A friend asked me earlier if I was doing any writing about my time in Greece. While I definitely want to, my thoughts and feelings are still a jumble and I don’t know what would be interesting and relevant to others. So, for the time being, I scribble some of those jumbles here. It is interesting how many moments I feel I have experienced in the last few days that would take pages to describe even if they only lasted seconds or minutes. Like when we were sitting at the occupied municipal building whose assembly had invited syrian war refugees to use (there are almost 50 of them living there now). We had a meeting to coordinate logistics and make sure that we understand their needs. There is one man who speaks decent Greek and a few who speak English who did a lot of the translating back and forth. It struck me how similar we are, syrians and greeks, with a dozen conversations going on at the same time, in greek, english, arabic, with the babies being passed around from lap to shoulder, from mother, to uncle to us greeks and back, the kids running around listening, playing, giving and getting hugs, showing us what they made with a bit of play clay, pulling us into their games, all the while discussing medical needs, how many more blankets we should bring, repairing the leaky roof, making sure that there are no dietary restrictions other than pork, making sure we all have contact information, admiring how our names are spelled in arabic. And then we finish and they start to thank us and we stop them, remind them, no thank yous. Because to thank is to imply that we are there to “help” them, that we are doing them a favor, that we are the “nice” ones, instead of the fact that we are all there, syrians, greeks, men, women, kids, elders, because we are just humans engaged in a common struggle, that we are equals who have found ourselves in the same moment and place, no matter how different the journeys that brought us here may have been. Solidarity, not charity. Like a meeting that I was at later yesterday, between anarchists, people from assemblies and local groups and Syrian refugees to talk about how to address the situation at a scale larger than the 40-50 who can be accommodated at this one occupied building. There are 603 syrians who were part of the tent city that they had built at Syntagma Square, where they had been forcibly evicted from at 3am in the night a few days back. There are at least 35,000 syrian refugees in greece at the moment. There are at least 1.3 million syrian refugees at the border with Turkey. Another 700,000 in Lebanon. Just the other day a vacant boat was found floating in the Aegean. We don’t know if the occupants had snuck on land or are at the bottom of the sea. What we do know is that this is a massive issue that will not let up any time soon. What struck me so much was how what almost everyone was saying was permeated by a fundamental humanity, by the recognition that we all must do what we can. It doesn’t matter that greeks are struggling too. We need to figure out how we all make it. Folks reminding us that 90 years ago some of our grandparents were taken in by Syrians in Aleppo after they fled Turkey in the aftermath of the greco-turkish war of 1922, and now we had in this very room people who had fled war from Aleppo and it was now our turn. That we don’t know if in a year or whenever we may find ourselves with all our belongings in one bag in an unfamiliar land. Like one person saying, and pretty much everyone agreeing, how one of our goals should be that the syrian war refugees who are in our town for as brief or long a time as they will be here, that they have the most pleasant and fulfilling experience that they can. Not just food, shelter, medicine, legal support. How can we give a moment of respite to people who have fled from a war zone. How do we make sure the kids are not just clothed and fed but actually taken care of, that they enjoy themselves, play, learn, grow. That we owe it to them and to ourselves to not only contribute to their material needs but to their, and our, humanity and dignity. It is in those moments when I see anarchism transcending politics and ideology and becoming the kind of humanity that we aspire too. It is in those moments that I remember that I am an anarchist not because I hate the state but because I love who we become when we practice our values. Those moments make life worth living. Those moments give me hope that we will figure it out and we will make it.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 13:32:46 +0000
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