Support Refugee Women on Lesvos

Our Giving Food Truck (www.thegivingfoodtruck.nl) has been running at almost full capacity with cooking activities with residents to cater to the camp during this holiday season. We have created a special holiday season soup distribution on Christmas evening for the community of around 1200 camp residents (with the appearance of Santa Claus as well). In addition, we had a New Years food distribution from our Giving Food Truck with Syrian Women united to help. This was a very bonding experience for women to come together and to help feed and celebrate this time of year. This activity was supervised by our team of volunteers who are also spending this holiday season to support our work on Kara Tepe CampUS on Lesvos, Greece, with whom we are very grateful for. They have worked hand in hand with the Syrian women on the CampUS to make these soup activties a reality during the cold winter season.

Actvities
There have been a significant increase of boart arrivals of people from Turkey. This is a very dangerous journey which is prohibited, but continues in increasing quantities. Just to give you an idea, on New Years night there, was a boat arrival 15 minutes before the clock striked 12.00am and another boat arrival 15 minutes after 12.00am on January 1st. This morning, there was a boat arrival of 171 new people onto the island. To accomodate this, the camp management is using our Community Yurt where there they register all of the new community members into Kara Tepe. This has meant that we have not been able to conduct some activities due to the usage of space in the afternoons such as Cookies and Conversations as well as Cinema Night. We have been able to make use of it for a Ladies Night, where women gathered together with their kids as well to join together to dance. In addition, we have run women's activities where we are teaching women technological skills through our Digital Learning Lab. We are currently developmenting an art course for adult women. It is an informal art course, however has said to have an impact to help heal trauma in an artistic and uplifting way.

We have a team of up to 10 dedicated volunteers at any given time who are glad to continue running these activities as well as engaging more and more of the women to continue participating.

We look forward to keeping you posted about the developments of this project thought the coming weeks and months.

On behalf of Movement on The Ground and the community on Kara Tepe, thank you for making this possible!