First Day Update

We survived Day One! Thanks for your prayers. Moria is an unbelievable place - crowded and chaotic are two adjectives that come to mind. I cannot take photos, though you can see I adjusted the rules ever so slightly to take the two below. So I will try to describe a little what it is like.

Imagine camping for months on end in a tent. Now imagine 12 people in a tent on bunks with blanket dividers between families. Imagine it is 95 (fortunately yesterday the high was only 86). You have maybe 10 sq ft of floor space outside your bunks. Then imagine a EuroRelief worker shows up and tells you (through an interpreter) that you must make room for more. This was the job of some of our team yesterday (including the brave Stephanie Estabrooks). This sometimes takes hours. Then you bring the refugees from new arrivals (if you can find them) and they see their new home. They have been paying smugglers to bring them here and most were hoping for a bit more. They still have such a long way to go to a “normal” life.

Terry was on a team that worked in the hot sun setting up a huge Swiss-made tent without instructions. Sounds perfect for him! Add a few Swiss young adult aid workers helping him whose only tent-making qualifications were being from the country that made the tent (never having even camped recreationally). Terry apparently did a great job of keeping his mouth shut.

I worked in the “info” area where people come with all kinds of requests - the most common being for a bigger tent or a move to an Isobox (a trailer with AC). The answer is usually “no”, but these are negotiating cultures and the people are desperate so they ask over and over. We have translators (who are themselves refugees living in the camp and are volunteering).

One request where the answer is “yes” and where no translator is needed is blowing up and patching holes in soccer balls. This was my favorite task in info!

Yesterday afternoon I was sent to guard an isobox that had just been emptied to make sure that only the appointed family could move in. While there, I met a little girl named Pareenaz from Afghanistan who spoke Farsi. I showed her I could write my name in Arabic (which has the same alphabet as Farsi). This sparked a real connection. She picked up a piece of trash (a local grocery ad), and we “talked” our way through it using English vs. Farsi, getting excited when we found a word in common like “coffee.” We drew pictures (thank goodness I had a small journal and pen in my pocket) and were eventually joined by two other little girls.

Pareenaz drew this little picture of me that has both our names in a heart. Then she wrote my name in a little piece of paper and put it inside her shirt and wrote her name on a piece of paper and handed it to me. I folded it and put it next to my heart. What a way to end the day!