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Let’s play a game, use your imagination and follow along.

You’re cosy in that recliner you love, you know the one. You picked it out together right after you brought your first home. It was after the wedding, of course. But before you started painting the nursery pink and stocking up on tiny socks.

It’s a late summers night, the coolness of autumn is just beginning to set in and that warm cup of tea feels just right in your hands. You switched from red wine that day the bump started showing through her favorite merino sweater, that super soft one you’ve always liked. You squeeze her hand just a little tighter. Despite the political problems flashing past on the television, the world couldn’t seem any more perfect in this moment.

You’ve always been pretty proud of coming from Britain, such a solid country with a great history. It’s been a great place to grow up, and your life has had its challenges, but overall been great. Your friends are here, your parents are here, and when you gaze out the window past the falling leaves your eyes keep coming back to the tree that you will one-day build a tree house in for your daughter, once she’s born and grows a little of course.

The BBC reports are coming more and more frequently these days. Walking down the roads conversations overheard mostly focus around the future of your country. As each day passes, things seem less certain than they did before. Just yesterday you bumped into an old school friend down at the supermarket who told you he was pulling his superannuation out. ‘That’s crazy’ you exclaimed under your breath. ‘Surely you’ll have to loose..’, ‘yeah, at least fifty percent’ he finished your sentence. ‘But, you know, it’s better than loosing it all – and if we have to leave suddenly, I want some cash behind me, y’know what I mean?’. You nodded along, but couldn’t quite grasp this concept. Why was everyone so concerned? This is a safe country, this is home.

The leaves are beginning to fade into orange outside the nursery window, the room that remains half that awful eggshell color you hate. I’ll finish painting in a few months, you think. Once things settle down a little and we know we will stay. Surely this war wont go on forever, besides, they are fighting up the other end of the country. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, of course you never expected to be living in a country under siege, but, you do believe it’ll get better. There’s hope.

You wake suddenly, with a jolt. As the weeks have passed and the leaves are more red now than orange, the bombs are becoming more frequent. This one was the closest yet. You start to think about what is best for your family. You don’t have a lot of money, you’ve invested so much into the house recently getting it ready for your new family. It’s ok, you think to yourself, we will just leave the country for a while. We will come back to our beautiful home soon.

All but a few of the leaves have fallen now, and you are saying one last goodbye to your home, to the half-painted nursery and to the tree-house that hasn’t been built yet. You and  your wife are heading downtown to meet a group of people, you’ve managed to strike a good deal to get out of here and you’ve managed to sell off a few things to pay for it. You’ll be taking a boat across the channel to France, a nice one they say, that’s why you sold the car in the end – to get the upgrade. Only the best for your family, plus it left you with a little extra cash in your pockets for the trip.

Fast forward a few days and you’re still holed up in an old, abandoned hotel. You want to go home. You’re hungry and frightened, but you’d loose all your money if you left now. You’d be taking your pregnant wife back into an active warzone, broke and defeated. What else is there to do but wait? They keep promising you’ll go soon, but the weather is too bad. Autumn is coming to an end and the winds make the sea rough. So you wait, squeezing her hand a little tighter each day that goes by, feeling her growing belly through that soft merino sweater. You tell her stories of pink-painted rooms and promises for the future to take both your minds away from here.

Finally the time comes where the world seems to be shifting in your favor. You’re woken abruptly in the middle of the night. Hurry, hurry, it’s time to go, the voices rasp from the darkness. Normally this scene would read more like a horror movie, but after days of being shut away from the world to a landscape of bomb blasts in the distance, you are just relieved to be getting the hell out of here. You’re all driven for what feels like a lifetime round windy roads and backstreets. Eventually the van pulls in to a stop and your group tumbles out onto the cold soil.

It’s quite late at night, and after your eyes adjust to the darkness you see other small groups of English people around, groups just like you waiting nervously with their families and meager possessions. The air is cold and you can smell the pine forest around you. The sound of crashing waves is enough to give you hope that you’ll be out on the water in no time, sailing away to your new safe place.  As your shoes tread prints in the dark, damp sand you spy a small rubber boat on the shore. This isn’t the luxury sailboat you paid so much for, you ponder. You turn to the man leading the group to ask, but before you get a word out he pulls out a gun. ‘Get in the boat’ he commands.

