Get a mobile library to refugee camps in Greece

Hello friends, it's your favourite mobile librarians sending greetings from a very spring-like Athens.

We've had a very busy few months at the library with our well-attended sessions, childrens' activities and plenty of books being loaned and languages being learned. With the arrival of new children's Turkish books we discovered that the way to get young boys reading was to provide books about football. Unfortunately we currently only have one book about Ronaldo and that has caused many problems already about who gets to read it or loan it. We'll have to try and find some more, sooner rather than later!

Yesterday we had a lot of fun at Thiva crafting outside the van and discussing a wide range of things about the world with a small group of young boys inside the van, using an atlas (to find Japan and to follow the Nile to its source) a book on religion to find out just how old Buddhism is and a rather grandiose book called the Book of Knowledge to examine the solar system and find out about the Big Bang. '14 million years ago?' gasped one of the children in disbelief. Then he hesitated, looked at me and said, 'and how old are YOU?'

The situation in Greece reflects the general situation with migration in general in Europe. Since the fall of the Assad regime in Syria the vast majority of Syrian asylum applications have been paused indefinitely, creating a huge amount of anxiety and uncertainty for thousands of people. As one Kurdish man told me yesterday:

"We came to Europe thinking of our children's future, so they could have an education and contribute to whichever community they live in. This is a very important thing for us. What sort of parents would we be, taking them back to Syria now, with no economy, no infrastructure and no certainty either in the political sphere?"

This same man, upon discovering our library parked outside the camp, immediately called his sons to come outside. The two brothers, a little shy, perused the books. One took a couple of Turkish teenagers' books, the other took a couple of staged readers in English. They promised to come next week for a game of chess with our resident 'expert' Giulio.  The father continued, "there is no life inside the camp. We are like animals, given basic shelter, bad food and nothing else. Why are there not training courses, education classes, anything? People cause so many problems inside, but no one does anything."

The darker side of this unending limbo is that many people end up taking dangerous and expensive decisions. In another camp this week there has been an exodus of about 10 families who all arrived in Germany after paying a smuggler for papers to get them all there. About 3,000 euros per person was apparently the cost. The tragic thing is that smugglers are making huge amounts of money from desperate people who are often go into debt with moneylenders just to leave Greece for what they think is a certain future in northern Europe. Yet Germany is trying to deport thousands of people from its borders back to Greece, saying they have no space, and that these people were given asylum here in Greece, not in Germany. This is a situation caused by European indifference and wider political issues that have never been resolved. 

The global situation has never been more alarming. With the library we have noticed it getting much harder to find funding to continue our work. The question of migration is an awkward one for politicians. There seems to be no one willing to present a clear, compassionate vision for migration. But we need one, because we will only see an increase of people desperate to reach European shores, especially as climate collapse accelerates. Migration is one of the oldest human activities we have. It is only within these past few generations that movement has become so difficult, that borders have become so deadly.

In the face of so much tragedy, trauma and indifference at the borders of Fortress Europe, what the library does seems an inconsequential drop in the ocean. We find it so disheartening that, nearly 10 years on from the so-called migration crisis that Greece chose the path of constructing human silos in the form of refugee camps, of isolating people from services and the opportunities to form communities, develop a sense of agency, build sustainable lives here. These de-humanising policies are Greek, but they are also tacitly enabled by the EU.

We wish that the camps did not exist. If they had to exist we wish that there were, just as our Kurdish friend suggested, opportunities for education, skill-building and creativity inside of them. We wish there was a library and librarians, community spaces, chances for self-direction, sharing amongst peers. We wish that our small mobile bookmobile, perched on the camp perimeter, was not the closest thing many people get to any of these things. We wish that others would start to see all of these people as exacty that: humans not numbers, people with aspirations, skills and plans. 

If you were curious to find out more about the work we do, ECHO's coordinators were interviewed for a podcast called Information Gone Wild. We were asked everything from where our books come from to our favourite food (spoiler: chips, salad and tzatziki). You can check out the episode here. 

A few weeks ago a man from Afghanistan came to me to request a book. He asked me for psychologist and philosopher Viktor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning', based on the author's experience in a concentration camp. We managed to find a PDF and we brought it the next week. He was so happy when we gave it to him, saying that he had been wanting this book for a long time. The concept that Frankl puts forth is that we have to create our own meaning in order to live fulfilling lives, which means also finding meaning in difficult and painful moments. Frankl's idea was that we can endure much hardship if we can find - within and without of ourselves - a reason to continue:

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life..."

I hope that this book request, from a quiet, thoughtful person living in a refugee camp, can give us all the courage to create meaning in our lives and to struggle together through darker hours thay may be coming. 

Thank you so much for your continuing support for the library.