Refugees begin to see Greece as home, not hotel

This article was published by Al Jazeera International as "The refugees making Greece feel like home". 

Fatima, from Afghanistan, converses with classmates at Melissa in Greek

ATHENS, Greece - Slowly, the Afghan girl articulates the words in Greek: “Me lene Zahra,” (they call me Zahra). Then comes the hard part: “I am not married. I am free,” she says, using the Greek expression for single, faltering on the vowels, laughing at herself and resurrecting the sentence.

Two weeks ago, Zahra and her friend Fatima boarded the tram outside their refugee camp at the old Athens airport and travelled downtown to Melissa, an organisation for migrant women. There they enrolled in Aleph, a municipally sponsored Greek language immersion programme.

The very name Aleph, Arabic for Alpha, reveals the Semitic origins of the Greek alphabet, adapted from the Phoenician some 3,000 years ago, and is meant to strengthen a sense of mutual respect.

Since last March, when Austria, Hungary and the former Yugoslav republics shut their borders to a river of migrants and refugees travelling from Greece to Germany, some 57,000 have unintentionally remained in Greece. Many are applying for relocation to other European countries. Others are applying for asylum in Greece.

Both processes will take months, and applicants are graduating from the state of pure emergency that brought them here. With the help of volunteers, they are attempting to achieve the normality attendant on fixed populations, and even the beginnings of integration.

“Maybe one day we will stay here and there is no way to go to another country,” says Zahra. Yet this is not the only reason they are learning Greek.

“They want human contact, in every way, just like all of us,” says their teacher, Vicky Tanzou. “You can come closer with the Greek people, you can be friends with them,” explains Zahra, who tries to talk in Greek to volunteers at her camp.

People’s likelihood of relocating out of Greece has little to do with their extrovert tendencies, says Nadina Christopoulou, who founded Melissa. “The desire to learn and to belong has very much to do with your background, your worldview, your vision of the future.”

Most girls of 15 and 16, Zahra’s and Fatima’s respective ages, are expected to start a family in Afghanistan; but tradition is not the force shaping these girls’ lives. Zahra wants to study civil engineering and chemistry. “My parents say ‘study first, then get married,’” says Fatima, who wants to be a doctor in Germany. “There is no way to be successful in Afghanistan - for women,” she says.

The girls’ brains, ambition and family support have shaped a sense of opportunity, and their gender has turned from a liability to a strength. Out of their traditional social context, refugee men are merely displaced, but refugee women are liberated, and Melissa has become their second home. “The one thing that has really impressed me is their determination to make a life in a new society,” says Christopoulou. “They are fully aware of the things we also perceive as oppressive…. domestic violence, for example, or the lack of access to education.”

Christopoulou and a dedicated platoon of migrant women from Africa and the Middle East conceived Melissa three years ago as a haven for new arrivals.

Melissa’s very arrangement is meant as therapy. “These people have not been in a home environment for months or years,” says Christopoulou. “A kitchen, a casserole, a pot of flowers, a pot of basil, a bowl of cherries - helps them make the transition so much better.”

The power of language – and makeup

Some normalisation initiatives come from the refugees and are strengthened by volunteers. Kastro Dakduk, a Syrian artist who made his way to Greece in the 1970s, has carved a shelter for some 300 refugees out of a disused school in the neighbourhood of Exarheia. Volunteers have provided food and clothing, but once those basic needs were met, the challenge was altered.

“I noticed the children all day would play football, play football, play football. I thought, what is next?” says Abeer Mawad, an English teacher from Syria. “Will they only play football?... The women sit down in the playground and talk. What’s the next step?”

One day in late March, Abeer, as everyone calls her, took a chair and a small Ikea blackboard, stood in the playground and waited. “Suddenly they follow me, the children and women, and come,” says Abeer. “We brought chairs and they sat and I began with my teaching.”

Abeer often had to knock on classroom doors where families slept into the late morning to convene her class. “Throw the sleep, throw everything and come,” she told them. Through the teaching of basic English to children, many of whom have never attended school because of the unrest in Syria and Afghanistan, Abeer began their transformation from fugitives to residents.

Exarheia is most famous as the capital of the Greek Anarchist movement, but the refugee children of the 5^th High School craved the trappings of order – a schedule, the demands of discipline and the authority of adults.

“Before everything was difficult. There was no speaking, only pointing. For example, going to the supermarket without speaking,” says Abeer, making the noises of a mute and pointing the way her students used to. “No! Now my students can go and speak English: ‘Yes sir, I need some water, Yes Sir, I need bread,’ and make conversation with grammar in a good way. When I see this, sometimes I cry, because I changed something inside them and outside them.”

Abeer flew to Germany on June 18 to be reunited with her husband and four children. Her final enterprise was a cosmetics workshop for young women. “It’s incredible how hungry they are for lipstick, eye shadow, particularly the Afghan women who’ve lived under the strictest regime,” says one volunteer at the school on condition of anonymity. “They wear their headscarves only halfway over their head and they see makeup as part of their freedom.”

Confessional theatre

A small number of Greek volunteers has achieved a rare social fusion for a brief period. Wilma Andrioti spent most of last year feeding refugees at the port of Piraeus. A few weeks ago, she organised some two-dozen Kurds and Afghans to retell their plight as a theatrical performance.

During weeks of rehearsals at her house, Andrioti and her two children, 11 and 13, became fast friends with the Afghan, Iranian and Kurdish refugees.

“We’d cook together, and what moved me was that because they felt obliged to me they brought whatever they were given at the camp – oranges, croissants, feta cheese in small packages,” says Andrioti.

“We played games and the Afghans taught my children the games they played back home … speaking words over hand motions – clapping, finger clicking, elbow bumping and hip movements.”

Andrioti now says, “We are a family with these people… They would clean and wash up everything afterwards. These people are civilised. They have noblesse, they have dignity and they are homemakers.”

Brave new continent

Integration is not everywhere offered, or sought, as keenly as it is in Athens, where refugees live in close proximity to Greeks. Most are kept in converted former army camps in the north of Greece, far from urban centres, and volunteer efforts are still focused on bringing them their daily bread. Some 8,000 are in enforced isolation on eastern Aegean islands, because a March 20 agreement between the EU and Turkey turned open reception centres there into incarceration facilities. Tensions in those reception centres are simmering.

But Greek volunteers and migrants who’ve spent decades in Greece have together acted as an outreach programme for the latest arrivals, in many cases supplanting the lack of state infrastructure.

“Greece never enacted any system of social integration, firstly because it was always a passage for migration, and secondly because it never really wanted to,” says Fanis Kollias, who recently started publishing Solomon magazine, exclusively written by –and for – migrants.

Kollias believes the first aid offered by NGOs and volunteers can be debilitating:  “[It] keeps refugees on a lower rung. It tells them, ‘I am here helping you because you need me and you will always be an inferior person.’… It doesn’t stimulate the refugees to begin to claim any sort of ownership. The point is to give people what they need to carry on alone.”

What Greece is witnessing now, through its accidental ownership of 57,000 refugees, is that humanitarianism is mingling with empowerment.

“We think about migrants in terms of their vulnerabilities and dangers they’re exposed to,” says Melissa’s Christopoulou, “but not on the basis of their skills, dreams, desires, their positive traits - their contributions.”

Girls like Zahra and Fatima are determined not to be victims, in Afghanistan or anywhere else. They have jumped at integration programmes like Melissa’s. In the process, they may be forming the vanguard of a new society on the edges of the troubled European continent.