Aid workers answer call for help with migrant tide
It started with a text message on Oct. 28.
Ravi Jaipaul, a 29-year-old humanitarian nurse from Edmonton, and his wife, Sarah Entwistle, a 31-year-old British nurse, were sleeping at home in the United Kingdom when they were jolted awake at 1 a.m. by a text message from a nursing colleague in Lesbos, Greece. “Boat capsized. Ten children unconscious. Get down to the harbour if you know CPR.” It was a general call out for first-aid response and medical support on the island which has become known as a way station for refugees.
Only an hour earlier, a boat carrying hundreds of people from Turkey to the island sank and left dozens fighting for their lives. Greek authorities estimated that at least 35 people drowned in the tragedy.
Aid workers on Lesbos called it Black Wednesday, a “day of deaths.”
The calamity spurred Jaipaul and Entwistle to act.
“Sarah turned to me and said, ‘If you’re not coming, I’m going alone,’ and that was enough to tell me that we were going to Greece,” recalls Jaipaul, a University of Alberta alumni and former nursing instructor at MacEwan University.
The couple booked flights and launched an online fundraising campaign.
In four days, they raised over US$10,000 and packed a pallet’s worth of oral rehydration salts, antibiotics, emergency ponchos, tents and sleeping bags to support the refugee crisis escalating on Lesbos.
It wouldn’t be the first time Jaipaul responded to a crisis. In 2014, he served for nine months in a refugee health centre in South Sudan with Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF). During that same time, Entwistle worked as a nurse in Saudi Arabia. Despite their individual experiences providing medical relief in six developing countries, Lesbos would be the first time the couple worked side-by-side delivering humanitarian aid.
They hit the ground running in Greece and quickly realized they weren’t the only ones who’d come to help. Dozens of Western volunteers, charities and impromptu groups had also set up along the coastline in an unco-ordinated, though well-intentioned attempt to provide care for the 3,000 to 6,000 refugees arriving every day from Turkey.
“The coast was overstaffed with Western health care professionals,” admits Jaipaul. “Volunteers would literally race out to the boats and create chaos, even if the boat was fine. We heard stories of volunteers getting possessive of the beach and what they were doing there. We didn’t want to be a part of that — and it’s not where we saw the greatest need.”
The greater need, according to Jaipaul and Entwistle, was in the non-Syrian refugee camps on Lesbos.
By early November, the UNHCR estimated that over 660,000 refugees had flooded into Greece. More than 50 per cent of refugees entered Europe through transit camps on Lesbos. With capacity to shelter up to 2,800 refugees, the island’s camps were completely overwhelmed with more than 12,000 people fleeing violence and poverty from countries in the Middle East and Africa. When refugees reached the shores of Lesbos, they were divided and transferred into Syrian and non-Syrian camps for processing.
“The Syrian refugee camp was very well organized. They seemed to have the volunteers and resources they needed and even proper shelters for refugees,” Entwistle says. “It was clear that Syrian refugees had preferential treatment over the non-Syrians, even though the health conditions of the Af- ghanis were arguably much worse.”
Jaipaul and Entwistle joined forces with the Health Point Project for Refugees, a front-line health care delivery initiative set up outside the gates of Moria, the UNHCR-run refugee camp on Lesbos for non-Syrians. The camp was filled with several thousand people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Morocco. Many of the refugees lacked clothing, food, medical attention, toilets and shelter as they waited for six days to two weeks outside the heavily barbed-wire gate to be registered.
Jaipaul and Entwistle saw hundreds of patients, treating cases of dehydration, hypothermia, sore throats and chest infections. They examined a woman from Afghanistan with a two-day old infant who had given birth in Turkey, while hiding in the forest, before making the journey to Lesbos. Miraculously, she and the child were in good health, though officials at the ferry to Athens denied her entry because she didn’t have refugee papers for the infant. Back at Moria camp, they advocated to help the woman to the front of the line. Her husband had been killed in Afghanistan. She was travelling alone with three small children.
“We were really forced into the mindset of the refugees,” says Jaipaul. “Imagine, you’re coming over on the boat and you’ve got to jump out into shallow water to reach shore. Your choice is to leave on your shoes, jump off the boat, get wet and risk hypothermia. Or, take off your shoes, step on a sea urchin and run the risk of infection.”
Jaipaul and Entwistle walked from tent to tent in Moria, providing health consultations to women, children and the elderly, many too weak to wait in the long lineups. They distributed water and oral rehydration salts, sanitary pads and tents for shelter.
“I quickly realized that, medically speaking, it wasn’t difficult. It was more important just to listen to people’s stories,” confesses Jaipaul. “It was asking, ‘what’s your name? Where are you from? Where are you going?’ It’s about treating refugees like they matter, as though they aren’t just numbers.”
“Though I heard a lot of tough stories,” he adds.
He met a family from Iraq who nearly drowned on their way to Lesbos. Their boat sank, they lost all of their belongings and they arrived at the camp at dusk, soaking wet, without shelter. Jaipaul says he nearly broke down when he met the father, who was sobbing uncontrollably. He remembers putting his arms around the man and holding back tears.
“It was very intense. These are such strong human moments.”
Jaipaul credits the years he worked in the emergency unit at the University of Alberta Hospital for his ability to provide care under highly stressful circumstances. “Edmonton started everything,” he says. “It’s taken me to where I am today.”
After two exhausting weeks on Lesbos, Jaipaul and Entwistle finally returned to “normal life” and their nursing jobs in the U.K. But the reality of the refugee camps in Lesbos is ever present in mind, says Entwhistle. “Our work is far from being over.”
Recently, they received a message from one of the Afghan refugees they assisted in Lesbos, who arrived in Germany and applied for asylum.
“We don’t know if he’ll get refugee status,” Entwistle admits. “We can only hope. It’s the hardest part about coming home.”
I quickly realized that, medically speaking, it wasn’t difficult. It was more important just to listen to people’s stories.