Get a mobile library to refugee camps in Greece

Hello there everyone, 

I hope that this message finds you all well, wherever you are. 

ECHO keeps rolling on, focusing our sessions on Mondays, Tuesdays and occasional Wednesday city sessions. Although our reach is reduced, it is still extremely valued. We enjoy sharing the space outside the camps sometimes with Rosa, a moving safe space focusing on women and children. When we are together our activities complement one another and it feels as if the outside camp is more of an open community space, where children run around freely and there is something for everyone, whether it is painting, reading, playing or learning. We talk with library users new and old, we loan Camus' The Fall to a teenaged Afghan boy who also loves Manga, we make colourful birds out of cardboard, we search for Asterix for an hour between the pages of a book.

Life inside the camps is tough and precarious. Many people are still waiting for any form of official documentation. One group of Iraqi women have been stuck in Greece for up to 5 years facing rejection after rejection with no support and nowhere to go. The camps, deliberately isolated and with extremely limited services - including legal - are not getting any better and there is less and less scrutiny from outside groups and organisations. Unfortunately, with the recent re-election of the current political party Nea Demokratia and continuing pressue from the EU to seal up the borders of fortress Europe, this situation is not looking likely to change.

What politicians in Athens, Brussels and elsewhere consciously ignore is the human cost of these policies, which we see first hand. There are vulnerable people in these camps affected by complex mental and physical health issues, many of which were exacerbated after entering the camps. One mother from Iraqi Kurdistan said that she cannot sleep at night because she is so worried about how they are going to survive and what pains her most is having to witness the suffering of her own children, one of which regularly has panic attacks.

None of these humans are receiving the support they need, and it is heartbreaking to meet people who visit the library just for a chat or to bring their child to do some colouring. They say they want to take a book, they want to start learning German, they want to read poetry that they used to love, but they say that they do not have the headspace for it. It is an artificially constructed crisis caused by inhuman policies and it is only getting worse at a time when we need to be radically re-thinking how we handle borders on a global scale. 

We see the ECHO library as a means of providing respite, a sense of solidarity and community, even in our restricated capacity outside the camps. Although we cannot give the concrete legal, health and financial support that is so desperately needed, we do our best to reach across physical, linguistic and cultural barriers to show the aspects of humanity that we all share. 

Recently, I reached out to one of our most dedicated library users who left to Germany last year. She says that, although her family's life is more settled, she misses the library. "I don't know whether you will believe me when I say that the library was really important to me, it had affected me deeply. Every week I came to take a book. I learned a lot from them. Books are so valuable to me."

The library could not function without your support and, at times when there are other events taking the headlines, we really appreciate that you continue to think about our little book repository on the edges of Europe. Thank you.