This is part six of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part five, covering working at a distribution tent and finding a full-time translation job, is here.



Jan. 4

Today was my first full day as a Farsi interpreter at a medical clinic at Camp Moria, Lesbos Island’s biggest refugee camp. Afghans or Iranians who speak clear English are a rarity on the island, so I’ve handled a handful of different translation jobs. They all left me feeling meh. The medical clinic was different though. Working with needy people, avoiding egos, and having a uniquely needed skill set were all improvements over my previous jobs. Working in a warm building with the majority of the cute volunteers on the island was a nice bonus as well.

Working at the medical clinic finally felt like my calling.


Most of the cases today were fevers and colds. It was a good way to ease into a language that I studied 10 years ago and haven’t used again until a week ago. Hot, cold, fever, cough, and vomit were the most common words. I had prepared a long list of medical terms over the weekend and was very grateful that I didn’t have to consult it often today.

One of the rafts had hit a rock near the shore and popped that morning, leading to everyone on the raft walking the last 20 feet to the shore. While there were no drownings or hypothermia from it, one particular injury kept popping up.

"Please stop making me laugh about people getting sea urchins stuck in their feet," I giggled to S, a doctor from a medical team from Vermont. He wasn’t trying to make me laugh. He wasn’t trying not to either. I was fortunately able to hold it in while around patients.

Sobriety came quickly as a visibly pregnant woman came into the clinic. She wore tears on her cheek and her hands on her stomach. She had fallen out of the raft and crashed into a rock, stomach first. She was panicked that her baby was hurt and told us repeatedly that she was 8.5 months pregnant. It was a big relief for everybody when we found that she had “only” broken a rib. The baby would be fine.

This is part five of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part four, covering a week of shore rescues and work as an interpreter, is here.


Dec. 28

The day has finally come to spend the rest of my donated money. I met with two friends and drove around the city of Mytilene, looking for box stores to buy gloves and shoes in bulk. We settled for a Chinese store downtown, making three different trips to spend every dollar we had raised.

We didn’t count everything, but we got roughly 25 pairs of shoes, 100 pairs of socks, 50 pairs of gloves, 50 pairs of underwear, 20 jackets, plus assorted clothes for children and women.


We then went to Moria, the largest refugee camp on the island, in the afternoon to link up with the two Spanish women I would share rides with for the week. They had returned to Camp Pikpa, a camp for refugees with special health considerations that I previously worked at, for the afternoon. I instead used a very expensive taxi and soon realized how far out the new hotel is. 15 euros a night for a quality hotel near the camp was too good to be true!

I considered returning to the tent at Camp Pikpa that night. My new room was very cold, didn’t have hot water, and was 40 minutes from work at Camp Moria. I missed my friends at Pikpa and spent the cold night feeling like I was on the moon. I wanted to be in my old tent at Pikpa.

I promised to take 24 hours before making a decision.

By now you’ve likely heard the news that refugees coming to Greece are being sold fake life jackets.

I’ve personally seen this, and it’s every bit as despicable as your gut reaction tells you it is. Unfortunately, the life jackets are the tip of the iceburg. If smugglers sell water-absorbent life jackets for only 45 euro (roughly 45 U.S. dollars), imagine what they’ll do for real money.

I hate writing this, but the media seems to ignore everything except the headline-grabbing life jackets. Someone has to tell it…

Bademli, Turkey and Lesbos, Greece are separated by less than 10 kilometers. The Aegean Sea lies between the two, with generally calm water and a mild climate. This short trip between Turkey and the European Union has been the most common route into Europe for refugees, with over 500,000 refugees arriving on Lesbos in 2015. A raft can make the trip in less than two hours on a clear day.