Every piece of you wants to run. What are you doing here? What did you bring your family to? Your mind races in circles and panic sets in, but it’s all too late to turn back now. A young child starts to cry. Shut up, shut up! The man exclaims, clearly agitated. People are shuffling from foot to foot, slowly edging toward the boat. The women, children, the sick and the elderly are instructed to clamber in first. Your wife’s cool, clammy hand loosens its grip on yours as she is ushered away. You feel a knot in your stomach and a sense of dread, not the first one you’ve had this week.

By the time it’s your turn to pile into the boat, it is already very clearly over capacity. There are way too many people here, but nobody has a choice anymore. You’ve been duped by a people smuggler. As the frail and weak are kept safe down in the bottom of the boat, the men are piled around the outsides and on the top. It’s cramped and uncomfortable, but you keep bringing yourself back to the reminder that this is only for an hour or two, soon you will be in France. Soon everything will be safe again.

A spaghetti sea of tangled limbs is bobbing in the unforgiving ocean. Your leg has gone dead and you can hear wails from inside the pile of pile of bodies, they’ve been howling for two hours now and you’re imagination is serving you unlimited reasons why. Another two boats left not long after you, and you can see them not far behind. Like yours, their engines have broken down halfway too.  In some moments you wish those wails were coming from your wife, any familiar sound to let you know she is still alive and breathing, buried down there. A hand reaches for yours. An old woman, head peeping out at you with tears streaming down her face. I don’t know how to swim she confesses.

You spot a ship in the distance moving toward you. Momentarily you forget about your vomit-drenched clothed and frostbitten toes. About how you’ve been sitting out on the relentless waves, in the cold for many hours. Your mind distracts you from how the old ladies grip is loosening from your wrist and her lips are staining blue. You’re being rescued. It’s ok. The people are waving and shouting to the big boat, but it is a little too far in the distance behind you, you can see it getting close to one of the rubber boats that is trailing behind. We’ll be next, you sigh in relief. It’s been the most difficult night of your life, but the end is in sight. Safety is near.

You watch, incredulously, as the boat comes to a halt, dwarfing the tiny rubber boat beside it. That lump in your throat feels harder now as you can but only watch in horror as instead of pulling the occupants up to safety, the people on the boat are stabbing it with knives, filling it with water. The final screams of your drowning fellow safety-seekers will haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life.

Nobody speaks for the rest of the journey.

After 11 long hours you make it to shore. You see unfamiliar faces pulling your boat in toward the rugged coast, but by now you’ve lost all sense of who you can trust. What language are they speaking? You try to listen closer to work out if you’ve landed in the right country but their voices are drowned out by screaming babies. Your mind swirls with questions. Most importantly, where is your wife?

Winter has set in now and she barely speaks anymore. Since the early hours of that morning, when you finally found her, hypothermic and curled up on the beach surrounded by doctors. The first thing you noticed was how she was soaked in your un-born daughters blood. Things have not been the same since that day. Your eyes haven’t met since the night when her hand slid out of yours, when she crawled into the bottom of the boat, never to return the same person. Partly, she blames you for taking her on this journey, even though most of her knows knows she would’ve died back at home. Hell, what used to be called home is now just an expansive stretch of shrapnel and rubble that flashes on television screens across the world when the evening news comes on.

You find yourself with much time to think. Your mind wanders to that half-pink room, you’ve even come to miss that eggshell colour. Maybe you could go back, perhaps you could fight in this war. You’ve already lost your home, your money, your daughter and your wife is as good as gone now, she wont even come near you anymore.  What more have you got to loose?

Life continues to roll on forward at a steady pace, taking you with it whether you like it or not. Suicide slips into your mind more frequently with each passing day. No matter how much you resisted at first to push the thoughts out, they just keep creeping in with more and more intensity. You’ve not nothing and nobody to lean on. You’d never felt truly alone until you heard the news of your parents passing in the latest blast. An orphan with no home, a despondent wife that would have left you by now, if she had anywhere to leave to. You have no money, and you’re loosing hope of seeing any kind of future. What is the point anymore? When you try and reach out to the world, you’re treated as a criminal, an animal, somebody less than worthy. And as day after day passes, you begin to believe it too.

This home doesn’t want you. Your old home no longer exists. What do you do?

A little girl scrutinises under a rock with her torch, carefully turning each one over looking for treasures underneath. She reminds me of myself as a child, endlessly fascinated with searching for creatures in the rock pools.

Completely oblivious to the fist-fight breaking out nearby, she gently replaces each turned stone as men in orange vests and dust masks pick up trash around her.

