Support Lesvos Shoreline Response for New Arrivals

The last months on the island of Lesvos have been marked by momentous shifts for asylum seekers and refugees. Access to basic services and human rights have become even more tenuous for the many people seeking safety in Greece. In the past seven months, we have contended with some of the most significant challenges of our five years on Lesvos, but thanks to your generosity and steadfast support, we were able to continue providing support to vulnerable people on Lesvos by focusing on the distribution of non-food items, such as clothing, hygiene items, and baby items. In order to demonstrate the immense impact of your support, we would like to share with you some of the challenges that we have faced on the island since February, and some of the ways in which we have responded.

When we launched this campaign, we were tackling the daunting challenge of adapting our operations to the closure of Stage 2 transit camp, a support structure in the north of Lesvos in which new arrivals could receive dry clothes, hot tea, have a few moments of rest, and access to medical care. The journey across the Aegean Sea from Turkey is an often perilous one - without legal routes to asylum, people seeking safety are left with few options but to board an unseaworthy rubber boat, setting out across stormy waters and rocky shores in the hopes of claiming asylum in Europe. Stage 2 represented a crucial moment of recovery after such a difficult journey.

Stage 2 was closed down at the end of January, and our team immediately shifted to providing the same kind of support upon arrival, wherever people landed on the north shore. We established a mobile distribution team to give out blankets and dry clothes at the landing scene. As boats continued to arrive amidst freezing temperatures and harsh winds, without Stage 2 people found themselves waiting long periods of time in the cold before being transported to Moria Camp, in the south of the island, where they could register their asylum claims. It was vital to keep new arrivals warm to mitigate the risks of hypothermia - especially for the many vulnerable cases that often arrived soaking wet on the shore, including children, pregnant women and those with disabilities.

Throughout February, our distribution team was deployed to landing sites with a van full of donated items. There, they distributed dry food, warm blankets, socks and hats, as well as rain ponchos to offer some protection from the weather, as new arrivals waited outside. Thanks to your generosity, our team was able to secure a van to transport warm clothes and blankets.

In the last days of February and in early March, the situation for arriving refugees shifted dramatically. Following intense protests against the building of detention centres for asylum seekers on the Aegean islands, tensions on Lesvos reached a peak. With reports of threats and attacks on asylum seekers, humanitarian workers and journalists, the situation quickly escalated. Due to the atmosphere of insecurity, we made the difficult decision of evacuating our volunteers and suspending our primary emergency response operations - spotting and landing support.

Though we were not able to provide emergency response, we continued to provide non-food items (clothes, baby items, and more) whenever and however we could. A small core team of our long-term volunteers remained on the island, coordinating with other organisations and partners on the north shore to continue providing new arrivals with blankets, clothes, dry food and other essential items. Due to the tensions across the island, groups of new arrivals often spent days stranded on beaches in the north - thanks to our collaboration with partners in the north, we were able to ensure they could access essential items.

In March, asylum seekers arriving to the north shore were also impacted by preventative measures against Coronavirus; we continued to search for ways that we could continue to support them. New arrivals were often kept for weeks in isolated areas on the north shore for a mandatory quarantine period, without access to running water, or suitable accommodation. Due to the Coronavirus restrictions, we could not directly access new arrivals, so we provided food, clothes, and other items to the people through one of our partners in the north who was permitted to access these sites.

In May 2020, the situation changed further for people arriving to the north shore. An area on the north shore that was built in 2015 as a camp started to be used as a quarantine area. Anyone who arrived was tested for COVID-19, and then transferred to this quarantine camp at Apanemo to stay two weeks - though some groups stayed well over a month. The camp remains an extremely low-resource setting, with no running water or electricity, little access to medical care, and difficulty in isolating from other people; only the authorities and UNHCR had access to this facility. After this quarantine period, people were transferred to the south of the island where they can register their asylum claims.

Through this time, and thanks to the tireless work of our Logistics Officer, we were able to consistenly provide packs of essential items to people waiting in the quarantine camp (distributed by the UNHCR). Since May, 504 people have stayed at this quarantine camp, according to UNHCR numbers. One quarter of them were under 18. In order to support new mothers and the specific nutritional needs of newborns and young children, we were able to provide packs including baby milk, baby bottles, diapers and other hygiene items (thanks to a generous donation from another NGO on the island). Our Logistics Officer also tackled the feat of organising our warehouse in the north of the island, also further expanding our provision of clothing, etc other organisations serving asylum seekers in the south of Lesvos.

In early September, fires devastated Moria Camp, where over 12,000 refugees and asylum seekers were residing - the day after the fires, we immediately supported our partners in the south of the island with urgently needed items, such as bottles of water, baby food, and dry food.

Unfortunately, as the changes we described reflect, the process for people arriving to Lesvos has become increasingly militarised. As recent news reports confirm, the illegal practice of pushbacks has significantly increased in the Aegean Sea - this has made it nearly impossible for people to seek asylum, a right to which they’re entitled by international law, and has greatly reduced the numbers of arrivals to Lesvos.

In this context, our role in emergency response became extremely limited. Though we continued to help in any way we could, it is no longer possible for us to provide the same dignified emergency response that we committed to in September of 2015, five years ago. After much deliberation and painful discussions, we recently made the decision to formally cease our Emergency Response operations and to withdraw from the village of Skala Sikamineas, the tiny fishing village that is the base of our operations. To learn more about this decision, we invite you to visit us online here. 

In the short-term, we have focused on distributing needed items from our warehouse in the north to other organisations across the island, particularly in this time of acute need on Lesvos. In the long term, we are identifying the biggest needs both on Lesvos and on the mainland of Greece, to see how we can respond to the short-term and the long-term impacts of the fire, which are vast and multi-faceted.

We would like to conclude with a heartfelt thank you to the invaluable support you have provided us over the past eight months - thanks to you, we have been able to continue providing essential items to asylum seekers and refugees across Lesvos.  Despite the immense challenges of the last months, we hope to have brought a measure of comfort and dignity to people who have risked everything to seek asylum in Europe. We cannot thank you enough for the vital support that you have provided along the way.  

Links:

• A Farewell to the North: Our Decision to Leave Skala Sikamineas