The Sea of Memorabilia

Our second beach cleaning day started with 5 degrees celsius and a cloudy sky. The storm has brought up tons of waste to the coast, and a feeling of desperation grew on us when we approached the beach in our car. Kagia is a pebble beach of about 500 meters in length, with a beautiful avenue of trees along the shore. Although the huge amount of waste was depressing, it was also quite a meditative act to collect the trash and bundle it. The entire afternoon we would walk along the coastline picking up smaller and larger pieces of plastic. Even though we found mostly household waste, there were also some surprises! It started with a Syrian birth certificate of a girl that was only a few months younger than me. This small piece of laminated paper with the girl’s photograph on it will most probably haunt me for some time. Every single piece of memorabilia we found forced us to reflect on its owner’s background story. After a while our beach cleaning turned into a sort of treasure hunt. Besides official identification papers we found shoes, clothes, children's’ toys and toothbrushes (and of course the obligatory life jackets).

Once we’ve accomplished our target for the day, we were lucky to get invited for a small birthday get together with the lovely girls from the ‘Dirty Girls’ team. Our reward - huge pieces of apple cake and some tea - tasted twice as good after those many hours of trash picking!