. Let them stop being the strong
ones

Already hundreds of these frightened youngsters have passed through
Dimakou’s life. At any given time she may have up to six children directly
in her care, as well as dozens more needing her time and attention.
Confined to Moria they watch as tens of thousands of people queue for days
to register their arrival in Europe and get the asylum application
paperwork that allows them to travel onwards. The unaccompanied minors who
are identified among the crush will be here for between two weeks and one
month.

This is compassion against the clock for Dimakou. The challenge is
somewhere between foster parenting and speed dating.

“You have very little time to make the relationship work,” she says. “But
the children can tell who is really trying to help them from the people who
see them as numbers or files. You have to let them tell you their stories.
Let them stop being the strong ones, even if it’s for a short time.”

Her manner with adults is energetic and lawyerly. Out and about amid the
thousands of tents at Moria she dispenses no-nonsense legal advice to all
omers. Among the overwhelmed police officers and harassed camp officials,
there is a tangible respect for her work and tirelessness. The same
directness and bustle is present in her interaction with the children, but
it is softer and laden with affection. Ears are pulled, silly faces are
made and hugs are doled out generously.

“I want to be able to let them be children again. To admit that they miss
their mum,” she says.

It’s not hard to understand why many of the children regard their
confinement at Moria as detention. They now have their own separate area –
an improvement on the days when they were left to roam among the thousands
of adults – but a fence is a fence.

Once they reach the mainland and a place in one of Greece’s badly strained
care homes, the confinement ends and most of the children disappear, rather
than wait for up to seven months for a legal reunification with relatives
elsewhere in the EU.

While there is no end in sight to the refugee crisis and the need for more
than the 12 existing guardians is glaring, the fate of the guardianship
network is unclear. Greece’s well-documented economic woes mean state
support is out of reach and the pilot scheme funded by Norway, Iceland and
Liechtenstein is coming to an end.

The guardians receive a monthly stipend for their work and would continue
to offer their services for free. But without basic funding the network
cannot survive for long.

 ‘They are suffering. They are without their parents, an education, a
future’: Dimakou in the Moria camp. Photograph: Nikos Pilos for the Observer
Back in Moria, Dimakou has a game she plays to help break down the barriers
between the children, with more arriving every day. Standing in a circle
and asked to say their name, they are given a ball. Before one child passes
the ball to another they must name the person they are passing to. After a
hesitant start, the ball is pinged back and forth while names are called
out in Pashtun and Farsi, Arabic, Somali and Urdu.

For the children their main lifeline with the outside world is the
smartphone. Among the four or five words of English all of them know is
“selfie”. But the phones are also a conduit for rumours and misinformation.

“The children have so much information from so many places, from friends,
from smugglers, from family,” says Dimakou. “You have to give them the
truth. You have to keep a calm head for their sake. They see you as a
trusted adult, a grown-up friend.”

Dimakou’s life, her home, cats, friends and family have been left behind
for now. She insists that the people who really belong in her life will
understand why she has chosen to be a guardian. “I am not the one who needs
emotional support. They are suffering. They are without their parents, an
education, a future. Who am I to say that I have a burden?”

Taking a rare coffee break by the harbour in Mytilene, Dimakou offers a
glimpse of the vulnerability that underlies the fierce drive. She swipes
through a series of pictures that show a 14-year-old boy with a goofy smile
and a taste for baseball caps on what looks like a holiday. The boy is
Anas, a charismatic but troubled Palestinian who got into trouble after
arriving at Moria. He only showed his sweeter side after Dimakou spent the
time to convince him that she really was there to help.

“Of course I get sentimentally involved with the children,” she admits.
“It’s hard when I lose contact with them.”

After Anas’s time on Lesbos the pair travelled together to Athens where he
had a place in a children’s home. He later ran away to continue to his
dream destination, Germany. In a thread of messages on WhatsApp he shared
his journey with her in broken English. The messages and pictures sent
while he travelled across unwelcoming borders and strange cities are full
of fear and excitement. The final message, sent from Germany, contains a
promise not to forget her help, it ends: “Christina u same my mother”.

After so many nights of worrying about the fate of lost children, receiving
this digital postcard was, she says, the best moment of her life.

To donate to the Observer and Guardian refugee appeal, please go here

https://guardian.charitiestrust.org/guardianappeal.aspx

---------------------------------
June Samaras
2020 Old Station Rd
Streetsville,Ontario
Canada L5M 2V1
Tel : 905-542-1877
E-mail : june.samaras at gmail.com
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