If I had to choose one word for the day it would be useless. We spent another 8-hour shift at the camp today. Refugee camps are miserable places. And they are dismally miserable in the pouring rain. Today it rained crazy rain. For most of the refugees there is no where to go to seek shelter, hardly anywhere decent to even sit down. Here's the one spec of good news, every single one of the ponchos you all donated were put to good use today!
I spent the majority of the day working in clothing, sounds like a section in a department store but couldn't be more dissimilar. The camp has a clothing tent where donated clothing is sorted and distributed to needful refugees. The process from start to finish is extremely painful. Helping a soaking, exhausted refugee straight off the bus from the boat change from her wet clothes into used dry clothes once belonging to a stranger is a challenging task. First communicating with her is a very frustrating game of charades, lots lost in translation. While she waits in the communal changing tent with 20 or so other women, children and babies I scour the clothing tent to find something suitable. Everything we offer them is donated. Some is better than others. I found myself embarrassed at some of things I had to offer, and at other times had to return empty handed when we ran out of what was needed. Never have I felt so useless. Shoes are an issue, they're soaked. We often don't have a suitable replacement, so we're left cutting up water-proof emergency blankets and after giving them dry socks lining their wet shoes with the blanket pieces to keep the wet shoe from soaking the new dry sock. And so they carry on with giant pieces of foil blankets spilling out of their wet shoes, wearing an ill-fitting pair of stranger's trousers and possibly a hideous new dry jumper. But it's all we can do. And a pile of their likely last remaining material form of identity is left behind, wet in ruins.
The unpacking and sorting process on the front end also is also difficult. So many boxes of clothing and shoes with little space to work in organising them, sometimes means we aren't able to give out something we have that someone needs because we simply can't access it. Useless.
It's been interesting to work in a refugee camp, controlled by police and facilitated by volunteers. It's a tricky dysfunctional relationship (not to mention a lot of eccentric personalities to manage among the volunteer rank as well!), and I see a lot of problems with the place. It's so incredibly disorganised making this stage of the refugee journey more difficult than it needs to be. The experience could be so much more efficient and overall more pleasant if things were more organised and just run better. But as volunteers there's little we can do to initiate and enforce any such improvements. So it's a process of managing chaos. I see volunteers growing weary and impatient, and before this experience I would not have fully understood this. You do sort of become a bit exasperated if not jaded working in such a dysfunctional place managing such a high volume of people with extreme needs. Ideologies of "making a difference" are somewhat dashed. #IWasAStranger
Warming up after a long, cold day at Friends
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