The trip is almost always done on a dinghy boat. These are made of rubber and will pop like a balloon if they hit a rock. These inflatable boats come from China and cost smugglers 1,200 euros. An average of 40-60 refugees are packed into each raft. 40-60 people on any of these rafts is far beyond any safe limit, with refugees sitting in the middle and hanging off the sides of the raft. Most arrive to Greece with only what fits in their pockets, as any bags on the raft with them are tossed into the sea to make room for more people. On top of all of this, refugees are told to steer the ship themselves. The price for all of this? 1,000 euros each.


The tickets are so expensive that many refugees wait in Turkey for up to a year, working under the table until saving enough money to be smuggled. This makes them easy targets for gangs and human traffickers. Or sweatshops. Sweatshops where they make fake life jackets. Once you’re able to save 1,000 euro, you are able to be smuggled into Europe with only the clothes on your back.

This is part four of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part three, covering working at Camp Pikpa and branching out to find my role on the island, is here.


Dec. 21

A couple more volunteers left over the weekend, leaving nobody to conduct the coordination meetings in the morning. My impatience got the best of me as I clanged a rock against a metal pole until everyone gathered, then quickly briefed everyone on the ongoing projects.

I spent the rest of the day building shelves for the Medicins san Frontieres tent at Pikpa. A team of Germans came in, all of whom had previous experience in construction, which dramatically lessened my workload and made life easier for C, the woman who designs the shelves. C stays stays in the same tent as me at Camp Pikpa and is another Bay Area native. Roughly half of San Francisco is currently volunteering on Lesbos Island in some capacity.

We spent the early evening preparing and packaging meals for Moria, the main refugee camp on the island. Moria seems to be perpetually cold, understaffed, and undersupplied, so the Pikpa volunteers spend a lot of time there and bring clothes and food up when we can. Packing meals for them is a nightly ritual that signals the end of the work day at Pikpa.

Myself, two tentmates, and Dutch volunteer R went into town and spent the rest of the evening at a Syrian restaurant. It was R's last night and we wanted something better than refugee camp soup for our final meal together. Being waited on in a warm restaurant after two weeks in a tent seemed to be a delicious dose of civilization for all of us, though we were sad to see R go.

This is part three of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part two, covering settling in at Camp Pikpa and starting work, is here.


Dec. 14: Reality sank in this morning. A very overqualified volunteer had gone back to her 9-5 job in the U.S., meaning the rest of us had to pick up the slack.

It was a lot of slack.

Several of us teamed up in the morning for around 45 minutes to take out and sort all of the trash and recycling, something she had done by herself. Another volunteer took on the nearly full-time job of washing dishes.

I spent the rest of the morning cutting out letters with an American volunteer. The letters were of the Latin alphabet and I drew their corresponding Arabic letter on each side of the letter. As we hoped, some of the children began playing with the letters and spelling their names! We can’t have much in the way of classes since we have such a fluctuating roster of children, but having kids leave Pikpa with a basic grasp of phonetics will be a big win if we can pull it off.

I spent the afternoon at Moria with two friends, although we didn’t do a whole lot. Situated in the hills above Mytilini, it offers an amazing view of the surrounding olive groves, with the Aegean Sea serving as a backdrop. Moria is run by the United Nations and has roughly 20 Non-Government Organizations floating around. There is often more need for help there than at Pikpa, but it is more difficult to be registered and approved. I headed over to the Olive Grove (where the non-Syrian and non-Iraqi refugees are sent) and did a bit of translating, but an Iranian-British woman was more enthusiastic and clearly more capable at this than myself, yelling orders and commanding respect as she marched through several lines of refugees.


That evening at Pikpa was fun, with a traditional Irish band coming to play for the children. The parents joined in and even let their guard down as they clapped enthusiastically to the beat. As I started dancing, a young Afghani man grabbed my hand and began dancing with me. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time as holding hands with other men is seen as a sign of friendship in many Arab countries (save your angry comment, I’m fully aware that few Afghanis are ethnically Arab). We danced nonsensically for a couple of songs before I left for the nightly job of preparing meals to be sent to Moria. Unfortunately, he flirted uncomfortably with me over the next week and generally begged for my attention. This (and similar incidents that tend to find me) is clearly karma for the times I've been friend-zoned and still went for the girl.