The train passes though just metres away from her carefully laced up shoes. Donated, of course. her favourite pair were probably pulled off and discarded sopping wet and cold back on the beaches. She doesn’t flinch. This chaos has become her normal.

The chain-link fence turned makeshift washing line protects her from the frequent carriages pulling through, taking many things to Macedonia, except of course, the people who want to go there most.

I cannot begin to imagine how it feels to sell everything for this so called better life, just to get stuck halfway. This transit camp is becoming much less transitory than it’s 1500 person capacity is designed for.

Each night volunteers head out to give out tents to those most in need. It’s too hard to tell during the day who that is, so we wait until later at night. Thats when it’s easiest to creep around sleeping bodies in the fields looking for the most vulnerable without any shelter.

The small girl gracefully dodges the constant stream of people walking by as she forages outside her families small popup tent, crammed in alongside 10,000 other refugees waiting to be allowed through the border.

Her father sleeps, exhausted in their small space that the family has called home for the past week. Her mother waits in a queue that stretches all the way down to area B of the camp, a line that will take many hours just to receive their one meal for today.

Whenever I see children around the camp I remember the instructions “If they break out the gas, cover the kids faces first”. This is the reality that haunts each day here.

Sometimes instead I think of those posters around the place warning about the very real risk of human trafficking, abduction and organ harvesting that goes on here on an alarmingly frequent basis.

The girl with the curious eyes finds a stone that captures her attention for an extra moment.

Another familiar face walks past, the one with the fear and sadness perpetually resting in her big, brown eyes. A bomb went off in her daughters room, now she has lost the ability to sleep or function psychologically in the way little five year olds are supposed to. She is always walking around in a state of panic . Forever trying to make sense of the world, manically trying find out where she needs to go next to bring her family somewhere safe, to give her child any hope of recovery.

As riots break out here, the border closes and more people are pushed back from Serbia, over in Calais they are tearing down that camp. Setting fire to peoples homes, ripping them apart in front of them. Shipping them out with false promises of residence in the UK. Across Europe as the tear gas flows into children eyes we are all asking the same question that you are asking me.

Where will they go?

This is the question I get asked everyday, by friends, followers and refugees alike. I have learnt so much being here. I understand what is happening in ways that people outside of Greece don’t. I have access to first hand accounts and up to the minute information. Yet, this is the question that keeps me up at night. I don’t think anybody knows the answer. So for now you can ask all you like, but it is the one question I just do not have an answer for. Perhaps they will get pushed back to Turkey. Maybe they will forge a trail across Albania, until that closes. Your guess is as good as mine.

Soon my two weeks on Lesvos will have become two months in Greece. In just 7 weeks I’ve come from one end of this country to the other. I’ve pulled in wet people from boats in the dead of night, helped prepare food for thousands, organised hundreds of people out of Moria and into cars, sat at the no-borders kitchen watching the sunrise and waiting for UNHCR busses, holding hands and crying with the others who wait. In such a short time I’ve supervised clothing distribution tents, slept in a tent at a gas station surrounded by 5000 refugees and waited alongside sick people in a remote, rural Greek hospital. I have stood in front of the fully armed Macedonian military, wondering when the tear gas will begin. I’ve liaised with the Greek army, offering the support of our medical teams if they fall short.

I’ve seen more, heard more stories and experienced first hand the effects of this war in more ways I ever had thought possible. This two week volunteer vacation has become something I just cannot imagine myself walking away from, it’s become my life. So here I stay. For another month, perhaps much longer than that if I can find a way to make it happen.

I’ve run out of tears for the everyday. For the child tugging on my trousers in need of more things than money can buy, for the desperation in that parents eyes, for the putrid toxicity of the smoke billowing, created by people so desperate for warmth that they are burning their plastic raincoats for firewood. I didn’t even cry in the Macedonian field, helplessly watching that man vomiting blood into the muddy ditch.

No, instead I cried in the train station. Immersed in repulsive normality. A young Grecian god with curly locks plays his shiny trumpet whilst waiting for a train, and I break down to the bewildered security guards, who are not entirely sure what to do with me. “Don’t cry, you will just be five hours later. We will help you get on the next train to Athens, it is ok, we will help”.

Kind eyes, nervous pats on the shoulder. I want to express my whole world right now, but I hold it together. This isn’t about misleading directions and wrong platforms, not about missed trains and requests for more Euro that I couldn’t afford in the first place. Whether I’m in Thessaloniki or Athens or the side of the road these tears were still overdue. Instead I thank them for helping, and hold the rest inside.

