By Jared Junkin
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“This camp for Syrians. English people, go away!” Almost two years have passed since I last set foot in Oriokastro, but I still remember those words. I still remember the hateful, squinting sneer on The Ring Leader’s face as he spoke them. He was an exiled Syrian, short and skinny, with dark, curly hair and a loud voice well fit for commanding the small crowd that had gathered around the two of us. He wore camo pants and a thick, checkerboard sweater to keep out the late-November chill of Northern Greece. He took a step closer to me and stared up into my face. "You are like woman to me. I could do anything to you, I could kill you, and you could do nothing.” Tensions between volunteers and refugees were usually quite low in the camps, but Oriokastro was an exception. It was a powder-keg, a camp on edge. It lay in the gutted skeleton of an abandoned factory just off the northbound highway outside Thessaloniki. A more dismal setting is hard to imagine: a decaying steel skeleton dashed with chipping white paint, a roof that looked sturdy but never really kept out the rain, an imposing barbwire fence that served no real function but to look imposing (it only encircled the front half of the building and the gate was never shut anyways). Everything about the camp—right down to its location—seemed to symbolize refugees’ disillusionment with the West and the ill-concealed reluctance of postindustrial Europe to cope with the influx of foreigners.
The highway was dangerous, and two weeks earlier there had been riots after a mother and her two children were hit by a truck on the northbound highway and killed. The Greek military who ran the camp had made arrests every day since, but they had all been related to the riots. The hit-and-run killer was unpursued. To make matters worse, it was a large multi-ethnic camp with an unusually high population of single young men (most camps are more than 90% women, children, and families). Gang violence between bands of Kurds and Arabs was a serious problem, and the sort of confused anger that’s so often productive of violence was endemic to the camp.
I understood the encircled, fearful resentment in the camps: the feeling of entrapment, and the urge to lash out that came from it. We’d been briefed on the situation by a volunteer familiar with the camp before we began our five-day-long clothing and medicine distribution. We knew the source of the anger. We made every effort to diffuse tensions as they arose. But sometimes they just need to flare. The crowd around me and The Ring Leader continued to grow. Hoping to deescalate, I retreated behind the makeshift barricade of pop-up fencing (the kind you'd see on the side of a road during a marathon) that we'd set up for the distribution. The crowd followed, and Lukas, a big burly German in his mid-20's with mouse brown eyes and a reassuring stolidity about him, came over to help. The ring leader started in on him immediately. "Listen, my friend!"
"You are not my friend." Lukas shouldn't have said that, for just as he did the entire crowd surged forward as if by some unspoken command, screaming with rage and hurling apart our barricades as best their tiny arms could manage. I had one child—yes, these were children, aged 6-14, who had been cursing at us, stealing from us, punching us, and burning us with hot tea and cigarettes for the last five days—tucked under my arm and another by the scruff of the neck and was leading both out of the barricades when I saw the ring leader, eyes ablaze with hate, as he reared up over a barricade and swung a closed fist palm down at Lukas. The German, an experienced boxer, caught the blow at the wrist and, squeezing a pressure point, forced the hand to drop something it held, which hit the ground with a metallic clang. He then let go of the wrist and slapped the ring leader in the face, who promptly burst into tears and ran away, the echoes of polyglot curses trailing him as he went. Without The Ring Leader, the crowd scattered. Lukas sat down in a daze. "My god," he said. "I just hit a child. What’s wrong with me?" I knelt down beside him and picked up the object that the ring leader had dropped. It was a foot-long piece of steel rebar, with one end maliciously sharpened into a cruel looking shank. The Ring Leader had tried to stab Lukas. He was 14 years old.
By that point in time I had been working at refugee camps in Greece and Italy for almost two months. I had seen a lot. I had heard a lot. I had witnessed and experienced suffering, selflessness, and love I never thought possible, and I’d squirmed uncomfortably as I tried to understand how local Europeans and drunk American tourists could ignore the refugee crisis so easily, when it was so close to them they couldn’t possibly not have noticed. Distance is the great ally of apathy, the father of inaction. Yet even in the absence of distance, inaction somehow reigned.
Through it all, through all the joys, sorrows, and contradictions, I had never cried once. I had also never been confronted so directly by physical danger. I went back to the volunteers’ shared apartment feeling completely shattered by the day, but all the while not crying. All the while not admitting to my friends around me what I most needed to—that I was scared of opening up, scared of crying, scared of weakness. I was too weak to admit I wasn’t strong, and I was suffering because of it.
