WAITING GAME
Migrants stand in bread lines while tourists dine on grilled octopus in Greece
As night closed in on the migrant camp, masses of people made their way to their makeshift tents, climbing hills of denuded olive trees, carrying dinner in plastic bags. Lila Ayobi showed her family what she had waited three hours in line to collect: Ten cucumbers.
“Everything else was finished,” Ayobi, 39, told them.
Her four children would have nothing else to eat until morning, when Ayobi would rise at 5 a. m. to wait in line again, this time for prepackaged croissants, one per person.
Waiting and disappointment are a central part of existence for the 38,000 people at Greece’s critically overcrowded Aegean island camps, where Europe’s migrant crisis is clearly far from over.
At the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, the largest of the island facilities, migrants wait in snaking lines for up to eight hours a day to get their meals. They wait for breakfast, come back to their shelters for an hour or two, and soon head off to wait for lunch.
“All day waiting,” Ayobi said. “In all the time we spend in line, we could learn a new language.”
They wait because this camp has mushroomed in size, growing seven times more crowded than its capacity, a shantytown on a vacation island never intended for such emergencies.
They wait because the Greek government and local authorities are at odds about what to do with them, and because a closed- off Europe has not offered another place to put them, even as rights groups decry the camps as an emblem of the continent’s failures.
Conditions at the island camps have never been worse. Children shiver through the nights, bundled in wet blankets that never fully dry. There are protests, scabies outbreaks and fatal stabbings in middle- of- the- night fights. The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatovic, has called the situation “explosive,” noting a “desperate lack of medical care and sanitation” — and the hours-long lines.
Many people here fled war and other desperate environments, and they risked their lives to cross the Aegean Sea in flimsy rafts. They are grateful to have made it this far. But they describe feeling humiliated and dismayed, sensing that even in the food there is a message about the resources Europe is willing to spend on new arrivals: not much at all.
A nutritionist told The Washington Post that the meals appear to fall below minimum calorie requirements. One migrant said the food was worse than at her former workplace, an Afghan prison.
“We are living like animals. It’s not a life,” said Zekria Farzad, 40, who had been a journalist in Afghanistan, which is where most of the migrants at Moria come from. “Actually, we are struggling to be alive.”
ALL DAY WAITING. IN ALL THE TIME WE SPEND IN LINE, WE COULD
LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE. — LILA AYOBI, MOTHER OF FOUR
WE ARE LIVING LIKE ANIMALS. IT’S NOT A LIFE. ACTUALLY WE ARE STRUGGLING TO BE ALIVE.