This is part two of a journal I’m keeping during my month working at a refugee camp in Greece. Part one, covering my last night in the US and two days in Athens, is here.


Dec. 9: It’s go time. After a series of subways and flights, I’m on the island of Lesvoz, the epicenter of refugee arrivals.

Now what?

I’d previously arranged to work in Molyvos, a town in the north of the island that desperately needed help a month ago. Since that time, thing have calmed down in Molyvos. Several senior members of the Greek government visited the camp in Molyvos before I came, leading to a pause in boats coming from Turkey. The Turkish coast guard is now patrolling the area near Molyvos at night, causing the smugglers to take boats further south. The city of Mytilene has now become the new major landing point. I decided to hold off on Molyvos for the time being and give Mytilene a shot.

Still unsure of where I will sleep or work, I decide to spend the day sorting clothes at a warehouse. This is a huge need on the island, as everybody dreams of coming and heroically helping refugees off of boats, but nobody dreams of heroically sorting shoes. I hailed a taxi in front of the airport and asked him to take me to the warehouse in town.

“Refugees?” he asks me.

“Yes, I’m going to the warehouse for refugees, where there are clothes,” I replied.

“You go to work for refugees, I will take you there?”

I tried to explain using the most basic English I could think of… “Yes, at the building with boxes, food, and clothing. The warehouse.”

“OK, we go to warehouse.”

Five minutes later, we were at Pikpa, which is definitely not a warehouse. Pikpa was formerly a summer camp for children with special needs, though it was abandoned and later became a refugee camp. It is now populated by at-risk families or refugees with special health conditions (i.e. pregnancy) that made them a poor fit for the general population at other refugee camps.

Last week, I left the US for six months of exploring Europe and Africa. My first stop is on Lesbos Island in Greece, working and living at a refugee camp. This is the first part of a weekly journal that I'll write while staying at the camp.

Dec. 4- Sometimes, despite all observable trends, humanity exhibits glimmers of hope. Since telling friends two weeks ago that I would be be volunteering at a refugee camp, I’ve had supplies shipped from all over the United States. I returned from a family vacation last week to find six large boxes waiting for me.

The rundown:

37 pairs of wool socks
85 pairs of normal socks
16 winter hats
12 pairs of gloves
7 scarves
10 t-shirts
3 sweatshirts
1 pair of moccasins
100+ toothbrushes
52 combs
60 pens
2 large backpacks
30 pounds of dehydrated, vitamin-fortified food
$225 in cash



Everything somehow squeezed inside the two backpacks and weighed in at over 75 pounds. I spent that night packing and saying goodbye to my family and friends as I would head across the Atlantic the next day and not return until June.

Dec. 5– I left for Greece today. I caught the shuttle to Los Angeles International Airport at 3:30 a.m., was in Houston at 11 a.m. local time, and waited there for 10 hours. Buying the cheapest flights isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After lots of waiting and no real trouble from authorities, I was in Athens at 10 p.m. the night of the 6th. The city was beautiful and the weather was pleasant that night, but my internal clock was so warped that I went straight to bed.

Dec. 7– I met up for breakfast today with Joanna, an energetic New Yorker who just returned from Lesbos Island. We took the metro to an old olympic field hockey stadium that was being used as a refugee camp. The idea was that we would serve breakfast there as it had previously been undermanned.

The stadium’s press office was turned into a clothing depot, the food concourse into a kitchen and command & control center, and all other rooms were used as a dorms for refugees. The bleachers were mostly empty and the field never had more than two or three people playing at the same time. This was probably good, as an Iran-Iraq soccer match between hungry and impatient refugees is a remarkably poor idea.


Today, the camp had double the staff needed. I helped for about 10 minutes stirring a vat of tea, then helped pouring tee for a bit while others passed out croissants. I then mentioned that I studied Farsi. I immediately became an interpreter for the Iranian and Afghanis there, relaying valuable messages such as Stay out of the sun so you don’t get dehydrated and Pick up the trash, we can’t pass out clothes if the area is dirty.