The path that led me to Oriokastro begins almost two years before that night, in the sterile, superficially cozy halls of a pediatric psychologist’s office in New Jersey. I had just been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. The psychologist, beaming an indecipherable smile at me, said, “I expect great things from you. This is not a disability, but a greater delineation of who you are.”
I’d grown up an isolated child. Despite the best efforts of my parents and my brother to create a happy childhood for me, I struggled to find friends and felt unable to connect with the people around me. When the insouciance of youth wore off and I began to realize the full extent of my isolation, I rationalized it by assuming an aura of superiority that protected me from the feeling of not belonging. If I felt I was better, then there was no reason I should care about being alone. I protected myself by becoming convinced there was something inherent to my nature that made me different, and better, than everyone else. The diagnosis didn’t help. It only provided a legitimate basis for my beliefs. It only inspired me to persist in believing them.
Instead of undoing the psychological trap I’d woven for myself, I tried unceasingly to convince the world and everyone around me that I really was better. The lie was perfect if the illusion was perfect; I was safe in my superiority so long as I accomplished everything I set out to do and never needed help from anyone else. As I aged into young-adulthood, I gave everything I had in order to make it so. Everything became about success and failure. Every success was an act of validation, and every failure a shameful confession, a hot breath of doubt whispered into my ear. I tried and I failed and I tried again, and all the while I sank ever-further into isolation.
By the time I turned 18 I was a stranger to my family and friends. I was present in their lives, yes, but there was none of the emotional intimacy that defines friendship, none of the interdependence creates caring in a family. I needed no one and I loved no one. I knew something was wrong with my life. I felt like I was being torn apart, but I had no way of changing that without admitting to myself that I was not all that I needed, and in doing so, admit to myself that I’d been lying the whole time. It was too much for me to fix. I felt trapped, so I ran.
I deferred admission to my college and spent the next eight months travelling and doing volunteer work around the world. Naively, I expected my travels to spur quick progress on important issues. I neglected the fact that travel by itself isn’t sufficient to create change. We must also reflect and look back on our pasts with critical and inquisitive eyes. Who we are is determined by who we were and where we came from; only by understanding our past can we hope to own our future.
I spent two months traveling in Africa and a month working at refugee camps in Reggio Calabria, Italy, and then arrived in Northern Greece in mid-October. By then I was confident in my capabilities as a person, but I’d yet to confront the more serious issues I was working through, the reasons I left home in the first place. I yearned for home and I missed my family, but I’d yet to open up to them or anyone else. And that was exactly why I found myself so beaten by that day in Oriokastro.
Life in refugee camps is a war of attrition. You arrive with a certain reservoir of strength, and every day a little more of all the precious things you need to feel human (compassion, faith, the capacity for joy) are drained out of you. Refugee camps are places of purgatory, places that kill you slowly, like radiation, a little bit every day. It is death by queuing, death by waiting for life. And the feeling of dying is not confined to the refugees alone. Everyone breathes the same oppressive air in those places. Everyone fights against it. Everyone suffers (though doubtless it is far worse for refugees than for volunteers, who are free to go and to leave as they please). If you don’t have some way to replenish your strength—a loved one close at hand to hold at night, a sport or song to play that fills you up, a friend to cry to—it’s inevitable that the camps will get the better of you. You have to open up, or you will be broken down. So it was with me. I’d arrived in Italy one month earlier with a full reservoir of strength and a feeling of invincibility that every 18-year-old knows.
The day of my first boat landing was the first day that left me feeling weak and drained. That day, a Doctors Without Borders ship dropped a boatload of 400 live Nigerians and two dead ones at the naval dock in Reggio Calabria. They’d plucked them from the waters off the coast of Libya two days earlier, and now it was our job to register them, take their fingerprints, administer medical aid, and get them into camps. There’d been outbreaks of Scabies and Typhus on the boat, so we worked in full medical scrubs under a baking Italian sun. Sunbathing tourists looked on from a few hundred yards away as we worked, first unloading the dead bodies, and then the similarly lifeless bodies of the half-drowned and hopelessly acquiescent survivors. I’d like to say I was overwhelmed by sympathy in those hours, but the reality is I’ve never felt more disconnected from a group of human beings in my life. I imagine we looked like aliens to them, with our masks and our white suits and our pale eyes. I certainly felt like one. That whole day was jarring, but particularly so were the first few moments of the boat landing, when we unloaded the dead bodies and stuck them into a coroner’s ambulance to be whisked away and forgotten. Most of the volunteers were crying by the time we started unloading live people. I was not among them, and repressing my tears in that moment is something I’ll regret for the rest of my life.
