‘It was just a little jab’
The mayor kept his word and was the first to be inoculated. He was followed by a German couple, Dr Peter Maurer and his wife, Renee. He is a doctor, she a nurse; after a lifetime of working together in intensive care units, they have retired in Halki. “We are from Heidelberg and we feel very lucky to get the vaccine. If we lived in Germany, we would have to wait a long time. We called our friends there to tell them the good news,” they said, contentedly. Dozens of others followed them. “I put my name on the list and I took it out several times, my child,” said Anna Livaniou. “I finally decided it’s a oneway street, we must all get the vaccine so we can be safe. My son owns a café in Rhodes and goes back and forth. How would I be able to see him if I didn’t get the vaccine?”
Every so often, the golf cart brought more people. The two young men who appeared to be taking turns driving it were very supportive of the elderly people making their way to the clinic. They often stopped to take in someone who had started making the trip on foot but found the uphill road difficult.
A woman asked her granddaughter, who had accompanied her to the clinic and was constantly asking her if she was afraid: “Afraid of what? Hurting? I gave birth to three children on my own here. In the old days we had no doctors, nothing.” Rigopoula Sfyriou, who was sitting next to the woman, said: “No one among us will be left unvaccinated. We live in an isolated place, the weather is often bad; if you get sick here from the virus or something else, things are not easy.”
Apart from the very beginning, there were no glitches with the procedure: 66 were vaccinated on the first day, 138 on the second and 54 on the fourth. All who had signed up were inoculated; many of those who had had second thoughts had repented. “It was just a little jab,” they kept saying.
“It is great for us that the state decided to prioritize us as a small island. It’s a gift from heaven. Can you imagine us rushing to Rhodes, or Athens, to get vaccinated? Whereas now the procedure took place here at home, organized; we only had to go to the clinic. We thank all the doctors who came here and the prime minister, who thought of us,” said former mayor Lefteris Lathourakis.
The past
We were looking down the hill at the beautiful sight of the port and Lathourakis was explaining to me how difficult conditions were when he was mayor, in the 1980s and 1990s. “You look at Emporio (another name for the settlement on Halki) nowadays and you say, ‘What beautiful homes.’ Back then half of them were dilapidated, ruins. There was a lot of poverty. Most of the people had gone to Athens or migrated abroad. Then came the miracle of tourism, which gave us jobs, because, before, the municipality was the only employer. Now we have both tourists and construction, we can put food on the table. We also have Rhodes nearby and we can travel there to relax. Transport is good and frequent. We are a satellite of Rhodes. What can the Kastellorizans say, where the closest land is Turkey? We don’t complain. We are here and keep the island afloat. It’s our duty.”
The local doctors and nurses and the military personnel that came from Rhodes to oversee the procedure were the heroes, but they didn’t go unsung. The locals showed their gratitude with treats and urged them to make sure they took a break. The personnel never complained, they were not discouraged when the online system was unresponsive and kept going. By the end of the third day, they were obviously tired, but also obviously satisfied that their mission had been completed, despite some problems.
As assistant nurse Nikos Stoyiannos told us, the preparation was thorough. Together with the doctor, they had to make sure to have the necessary medicines ready, in case a vaccinated person had an allergic reaction or some other complication. “Fortunately, nothing went wrong in any of the 258 vaccinations.” Asked if he considered his mission difficult, he smiled stoically. “Before I came to Halki, I was working at a psychiatric clinic, where we often had to give a patient two or three shots simultaneously. I am trained and I love my job,” he said. He did so well that the locals gave him a nickname: “The Light Touch.” After Halki, small island vaccinations took place on Tilos and Oinousses, followed by Leipsoi, Agathonisi, Arkoi and Marathi. The problem with the rejected social security numbers appeared to have been solved and participation was satisfactory.
“At a critical national juncture, every single island – even the smallest – is like an aircraft carrier guarding Greece. Next to us, there are neighbors who have designs on us; if the islands and the Aegean are abandoned, then it’s ‘Woe to the vanquished.’ Every Greek government should take care of the islands at any cost so that inhabitants stay; this is the most important thing, not just for the survival of the islands but for the survival of the state,” ex-mayor Lathourakis said.
We returned to Rhodes on the same Nissos Halki boat, with Captain Zabetoulas. As his wife was napping in a nook behind him on the bridge, he told me how he was born at sea. “My mother’s waters broke as she was being taken from Halki to Rhodes to give birth. I don’t know if that’s to blame, but I have never had a job on land. Before, I was a towboat captain. Demanding post. A tiny little thing dragging behemoths. If the rope tied to the ship breaks and snaps back it can kill a man. So, I returned to the island, got married, had a son and I’ve been the skipper on Nissos Halki for the past four years. Look, here’s a photo of my little one holding the wheel. Maybe one day he will become a captain and have the joy of taking these people back and forth.”
‘I haven’t heard my name called out like this since school and the army.
I feel 20 again!’