I had become tired of writing. The stories of these people stick stubbornly in my mind, more accumulating each day. No amount of vocabulary can do these tales justice, so most days I fall asleep in a sea of draft copies and hand written notes that will most probably never make it to these pages. Is my enthusiasm fading as I pour all of my energy into holding hope for these people instead of putting pen to paper? No, it is still very much there, it has just been directed to other places. My passion for this cause and these people grows with every minute I spend in the muddy hell.

Yes, hell.

I cannot think of a better word to describe these fields, bisected by train tracks and cut off by a barbed and ruthless border.

42 days of mud, of sadness and despair and tragedy later, after much resistance I  agree to take three days off in Athens, get some space, come back refreshed.

One hour away in this large city, my accidentally extended transit stop to Athens, life goes on. I want to scale the walls and shout from the rooftops..

“People! Look to your North, look in the mud. People are sick, people are dying all around you”.

But, I suppose they know. How could you not? It’s all over the news, all of the time.

Of course they know, but still I’m itching in my skin from the rampant consumerism and luxury that exists so close to the hell I call home.

Two relaxed Greek men talk business beside me, the springtime sun shining across day planners and mobile phones. This is far too normal.

Back in camp human rights have become no longer just a concept we should fight, but a reality that I see violated over and over again. People are soaked into their bones. They have been for days, and they will continue to be for many more. If they say the wrong thing, or unknowingly present the wrong papers, they are beaten. Bones are broken. Tear gas is used. Simple as that, sometimes even less – sometimes there is no reason.

The borders are closed, they say. Forever. But where do we go? The question resonates with us all, I wish I had all of the answers. Even some of them would do.

The business man orders a frappe, pleasantly oblivious. I am going to wait here with my lack of answers for another five hours and hope to get let onto the next train.

I have spent the past few days wondering how, when I finally got the chance, I might tell the story of the past five days. Agonising over the details and the timelines. What happened when? Did the hospital trip happen before or after the border closures. Honestly, it has been a bit of a rough ride here recently. Each time the situation doesn’t seem like it could become more difficult, something happens to challenge that.

Our gas station camp is unrecognisable now from the one we arrived into, inhabited by many thousands of salt-water worn, well-walked in shoes filled out by uncertain and confused people.

I could take this opportunity to tell you about the dark moments, the parts where I had to leave and cry out of sheer exhaustion, ravaged by the cold and flus of 50 sick patients an hour, in a queue that never dissipated.

The part where the Macedonia border closed to all Afghanis, sparking a mass exodus of 1000 desperate people giving up hope on their busses ever leaving, trekking 15km to the border in the cold, elderly, sick and babies in tow down a busy highway.

The evening before where I was informed, in no uncertain terms, that I would need to stay with our critically ill patient in hospital overnight, that refugees were not permitted to be left unattended there and that I was destined to sit in a small, empty & dilapidated hospital, patching up broken English with more broken English. Arabic vs Greek, with me translating two languages I don’t understand myself. A common improv translation task these days.

Yes, those moments were difficult. I could write you a hundred heartbreaking stories of the people here, the scenarios and tragedies. But they are so frequent here these days that it barely feels like news anymore. Use your imagination, everything you think has happened here, and to these people, is probably true – and more.

Instead I will introduce you to some of my friends.

Meet my friend. The one with the charming smile and kind eyes, although you couldn’t see them the first time we met. Hunched over onto a car vomiting, drifting in and out of consciousness and clutching his stomach in agony, there was no time for such gentle introductions. Instead of shaking hands, we met as I held his legs tight, a team of four carrying his writhing body over to the closed clinic. We became acquainted as he gripped my hand tight in the ambulance, deliriously asking over and over for his wife and baby as our doctor put an IV in his arm to help stabilise him. Over five hours sitting and waiting at a remote hospital we became friends. As he recovered we shared stories of our countries, our families, our own very different journeys. He shared with me photos of his 5 month old daughter as I loaned him my phone to check in with his family back home in Syria. My friend who called me over by name the next day to introduce to his family, who I shared a beautiful moment in the sun, taking a teddy bear to his daughter and having photos taken with him and his family, sharing a packet of oreos. ‘Please, take my number’ I insisted. ‘Tell me once you reach Frankfurt, I need to know you are all safe’. ‘Ah, Facebook! I will find you on Facebook. Thank you Anna, thank you so much’. Their journey continues. I hope someday, when phones are charged and WiFi accessible to him, I will hear from my new friend in Germany.