That night I stayed up late talking with Karly, a young Swedish woman who travelled with me in Greece and Italy, and who, for a month or so, I counted among my closest friends and confidants. She cried that day. She cried as a I wish I had, with a willingness that felt mature and looked cathartic, and seemed far more in touch with the purpose of tears. We sat in a restaurant in Reggio Calabria, feeling uncomfortably burdened by the knowledge that while we were enjoying pasta and fresh fish, the people we’d spent the last 16 hours with were on buses to refugee camps in mountains. We felt guilty, and we didn’t know what to do about it.
We sat and we talked and we ate, and the conversation turned gradually, as it usually did, towards our lives back home. “Why did you break up with your boyfriend?” I asked her. I’d been wondering for some time. She spoke of him frequently, but when she did her words took on a character very different from the way we usually speak of exes. She spoke of him as one would speak of the dead. There was an unconscious yearning in her words that implied something had been lost against her will.
“I didn’t,” she said.
They’d been deeply in love, the two of them. They were both medical students at college in Sweden. He was the Swedish-born son of Lebanese Refugees who immigrated in the 80’s, and they had grown up on the same street. They had their first kiss at age five and their second at fourteen, and they had been together ever since. Everyone around them said they were the most beautiful couple they’d ever seen—beautiful not just in the way they looked but in the way they acted. Beautiful for the way they complimented each other’s flaws so perfectly, for how simply and truly they brought each other happiness. There was a joy of life in them, a mutual magnetism that brightened the world around them with the selfless ease of true love. They planned to get married when they graduated medical school, but his parents wouldn’t allow it. They wanted him to marry a Lebanese girl, and refused to support the marriage. When he defied them they threatened to disown him. When this failed they threatened violence against Karly. He had no choice. Two months before she arrived in Italy they said goodbye to each other for the final time, parting ways with the promise that, if they really loved each other, they would never speak again.
By the time Karly finished her story she was crying. I was touched by her openness, and by her honesty. “My god, Karly. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s okay.” She wiped away a tear. “Talking makes it better.”
“Do you think about him still?”
“All the time.”
“Is he part of the reason why you’re here?”
“I feel like if I save all these people, then maybe I’ll save him too.” We sat in silence for a long moment after that. “Why do you think you’re here?”
I told her I didn’t know.
There were several other days afterwards that left me similarly depleted, but it wasn’t until that night at Oriokastro that I finally felt emptied. After we left Oriokastro, we drove home to the volunteers’ shared apartment. I sat in a daze and looked out the window as the silent Greek countryside rolled by in darkness. No one spoke. We were greeted at the door by Lewis. He was a working-class Englishman in his mid-twenties who’d quit his job to found a food pantry in Thessaloniki. He was one of the happiest people I’ve ever met in my life.
“Jaysis Christ!” He yelled when he saw us. “You lot look like you’ve been sucked off by a bunch of bloody dementors!” A few of us managed tired smiles for him to chew on, and the rest staggered off to their sleeping bags. He pulled me aside after all the others settled in. “Listen mate, you can’t go back there.”
“We have to,” I said. “There are still 200 more people we have to get coats to.”
“Don’t you see what that place is doing to you? Every day you come back and there’s a little less light in your eyes. I can see it. It’s killin you. Take a day off tomorrow, please.” I told him I’d be fine and went to lie down.
Later that night I lay on the floor, curled up in my sleeping bag in the breathing, snoring semidarkness of the crowded apartment. I kept replaying that moment with The Ring Leader in my mind. The whole week in Oriokastro I’d been the one in charge of managing him. I was the one who’d scolded him, who’d headed him off when he made trouble, who’d caught him and thrown him out of our distribution area after he tried to steal from us. He hated me. He also had a crush on Karly. There was nothing between us but friendship, but The Ring Leader had seen our closeness, and in his youthful jealousy he probably assumed there must’ve been something more than camaraderie. I’m sure that made him hate me all the more. If Lukas hadn’t been there at that specific moment, he almost certainly would have tried to stab me instead. Could I have stopped him?
There was something else too. Five minutes after The Ring Leader left he came back with his father. The man’s fat, balding face was flushed and sweaty. He looked drunk. He staggered and pushed and shoved his way through the queuing crowd of refugees towards where Lukas and I stood.
