Karama Library Project - Greece

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive."

–James Baldwin

On our way to Athens to meet some old Palestinian friends....The situation of Palestinians born in Syria - all of them without ID - is unique, and this project will seek Palestinian Syrians out and aim to serve them in particular.

Palestinian Syrians: Twice refugees As refugees continue to flee civil war in Syria, the road to asylum remains difficult for some Syrian-born Palestinians.

Athens Airport
By Mahmoud Darwish

Athens airport disperses us to other airports. Where can I fight? asks the fighter.
Where can I deliver your child? a pregnant woman shouts back.
Where can I invest my money? asks the officer.
This is none of my business, the intellectual says.
Where did you come from? asks the customs’ official.
And we answer: From the sea!
Where are you going?
To the sea, we answer.
What is your address?
A woman of our group says: My village is my bundle on my back.
We have waited in the Athens airport for years.
A young man marries a girl but they have no place for their wedding night.
He asks: Where can I make love to her?
We laugh and say:
This is not the right time for that question.
The analyst says: In order to live, they die by mistake.
The literary man says: Our camp will certainly fall.
What do they want from us?
Athens airport welcomes its visitors without end.
Yet, like the benches in the terminal, we remain, impatiently waiting for the sea.
How many more years longer, O Athens airport?

Home
By Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
ni***rs with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
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or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

One of the places we'll be sending books! Jasmine School in central Athens

Elpida Home outside of Thessaloniki, one of the migrant centers we're working with: "We wanted to try something different, maybe the opposite of what is being done. Instead of creating dependency, create independence; instead of being top-down, let's see what happens when you make it bottom-up," Mike Zuckerman, an urban space creator and the project manager of Elpida

A ray of hope for refugees in northern Greece A new refugee center in northern Greece funded through a private/public partnership aims to improve living conditions for refugees. Marianna Karakoulaki and Dimitris Tosidis report from Thessaloniki.

An important reminder. Einstein was a refugee— and IRC was founded at his request in 1933!

Photo: UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency poster hanging up at IRC-HQ

This is an activity by the children of Project Elea, on the periphery of Athens
They want: Open Borders, Love, Justice, Play.... you don't see people asking for Charity.
One friend told us: “We didn't leave our homes, lose everything, survive the journey and come to Greece only for a pair of Adidas. We wait in these lines for many hours sometimes, but it quickly changes us - you can't imagine what begins to happen to people, we find ourselves fighting over shoes. I feel I don't know or understand these people. I only understand this isn't who we are, this isn't who I am. I have lost myself, I have lost my power.”

Sometimes there are limitless crayons and markers and paintbrushes during activity time, other times children cry over a few squares of colorful, torn, tissue paper, desperately afraid they won't get a piece of their own.

A grandmother finds herself losing her temper after going without her daily glass of milk. She finds herself standing in line for hours demanding her due, and discovers she has been unintentionally omitted from the official camp “census”.
A teenage girl can't wash her long hair for weeks, shampoo has become a luxury.
Donations of charitable goods ebb and flow.

People bravely escape their homes only to find themselves in transit camps dwelling in a persistent atmosphere of scarcity. They often feel they must scramble and compete with others in order to get their hands on some bare necessities. The distribution line can strip people of their sense of identity, making them feel almost invisible.

Efforts like Project Elea work hard to counter those dynamics. To bring back a sense of Humanity.

“I watch my children run past into the arms of the foreign volunteers, and they are so happy. These good people are able to give them a few hours of laughter, it's important. But at night they're not the ones who dry their tears. Before we go to sleep I try to come up with a different story every night, stories about butterflies and other beautiful things, so that they can sleep. But sometimes I can't always think of anything beautiful and I can't come up with any stories. None of us sleep, we all have nightmares, the children are up all night long and so are we.”

Foreign volunteers conduct informal education activities for children for at most a few hours daily. And unlike volunteer teachers in refugee camps, their parents will be there in coming months and years. Throughout almost all the trauma migrant children have endured, their parents have been there.

Every parent will tell you that since landing in a refugee center, their children have become exceedingly restless, often staying awake into the wee hours. Most families in refugee centers spend months on end, day after day, in very close quarters, hovering over cell phones as a means of entertainment, distraction, and communication with relatives. Reading to children helps establish the notion of bedtime and restore life's daily rhythm, assuring that children get the consistent rest required to facilitate their cognitive development during waking hours.