I would like to introduce you to another group of new friends, the explorers. Men my age, forging a safe pathway across Europe for their families waiting patiently in Turkey for them. Out to find a better life. Laughter crosses all language barriers as we teamed up in the middle of the night to make new tents out of a pile of broken pieces. A moment of eye contact sparked an eruption of laughter as our abstract tent creation wobbled, wavered and finally toppled over. My friends who don’t want to be helpless or cared for, who stay up through the night helping volunteers create safe spaces and hand out food. The explorers who insist we take their seats, who share stories and jokes as they saw up more discarded tree branches for the oil-drum fire we will all sit around for the coming hours, Whose spirits haven’t been crushed despite facing endless challenges. My beautiful group of laughing explorers.

Next, my solo friend. Sitting on the curb, helping us translate. He doesn’t want help nor sympathy, he is kind and patient. He lost the life of his brother along the way and now travels alone on the long path to Germany. He has a beautiful accent, and takes the time to learn from me where New Zealand is. He has no tent, no blanket and it is bitterly cold. I get to know this friend by ushering him into the ambulance, the four of us sitting and drinking hot chocolates and sharing quotes, stories and jokes from my colleagues  phone. Eventually we convince him to take our blanket with him. This new friend of mine is a stoic warrior with a kind heart.

I have many other friends around this camp, so many I can’t count. Some I know well, some I have only met in passing. Walking around I am greeted by kind smiles, offers of everything ranging from water, cookies and cigarettes through to the jackets off their backs on a cold night. The kindness and resilience here leaves me incredulous. Each day I make new friends who will entertain me through the night with their laughter, their stories. Amidst a jungle of tour buses and bodies sleeping around the ground, bellowing smoke of campfires and makeshift huts in the luggage compartment of busses, my new friends wait for a signal that they will be allowed to move on.

All of my new friends are on a journey that I can barely comprehend myself, and at any minute they could be gone again into the night. But with the tumultuous situations up at the border that might not be for a while. Until then, we will wait here, all together.

The wind howled through camp the last two nights, hurling pine needles and poorly pinned laundry across the grounds. Spring is coming, but before the orange trees burst into flower I will be gone from this island.

Providing the weather stabilises, we will be leaving on a ferry bound for Kavala tomorrow morning.

Will I return to my life jacket strewn island paradise? It’s too early to know. With the promises of incoming NATO ships and more EU threats to Greece, things are bound to become more chaotic at the land borders, but potentially provide some respite for the islands. If the needs of Lesvos grow again, I will come back. For now, I need to go where I am most needed. So begins my journey north toward the Macedonian border.

I arrived into Athens, moved to Lesvos and now will begin my Journey up toward Macedonia. 928km away – I will be taking the ferry for most of that distance.

I am beginning to pack up my belongings, both the ones I arrived with and the new bits – tents, sleeping bags and other things required for entering a refugee zone with minimal infrastructure. Of course I’m feeling a little nervous, every new plan begins with a cocktail of excitement and trepidation. It feels good to be moving ahead, to be going where help is needed.

Tomorrow marks my one month anniversary on this island, it feels like a milestone day to leave again.

2016 has already taught me about many things I never expected to learn; I had never been into politics however I have developed political views, gradually I begin to understand. The decisions of politicians weigh heavily on my conscience. I feel enraged that people are being killed just kilometres from where I am. Human rights have become real.

I knew nothing of sailing, but now when I stare out past the port I can tell you if the boats will come, or if it’s too choppy. I can spot the coastguard from 6km away and show you the difference between a blinking rescue signal light and the lights from the turkish fishing boats.

The past week has been quiet, peppered with bouts of anger and frustration.

Small disputes and debates with friends who have never been, and will probably never come here. People who have never experienced first hand the humanity of this situation, who feel their own solution is the right one to solve such a global and horrific crisis. I get easily fired up these days. After a month of meeting this crisis head-on, from a face to face perspective, I may have lost touch with the broader scope of things. Either way, I become more passionate about this cause as time continues.

As the minutes creep into weeks I am realising the power of our anger. How so many people have arrived here, motivated by a sense of rage and injustice. I have come to accept that not only is my anger real, but that it isn’t bad either.