“You hit my child!” He yelled at us, “You hit my child!” The Ring Leader stood meekly behind him and watched. The look on his face was one of breathless, astounded horror. I’ll never forget it. He was angry at me and Lukas, but he was scared, too. Very scared. And I don’t think he was scared of us. His father reached out to grab Lukas’s collar, but he was immediately restrained by a small handful of young men who’d been waiting in line. It is an extraordinary taboo in Arabic culture to counteract the will of an elder in public. It is an expression of profound disrespect in almost any context. I was shocked they intervened. A moment later, two refugees who lived and worked with us as translators got in between us and the father and defused the situation. In the end the father led The Ring Leader away, speaking angrily to the boy and slapping the back of his head as he went.
“Father no good, children no good,” Several refugees said apologetically after they left. I felt bad for The Ring Leader after that. Children are barometers, products of their home and their environment. The worse they are, the worse their lives must be. That’s why it’s impossible to hate a child—It’s impossible to hate someone you truly pity, and the cruelness of a child is always pitiable, because it is never their own.
I felt then, halfway between wakefulness and dream, a profound sense of hopelessness. I was afraid. I knew I was at the ends of my strength and I knew I needed to open up to someone, but I was unwilling to do so. I was also ashamed, ashamed that I couldn’t even deal with my own psychological malignities, which seemed so trifling compared to the vast suffering in the life of the refugee. Having to struggle with my internal issues was a luxury; the people with real problems were preoccupied with survival. I was here to help those people, and yet I was the one who needed help. It was sad and shameful. I was too preoccupied with my guilt to notice that I had admitted to myself that I needed help.
I fell quickly into the deep, dreamless sleep of the very ill and the very old. I slept soundlessly, unconsciously, and was aware of nothing at all until shortly before I awoke. I remember nothing of the dream’s inception, but I was alert and lucid enough to be absolutely certain that I was dreaming. There was nothing, and then suddenly I was falling through blinding darkness. I fell and fell; my stomach did tingling flips and my eyes saw nothing at all. I don’t remember hitting the ground either, only that when I stood up, still in darkness, I was in the arms of another, and I was sobbing my eyes out. I remember the warmth of the embrace and the feeling of love—the truest kind of love; the kind that is selfless, the kind that gives without fear of reciprocation or reproach—but mostly I remember the crying. I cried freely and without shame for the first time in many years. The tears were those of release, redemption, and finally, joy. It was the most extraordinary dream I’ve ever had.
I was still crying when I awoke on the sunlit floor of the apartment. I’d like to say that I didn’t try to hide it. I’d like to say that the emotions I experienced in my dream had touched me so profoundly that I no longer feared the vulnerability of crying, that I no longer felt the need to hide it. But that just wasn’t the case. Karly, who slept on a pile of yoga mats next to my sleeping bag, rolled over and stretched noisily in the morning light. She reached over and shook my shoulder gently (I didn’t have an alarm, so I relied on her in the mornings), and noticed the tears in my open eyes.
“Are you okay?” She whispered. I feigned confusion.
“What? Oh, yeah. I’m fine. My eyes just water sometimes in the morning.” I wiped my tears away and stood. She accepted my lie and we went about our day as normal. She never learned of my dream. No one there did. I recalled that day, already months past, when Karly opened her heart up to me. I wondered what it would take for me to do the same. I think that perhaps, if I’d really opened up in that moment, I would be a very different person from the one I am today. But the fact is my battle with the fear of weakness, the fear of vulnerability, the fear of being human, will not be so easily won.
Critique
Hi Jared,
The description in this piece is done remarkably well. The tension in the camps is conveyed expertly, and the immense and incredible detail of the piece is proof of the depth of the experiences behind it. However, the setting of the camps is a bit difficult to place. Though we know the basics, we don’t know what the camps looks like, and cannot feel it ourselves, making it difficult to fully comprehend the nature of the situation. By discussing more concrete details about the camps, the audience would be able to tie in the physical with the emotional, achieving a more thorough experience. What did they look like? How were the living conditions? In one of the first scenes, there’s nearly a fight. We know there’s a barricade, but what else is there? What time of day is it? More details can really ground a scene.
There’s a sense of removal of the narrator from their surroundings, and even the other characters. Although the narrator clearly makes a point to address the way they feel, their expression comes off as slightly stiff. Even in the final scene with the narrator’s dream, there’s something lacking in the expression of the narrator’s emotions that prevents the full force and significance of the dream from coming across to the audience. This may be due to the use of statements like “I felt like…” or “I was…”, which tend to feel stiffer. Using sentences where the emotions are present allow the narrator’s feelings to take center stage. For instance, “I was shocked when they intervened” could be written as “Shock struck deep in my bones.”
Overall, the piece is polished despite the aspect of emotional disconnect at times. It is well written, and an enjoyable read. Keep writing!