Watching floods of refugees arrive in Europe, retired nurse Roberta “Robin” Panagakos couldn’t bear to sit by any longer.
The Greenfield woman, who last year joined a Zen Peacemakers retreat with the Lakota tribe in the Black Hills of South Dakota, heard that Petra Zenryu Hubbeling, a self-described “wandering monk” who had been living at a Sante Fe center of the Buddhist order, was planning a “service retreat” in Piraeus, the Greek port near Athens where thousands of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria, as well as Iraq, had been assembled in tents set up as temporary shelter.
“I was moved by seeing all of the news coverage,” says Panagakos, who just returned after working in a variety of volunteer roles among hundreds of Syrians, Iraqi, Afghani and other refugees crowded in makeshift centers in several sections of the port described by their exit or entrance numbers: E1, E2, and so on. “I thought, ‘This is so tragic. I can’t imagine having my house in Greenfield bombed.’ This is something that’s happened throughout history, but here I could see these close-up pictures of women, babies, hordes and hordes, living in tents on a pier. It just spoke to me and raised a need in me to be there to help.”
Panagakos, who’s traveled to Greece more than 15 times, had been in Galveston, Texas, staying with her daughter and grandchildren in 2008 when Hurricane Ike flooded the city, and had witnessed first-hand the devastation there, and was moved last year by the need for the “tons and tons” of winter clothing she’d helped collect and distribute at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
But unlike the Zen Peacemakers’ “Bearing Witness” retreats — at Auschwitz, in the Black Hills, in Bosnia and Rwanda — this open invitation by Hubbeling, and by Zen Peacemakers program coordinator Rami Efal of Northampton was to plunge into another of the Zen Peacemakers three tenets: “not knowing,” along with the third tenet of taking action. Thus this was not officially a Zen Peacemakers retreat, but guided by the socially-engaged Buddhist group’s principles.
“It was being there and doing what needed to be done. I thought we’d be out on the street, but we were out on the pier.”
There, along with Efal, Hubbeling and about half a dozen other Zen Peacemaker volunteers from the Netherlands and the United States, plus dozens of volunteers from around Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere, Panagakos and the rest worked as refugees came and went. The numbers, like the faces, changed from day to day, week to week.
More than 46,000 refugees have been trapped in Greece by mid-April, according to Amnesty International. The number of arrivals in Greece, which had been as high as 1,500 per day, according to the International Organization for Migration, was drastically reduced after a European Union deal threatening deportation to Turkey unless they could successfully apply for asylum.
In the large terminal building, where restroom sinks were used to do laundry as well as wash hands and faces with cold water, Panagakos said, distribution areas were cordoned off with packing tape to hand out diapers, one at a time, rationed pieces of toilet paper, and baby formula prepared from powder and water boiled nearby.
Panagakos also volunteered for a daily baby bathing center, carrying water boiled in an electric kettle, then mixed with cold water from large jugs in a basin and transferred to one of a pair of small plastic tubs that were filled and refilled again and again for the waiting mothers with their babies.
As with the bathroom wash basins, she says, “They had to bring their own soap. It was very primitive.”
For families with young babies, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees provided blankets for lying inside, she said. Clothes were spread out on bushes and hung from trees to dry. One of the flashpoints was at a 4 p.m. daily distribution of clothes, where Panagakos worked as well as organizing a dimly lit stone-warehouse sorting area for donated flip-flops, shirts, shoes and pants of all kinds. Volunteers were advised that there could be tensions among the different nationalities and ethnic groups — Syrians and Iraqis, Kurds, Yazidis, Afghans — and that if an argument broke out among people waiting on line, there could be rioting, said Panagakos.
Most of the time, she says, it was simply “chaos for two hours … people would push and shove, with volunteers running around trying to find clothes on shelves in the dark.”
A similar frenzy came at mealtimes when trucks arrived with containers of meals prepared by caterers and tables had to be set up outdoors for separate lines of men and teenage boys here and women and young children there.
“There was chicken, rice, an orange and rolls, occasionally a vegetable,” says Panagakos. “Whatever it was, there was never enough to feed the adults or the kids. … The men pushed, they shoved, they yelled at each other … the poor boys were literally squeezed between the men. It was all just so wild.”
The Greenfield woman lived with other Zen Peacemaker volunteers at a rented apartment a half-hour’s walk from the refugee camp and worked at organizing a distribution of strollers for women with babies, or picking up trash that fell from dumpsters or could otherwise become a public health hazard
There were other volunteers, many of whom had come from around Europe, like Carmen, the Belgian woman living out of her minivan and traveling around the continent and who spent time cutting hair.
“Many people were so idealistic, energetic and compassionate with great skills to offer,” says Panagakos. “There were also people there with true heart, who really wanted to help but who were in the way.”
Volunteers were told during an orientation that they shouldn’t make eye contact with the refugees or approach them, she said. “But by the second day, we were all hugging the children and playing with them. I was picking them up and playing games.”
She displays a pair of drawings that two of the children had made for them.
“There were so many people doing so many things,” Panagakos says. “There were so many organizations and so many needs to be met. So many micro-managers.”
After 11 days of what was planned as a five-week “plunge,” Panagakos, in her 70s, felt exhausted by the experience of working in the relentlessly chaotic environment of dislocation. But she also turned her “not knowing” into a deeper understanding that comes with bearing witness.
“Seems like the exposure to the suffering and helplessness of the refugees at the piers took toll on some volunteers,” Israeli-born Efal writes in a blog post about the “plunge.” “Some were burned out, some were frustrated with the unexpected results of doing good … I understand bearing witness here includes the caregivers, the volunteers, they, us! … too need attention and care.
“By the second day,” concludes Panagakos, “it occurred to me that whatever was happening, however it was awful for the people, they have life. It really made me wonder about the human condition. … I’d look right in their eyes and smile, and hold my heart for them.”
Efal, who has been on various Bearing Witness retreats to Auschwitz and South Dakota, and has spent time as well in Rwanda, has his own observations about Piraeus.
“Today was very much about bearing witness to a larger, slower, picture,” he wrote in his blog. “I reflected on the energy of the day before and appreciated the flow of the highs, the lows. I look around and see a man sleeping in the open, covered by a blanket, kids playing rope, a pair of women sitting in the shade sharing about their day, a young man in denim suit has his arm around a young woman with sparkly purple hijab lean against a broken car, a toddler playing with sand and a tin can under a hanging rope of red, pink, blue clothes drying in the sun. All of them teach me — I feel a sense of ease and perspective and appreciate that most of the time, even in a place of deep uncertainty, confusion and complexity, it’s just that — appreciating and hanging in the in-betweens.”
In a post he writes the day before the start of Jewish holiday of Passover “when the Jewish people, of whom I am a descendent, celebrate the exodus from tyranny into freedom, of deep faith in the midst of great pain, both within one-self and without in the context of peoples and nations — it’s also a time for family gathering, warmth, and community. I reflect on the broad stroke of my human race, of movements of peoples and families, of clouds of faith and helplessness washing over the planet. This Passover, I will celebrate with these folks here who have fled civil wars and lost every single thing they owned, those of five thousand years ago, those of today, and those of the future. I begin to accept that the tendency to divide and hurt is an innocent expression of our tragic ways to live, and that the yearning to be seen, to be heard, to be nurtured, to find freedom and agency, and to contribute, are universal.”
On the Web: https://medium.com/@rami.efal
You can reach Richie Davis at
rdavis@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 269