So let us be angry. Invite in the small frustrations and the massive rage. For it is how changes are made and people are inspired, it drives us to take action and re-shape the world into something closer to how we thought we wanted it. Love is the motivation behind change, however it is constructive anger that is the real driving force.

Let us be angry, but let us also learn to channel it into constructive change.

I’m sitting in the reception, a small brightly coloured room at the entrance of Pikpa. To my right is a pile of drums taking a break from their usual residence in evening drumming circles, landscaping sketches are taped to the walls behind me telling stories of beautiful things to come.

This room is the hub of where all the meetings are held and changes take place, it’s where I come to work, to write, to think. Outside the window I can hear haphazard guitar strumming, children laughing and parents cooking dinner in the communal dining room.

This is a community with heart, a place that is constantly evolving and changing to meet the needs of an unpredictable future of the island.

Quieter days and gentler times

It’s not all boat rescues filling up my days in Greece. I am based in a community known as Pikpa – the community of all together. Here we only take the most vulnerable of refugees, those who are ill or in especially difficult situations. An ongoing community that has been growing and evolving for three years now, it is a bit of an oasis amongst the chaos of the other camps. This sanctuary is a self proclaimed  ‘self-organised, autonomous space run by volunteers and is built on the principle of solidarity’.

You can feel it from the moment you arrive that Pikpa is bursting with love, compassion and a strong sense of community. It’s all too easy to fall madly in love with this place.

This morning I arrived downstairs refreshed, a rare night spent curled up in bed rather than ushering in rubber boats, an unusual luxury.

Volunteer Meetings

The meeting starts at 10.30, but people trickle in slowly. I enjoy a moment of sunshine and a coffee as volunteers find a comfortable spot on one of the sofas, fashioned from the insides of life jackets and the outsides of boats.

During the meeting introductions are made, the daily jobs and needs are outlined, and teams for the day are recruited. The aim of Pikpa is to fill gaps and needs around the place, operating in a fluid & flexible way to ensure that whatever is most needed in that moment is what gets done.

They work intuitively – exactly how I like to, perhaps this is why I fit so well.

Before we part ways, some out to sort donations, others to plant trees and move tents, we all gathered to learn some new language skills. Arabic is a beautiful and complex language spoken by so many of our arriving refugees, even knowing one or two words can make a difference. The richness and poetic beauty is apparent and this lesson is enhanced by some of the resident children joining in and suggesting their favourite words for us to learn.

The flexibility of this community allows all kinds of projects to blossom, ranging from language classes and yoga through to music, dance and art projects unfolding across the common area.

Connecting with the residents

Although I thrive in emergency situations and am at my best with pumping adrenaline, a day off to connect with the residents and become better acquainted with the property is a welcome retreat for me today.

These are the days with no boats, in some ways they are more significant than the hectic beach mornings. These are the days where I am working with a group of like minded people to create something sustainable. A project that is not just an immediate reaction to the crisis of today, but a long term plan to create refuge for whoever needs it and to respond to whatever needs might arise in the future. It feels good to be a part of something like this.

I spend my morning as some kind of human climbing frame, cuddled up with a team of kids and colouring books. We exchange languages, I stumble over the foreign sounds of Arabic and they laugh, then impress me with their English.

My job for the morning is to look after the communal dining room, making sure the space is safe and clean and that the tea and coffee flows. Most of this job is spent interacting with the people here, and it’s a great inspiration for me to come up with some fun art projects I can do with the children later in the week.

A Playful day, a heartwarming change of pace.

It’s hard to imagine the hell these kids have been through, they are just so damn happy.

A small boy takes up residence on my knee whilst his older sister shows me how to write her name in Arabic, these kids all have stories that could break your heart a thousand times over, but we protect them here – no faces, no stories and no photos get published online.

Energised from playing and heart thoroughly warmed from the kids, I ventured out in the late afternoon to pack food. From here we cook and distribute food to Moria – the much bigger refugee camp on the island.

Today 900 portions of lentils and rice were cooked and packaged into foil trays down a small production line, packed into a van and sent off into the darkness to help fill the stomachs of hungry people camping out at Moria and on the hillside surrounding it. The numbers we produce vary by day, but the positive atmosphere and team work in our make-shift production line is unwavering.

It’s not all crazy rescues and adrenaline

When people see media reports of the situation on Lesvos it is focused so heavily on the drama, the drownings and deaths, hypothermic babies being hauled out of semi-sunken boats. Yes of course this is the reality here, it is horrifying, but there is so much more to life on the island too.

