Our team arrived on the island of Lesvos on Sunday night to work with Gateways2Life for the next two weeks.
This is the second time I have been on this island in just a year. I am struck again by its beauty and the friendliness of its people, which we are fortunate to get to enjoy each evening when our work is done (the refugees are not so lucky).
William Splitgerber, director of Gateways2Life, gave us some background which was quite interesting. Early in the last century, Turkey expelled 1.5M people of Greek heritage, effectively making them refugees. Many of them fled to Lesvos, only 4 miles away by boat. It was a logical place to go since Lesvos had been under Turkish control from 1462-1912.
Present day islanders are descendants of those refugees and they initially met the current refugees from the Middle East with open arms. The citizens of Lesvos were actually nominated for a Nobel peace prize in 2015! They are still kindhearted for the most part but are starting to be very concerned. For some perspective consider that there are 8000+ refugees living in Camp Moria (which was built for 1800). The little town we are staying at nearby has less than 1000 residents! Its economy depended heavily on tourism which has pretty much screeched to a halt since the refugees arrived. And worse, while refugees used to funnel through Lesvos quite quickly to Athens and then to other countries, those doors are closing - stranding these people here - and stranding Lesvos with lots of problems that they have no resources to handle.
This is a big opportunity for Christians to practice the Great Commandment to love our neighbor. While there are several secular humanitarian groups here, I am happy to say that through the grace of God, the UN has asked EuroRelief to run Camp Moria. It is a branch of Hellenic Ministries - a Christian organization!
And the group we are with - Gateways2Life- operates a center for women and children just outside the camp. The main physical need they are meeting is for safe showers and laundry. It is a big effort! The center here is just opening (last year we were here for the opening of another center outside a much smaller camp run by the city of Mytilene). They hope to run the center with a Greek local staff, but our team is being the beta testers and allowing them to delay this operating cost for a few weeks and do their interviewing. And it is allowing us to learn a lot and have our hearts impacted (more about that in the next post).