Other conversations involved telling Iranians who had just traveled across the entire Middle East that they wouldn’t be allowed to enter the rest of Europe and were not eligible for Greek work visas. This was a depressing trend. The European Union was only allowing in refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, while refugees were showing up in Greece’s open borders expecting to move on to Germany or Sweden. The result was buses full of Syrians going through to Macedonia while thousands of Algerians, Iranians, and Pakistanis got stuck in limbo in Greece.

With nothing else that needed immediate translating, I searched for Iranians and Afghanis to practice Farsi and Dari with.

I quickly struck up a conversation with Jawwad, who was sitting on a chair directly underneath a sign that said not to sit there. I liked him immediately. He was Afghani, but since he left Afghanistan and lived legally in Iran for several years, the European Union considered him Iranian and wouldn’t grant him refugee status.

I next spoke with another Afghani who was stuck in Greece despite his family being in Macedonia. He had lost his paperwork proving that he was a refugee, leaving him in limbo until the UN could finish sorting the other 1,000,000 refugees and try to find his information. Taliban-era Afghanistan apparently wasn’t great at keeping public records.

The final significant conversation was with an Iranian who wanted to settle in the United States. When I mentioned that there were large Persian communities in Los Angeles and San Jose, he took that as a cue that I worked for the government and could get him a visa. I backed out of the conversation as gently as possible, found Joanna, and set off for a lunch meeting she had set up later.

After a series of cabs, metros, and trains, we found ourselves at the IASIS headquarters. IASIS is a non-profit in Athens that deals with the homeless, mentally ill, and abused populations. IASIS has adapted to become a landing point for refugee women and children who were viewed as vulnerable. Its name is also sure to get Joanna’s assets frozen when she donates to it. Joanna worked for a very well-known bank in London and there to discuss where funding would be most needed. I was there because I had nothing better to do and wanted to learn more about the situation. We left the meeting with an understanding that Joanna would buy them industrial kitchen equipment and that I would work with them after Christmas. Smooth talkers they were.

Dec. 8– I’m spending today exploring Athens, finding waterproof boots for the shore rescues, and trying to finally defeat jetlag. Mostly, I’m relaxing. Tomorrow takes me to the island and a new adventure.

Was I bored or hungry? My night shift at the hostel seemed to be moving in slow motion that night. I stepped away for a couple of minutes to grab food from the staff refrigerator in the back yard. A coworker, Julie, watched the office for me.

I returned to an empty office and an open door. I went out to see why the door was open and found Julie talking to a man through the fence. The man was around 45 years old and needed a bed for the night for a friend. He didn’t have a reservation but claimed to know the owner, Jon. Jon would vouch for him. They were friends. I talked with the man as my coworker went back inside to call Jon. The man asked again if he could have a room and then gave us 10,000 Chilean Pesos (15 dollars), said he didn’t need the change, and signaled to the car across the street.

When the man brought his friend out, I immediately saw why he had left her in the car during our initial conversation. She was roughly 45, distraught, and wearing a very short skirt & very high heels, one of which had a broken strap. A strong limp and eyes that told of recent drug use came into focus as she got closer. I stepped inside for a minute to brief my coworker. Neither of us knew what to do. Our daily workload focused mostly on arranging reservations and giving tours. I must have missed the training session on dealing with battered woman escorted by their abusers.

I stepped back outside, opened the gate, and let the woman in. The man tried to follow her in, putting his hand on my shoulder as he talked to me. I told him twice not to touch me, each request followed by him removing his hand for five seconds. The third time, I told him very colorfully to leave, pushed him out, and slammed the gate as he yelled at me.

