Inside a refugee camp: Everywhere I look I see children’s lives being disrupted

There’s a different ring tone on FaceTime. It’s like it’s distant, appropriately so, but because I call my wife so often it allows to me control costs. When we speak the sound quality is not good either. Again, in our circumstances, it seems apt.

It’s so hard to be apart from her and my little girl. What must my child be thinking, seeing her mother heavy with the new baby and her father absent for months? No three-year-old should be expected to understand. I worry about that. I worry that no amount of explanation when she’s older will undo the possible damage my absence now could be doing to her.

She’s a bright little thing. I know her mum reassures her every minute of every day. I know too that because I tell her I love her these daily phone and text rituals might lessen any hurt, any damage. That we can communicate as we do with such frequency is a blessing. I wonder how, before modern telecommunications, migrants coped with separation.

Everywhere I look I see children whose lives are being disrupted. Boys and girls of all ages; teenagers and young adults with lost months and in many cases, years, without education. This is not their fault. Nor is it their parents’ fault. In any event apportioning blame is hardly relevant. What matters is a resolution. Fixing the problem is what matters because every week less that our young people spend in these circumstances would not just be a victory for them but for Europe too.

Crucial stage

Nour and Sara are six and seven years old. Their older brothers are in their early teens and the family has three small tents near ours. Their father, Abdul, is my friend. The family has been travelling for a year and until recently the children have had no education. The boys can, to an extent, educate themselves, but the little girls have lost time and momentum at a crucial stage.

Abdul and his wife are alarmed. The UNHCR is suggesting we should prepare for life in the camp until at least 2018. Whether or not it was reasonable to have expected a different reception from Europe, we migrants did. Those with children especially so.

When we sit, smoke and talk late into the night, the needs of our young is the most common topic of conversation. Another friend, Ajmal, is from Afghanistan. An educated man, he left because of the violence but also because he wanted his girls to receive a proper education. Ajmal is mild-mannered, considered. When he talks of the risk that these lost years for our young people might feed resentment he does so out of genuine concern. There’s no anger, no attempt to apportion fault. Ajmal returns regularly to the theme out of fear for the future. He is correct: lost opportunity might encourage dissent.

Hope rests with us and with the volunteers. Remarkably, week in week out, we receive new blessings in the people who come to help us. Some of them are local, others come from across Europe, Scandinavia, the US and Canada (in contrast to the complete absence of volunteers from conflict-free Arab states). What’s changed over the months is how we interact with the volunteers. At first it was a relationship of dependency. Today, through the encouragement of some, it has become almost a partnership of equals other than that they have access to resources which is what we are bereft of right now.

Cristina is a Belgian who has lived in Athens for years. She has been a constant around the port. Even at the time of the Brussels bombing she was unflinching in her determination to support us. It is conversation; it is encouragement; it is time; it is love and concern. Cristina was one of the people who encouraged us to set up classes for the children. When, and only when, we had demonstrated a capacity to organise these did she come to the camp with large tents where the classes could be held.

The most important part of this interaction between migrant and volunteer is that it establishes trust and mutual respect. It’s how we had lived our lives before being forced to flee. It’s what we came to Europe in search of and now worry might never crystallise.

When I think about how close my wife is to giving birth I feel weak. Nauseous almost. There are women in the camp who are pregnant, others who have given birth in recent months and, however difficult that has been, the family is together. Mine is not.

Did we do the correct thing in deciding I should push on to Europe? I think back to the night we made the sea-crossing in the overladen dingy. What if it had capsized and my wife and daughter had been with us? I can console myself with that thought but I quickly realise that no one was lost on that journey so perhaps we would be together now. Would that not be better?

Due date

As the due date approaches my wife remains strong. When we talk. I cry. When we text, my words betray me as the needy one. In recent weeks my mother’s resolve has weakened. She’s increasingly upset and emotional about how the family has become fractured and dispersed.

“The children, the children, the children,” she says, over and over. She is a proud woman. She raised her family expecting that, in time, she would enjoy the blessing of seeing us raise ours under her watchful and loving eye. That hope lies with the rubble that surrounds our home and her beloved jasmine bush.

Mustafa is a pseudonym to protect the the identity of the author, who is in the refugee camp in Piraeus, Greece. He was in conversation with Fintan Drury