Cleaning Up, Again...
It is an excellent day for beach cleaning with almost a clear sky and no wind. Though it is a bit chilly outside, the wetsuits do the trick in maintaining the body temperature. Today we have extra gear; helmets, vests with extra pouches and new gloves. We head to the beach at Skala Sykamineas to continue with the cleaning operation.
Though we have done the walking on the steep rocky coastline, I haven’t quite got used to it. The act of walking, or sometimes climbing, on the stones is slow and tiring; not only there is no clear path to go through, but also the stones are slippery with the addition of sea urchins to add to the action. One wrong step or foot slide on the urchins and the thrones will punch through the water slippers sole into the foot (It did happen to Henry last time, and it didn’t seem joyful).
Litter (mainly plastics and foam) is put in plastic bags, life jackets buckled together and dinghies cut to empty it from water and turned into smaller manageable pieces. These are all piled close together to be carried later by boat through the sea, as it would be extremely difficult and time consuming to carry the pile back to the shore.
Cleaning didn’t seem a “fancy” or world changing thing to do; no one of my friends was impressed when I told them we are doing that, me neither. But after doing it, well it is extremely important and it is a task that should be taken seriously. It requires a lot of man power to clean the beaches of Lesvos, and given the rocky coastline, it does require special equipment. The amount of plastic collected is very big, and the fine ones that we weren’t able to collect was definitely substantial. “Why on earth do people use this crazy amount of plastic” I was wondering, though I was a culprit too. The cleaning I would say, made me much more conscious to my consumption habits, of plastic particularly.
After the cleaning operation, I was interviewed by Laura, a volunteer on Lesvos. She had, four simple questions I believe. What has been agreed to be 20 min interview dragged to an hour, or maybe one hour and half. A topic lead to another and another.
She asked me about our experience in Moria Camp, which lead to so many topics. How dazzling it was when in our night shift, at 3 am in the morning an Iraqi family came to the camp to Lighthouse. Very calm and considerate that it was hard to believe that they were, just some hours ago, in a dinghy in the middle of the sea with tens of other people. I lead them to a room, in where they can sleep, and the youngest in the family, a little boy, started crying when we entered the room which was full of sleeping strangers. So calmly and with consideration, the father tried to calm his son, and took him a bit out of the room out of consideration for the others. 3 am, and I just came by a dinghy, and probably after long days of traveling and long hours of walking, I am not sure if I would be sensitive to not waking up others.
We talked about the great work volunteers are doing, coming from all over the world to help, how human it is. But at the same time, the amount of inhumanity that lead hundreds of thousands of people to flee their countries. In Moria, both the human and inhuman can be seen; the helping hands and the misery, tiredness and sadness caused by the collective inhumanity enforced on the displaced.
We talked about how ironically funny it is that we act when we have the crisis, but we don’t when all the red flags are raised before it. How the humanitarian work starts after the crisis has happened and not before.
Maybe one day, we will understand that we are all humans and vulnerable, and life happens in cycles. One day we might understand that our lives are connected and we share the same planet; what happens in a place kilometres away is not isolated from us. We are part of human suffering, but as well we are part of human joy, success and happiness.