The woman obviously needed help so I led her in and took her to the dining room. I then found Julie and told her “She’s pretty f***ed up, we should call an ambulance.” I then saw the two guests in the same room and regretted not pulling Julie to the side to say it. We went to a smaller room near the kitchen. The woman said that she was hungry so I brought her bread and butter as Julie began asking her what had happened. Julie was Latina, charismatic, and spoke Spanish as her first language. The woman warmed and opened up as she spoke with Julie.

I felt that they would be more comfortable in private so I left them and grabbed the phone in the office. No one picked up the emergency line for the hospital, so I gave up and called the police instead. They told me they would send a unit by soon.

I went to update Julie and hoped that things weren't how they looked. They were. In addition to the bad ankle, her speech was slurred and she had a long red mark on her face that she earlier tried to hide with her hair. She eventually opened up and said that the man had been beating her and she didn’t want to return.

What to do?

I subsidized my time in Salvador by working at a youth hostel. Work resembled a Pitbull song and every night brought a new cast of travelers from around the world who there on vacation. Most nights I hung out with whoever was staying at the hostel, with the exception of Fridays. I don’t bro out at bars with the guys and typically went to the lighthouse to watch the sunset with my girlfriend at the time. She worked late one night, so I went alone and explored a new part of the city.



I enjoy seeing new cathedrals and churches, so when I saw a large one with the lights on I went in. I sat in the back and tried not to draw attention to myself. After about two minutes I saw the rest of the crowd walking towards the front and a women in the aisle motioned for me to come forward. I wasn't sure what was going on, but it looked like a weird time so I followed the group towards the front. We then stood in a line facing the stage. Three pastors came to the crowd and started barking commands at a man. The pastors put their hands on the man's head and started yelling and shaking their hands. I stood and wondered what was going on when they finished with him and a pastor walked to me. He was much friendlier with me than he was with the first man. After a minute of talking, he put his hands on my head and started chanting. At the end of each sentence he chanted OUT or NOW and would throw his hands up. This only lasted around two minutes and then he looked at me, smiled, and walked to another person.

As Thanksgiving approaches, I look back at the previous year and reflect on the amazing love and compassion I've received. While I could write a book on all the people who've helped me out, I owe the most to the Syrian and Iraqi refugees I worked with in Jordan. They ignored our differences and took me under their wing when I didn't have anyone else.

I arrived in Jordan at a tough time. I had quit my job in Turkey early and didn't have a backup plan. I landed at a hotel restaurant in Amman, Jordan, not knowing a single person or a word of Arabic. It was a leap of faith and could have easily turned out terribly, had I not lucked out with my coworkers. The main crew I worked with was composed of myself, an Iraqi refugee, and two salafist Syrian refugees. I'm white, Mormon, and don't speak any Arabic. There was every reason for this to blow up in my face.

The leader of the restaurant staff was abu Abduh, a Syrian refugee. He spoke no English and I spoke no Arabic, so he bridged the gap by yelling Shaku maku Jimmy! every 30 seconds, or whenever one of us enters the room. Shaku maku is Iraqi slang along the lines of what’s shakin?  and my name isn’t Jimmy, so it got old. Fast. Abu Abduh used to be a taxi driver in Homs, Syria, but fled to Jordan as he became trapped between ISIS and the al-Assad regime. He was loud, obnoxious, and would give you the shirt off his back. He was the patriarch of our strange family.

Next came Thamer, another Syrian refugee. Young, serious, and a strict salafist. Due to his religious views, ISIS thought he would be sympathetic and tried to recruit him. He immediately packed his car and sped to Jordan. We regularly argued using hand gestures and a collection of profanity that we both understood, but could never stay mad for more than five minutes.

Finally, there was Muhseen. He's a former Iraqi Army soldier who also worked with American forces. He originally lived roughly 15 minutes from one of the locations I served in Iraq, close enough that I’ve probably given his son candy at some point in the past. Muhseen's brother worked as a barber on a US Army base and was murdered. He then found a bullet wrapped in a note that said “LEAVE” on his doorstep. Muhseen left with his family in the middle of that night.