Orange mountains
Today was our third day of beach cleaning. We decided to go near the lighthouse in Korakas, on the North of Lesvos, where most of the boats have landed since last summer. According to Henry from the lighthouse, the boats kept arriving to the same shores because they followed the orange mountains of life jackets. However, the beaches are very hard to access from the land, which makes the reception of arriving boats quite challenging. Nowadays, most of the arriving boats are guided to Mytilene, on the South of the island, where the main reception site Moria camp is located. Even though the amount of arriving boats in the North has decreased, the amount of life jackets, clothes and dinghies left behind is tremendous.
After an adventurous path, that involved some sliding in the mud and crawling through the bushes, we finally ended up on the beaches of Korakas. It was overwhelming to see the amount of dinghies surrounded by dozens of life jackets every ten metres. After a couple of hours of cleaning, we felt hopeless to realize that the amount that we cleaned up was probably one tenth of the whole beach. And that was just one beach on the long coastline of Lesvos. Even though we are day by day more aware of how little we can actually impact, it is still important to remember that every single lifted life jacket is one waste less on the coastline of this beautiful island. On our way back, we faced some additional difficulties. Our last obstacles were to step over an undefined dead animal, face a pregnant donkey and climb over a two metre fence. We finally found our way back to Skala and had a warm cup of tea to comfort us after this dramatic adventure.
Visiting the life jacket graveyard had been on our Lesvos bucket list since the beginning of our trip, and we decided to explore it today. We arrived to the site just before sunset, which made it an even more ghostly experience. The amount of life jackets piled up in the graveyard is simply absurd. You can’t help but connect them to the lives and stories of people who have worn them through the challenging sea crossing to Europe. The life jackets are piling up on the graveyard just like people are piling up on the borders of Greece while waiting for Europe to find a consensus on how to handle the crisis. It was surely a sad and melancholic view, but also a very powerful image filled with hope. Every life jacket stands for an attempt to seek a safer life, and you can only wish from the bottom of your heart that the stories will end well.