Pikpa, and Lesvos in general, feels like a completely unique sub-culture. A place with volunteers from all across the globe working together to create a sustainable system to help those most in need. It feels important to share that there is so much more to life here than emergency rescue. In our down time, even the most experienced lifeguards, doctors and translators all give their time to sort donations, re-pitch blown down tents and work on registration lines for newly arriving refugees.

It’s hard to know what the future will bring with so much instability in the local economy and very real threats of Greece being suspended from the Schengen zone, everybody has their theories on what might happen, none are good. Amidst the uncertainty and difficult times, it is also incredible be be a part of something so positive and to experience so many wonderful people coming together to create a space like this.

Once a week I let go and get away. I escape to the relative normality of a cafe overlooking the ocean and I let the weight of the world fall on me. Sometimes there are tears, sometimes despondence. Usually I manage to get some work done in there too.

Todays emotion of the moment is bewilderment. Today things have changed, my little world here is different to how it was yesterday or last week, things on Lesbos are shifting. I don’t yet know what that means for me or the others here.

For two nights now I have sat through the sunrise without the usual panoramic of little black dots approaching in the horizon. The ocean has been empty of those I am here to rescue, and that is a good thing. No boats means no drownings, no deaths, none of this unnecessary suffering I have become accustomed to. It looks like the authorities are getting their act together, it looks like the very beginnings of a #safepassage are emerging. This is fantastic news, if it lasts.

Forgive me for sounding skeptical here, but my initial reaction is a feeling of too good to be true. For the past two days numerous volunteers have speculated on why the boats have stopped arriving, how come we are watching smooth oceans and great weather and not seeing any refugees signalling in the distance.

Perhaps the coastguard are turning people back to Turkey? There were rumours of Turkish police being spotted patrolling the Izmir coastlines at night, thwarting smugglers attempts to send off boats. Whatever the reason, something was going on and the whole island had been spending the evening discussing it.

Today emerged more information, on one of the main social media information groups for volunteers Léon van Schie posted:

“Breaking news from the front; in the Aegean sea around the island of Lesvos, right in front of the Turkish waters, lay 6 huge Greek naval vessels that stop all refugee boats. The Greek let them board the navy ships, register them, and when their numbers approach 400, they sail towards Mytilini harbour, from where they are sent to Athens immediately with a ferry. Turkish coast guards have been seen accompanying the refugee boats up to the Greek waters, from where the Greek bring them on board safely.”

Aha, I thought. As I’m sure did many others. This makes sense, this is good. As the day has progressed more information has surfaced to suggest that these refugees are not being sent to Athens, rather being piled onto buses and sent to Moria – the main registration point and refugee camp on the island. So they are still coming here, just in a much safer manner. Relief washed over, safe people, I like safe people.

Amongst long nested threads of tittering conversation, a poignant question stood out. Anna Åberg Moutzourelli asked:

“Do they get dry clothes?

Do they get a hug?

Do they get information?

I have lot of questions.”

A stark reminder that volunteers on the shores provide so much more than just a taxi service to the registration queue.

Opinions on whether this will last are split. There is widespread speculation that this is a temporary solution arising as a response to threats of EU suspension if Greece doesn’t work to secure its borders. Others highlight the presence of British MP’s as well as German and French ministers arriving later in the week as a potential cause for making a good impression, one which will loose momentum once the spotlight is taken off.

This isn’t the first instance of a “Volunteers aren’t needed any more” statement. It has been suggested a number of times last year when various changes were made and milestones reached, however in every case the need for volunteers remained. Will this be the case once again?

So where are we needed now? There is already an influx of not-yet-arrived volunteers questioning whether they should come to Lesbos, or whether there help is going to be more needed on the other islands or perhaps Athens. Of course there is no clear answer to this, other than to say that whether we are meeting boats or not, the refugees are still coming, and still being taken into the camps where there is always a need for assistance and support. I am sure many will leave in search of other places to help, perhaps Turkey, whist others (most likely myself included) will wait it out on Lesbos to see what happens once the media spotlight subsides. It will be interesting to see how long Frontex and the Greek authorities sustain this practice for.

I certainly hope this is a sustainable solution, and a step in the direction of safe passage. But if it’s not, and it is just a temporary facade, I will be here ready when the boats return. In the mean time, it’s business as usual with people to feed and refugee camps to run – beach rescue or not.