Chronicling the Uniquely Human Need to Lend a Hand, Even in the Darkest Times
Writer: Dana Sachs
“You can just go volunteer in a refugee camp?”
“Apparently, yes.”
In 2016, a friend decided to join a fledgling grassroots aid effort at a makeshift border camp in Northern Greece. As a writer, I had long explored themes of displacement. For months, I’d watched with alarm as Europe’s migration crisis grew increasingly calamitous: drownings in the Mediterranean, thousands sleeping in train stations and ports, tent encampments springing up in border regions. But until she told me of her plan I had not known that volunteers from around the world had galvanized to help.
“Can I go with you?” I asked.
A month later, the two of us arrived at the camp on Greece’s Northern border. Thousands of refugees and migrants were sleeping in tents in the muddy fields beside a small Greek village called Idomeni. For ten days, we worked alongside other volunteers organizing donations, serving soup out of the back of a truck, distributing used clothes. I can’t say that this was an entirely successful operation; a lot of things went wrong. But one fact was obvious, and important: A lot of individuals had seen a humanitarian disaster unfolding in Greece and they were helping to reduce the suffering there.
Ever since then, I’ve followed the development of this aid movement, both as a member of the grassroots community and as a writer determined to chronicle these historic events. I wrote All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis to highlight something that we all witness but rarely discuss: The very human desire to lend a hand. I don’t mean to suggest that All Else Failed looks only at the positive outcomes of this volunteer effort. In order to better understand displacement, we need to consider it in all its breadth, not only by recognizing what’s gone wrong, but also by acknowledging the extraordinary good will that people have shown one another. Only then can we understand this global crisis and the many ways we might effectively address it.
My story begins in 2015, when arrivals of refugees to Greece were increasing exponentially, mostly because of continuing violence in the Middle East. On the Aegean Islands, thousands of people arrived in boats every day. They were sick, hungry, traumatized by war, and they needed almost everything—food, blankets, medicine, diapers. But the world’s most prominent humanitarian actors—the Red Cross, the International Rescue Committee, and the United Nations—became stalled as they tried to figure out what to do. Into that void stepped hundreds, and eventually thousands, of volunteers. They were Greek villagers, Swedish college students, tourists, and even refugees themselves. They couldn’t end the crisis—the world needs governments for that—but they helped keep a humanitarian emergency from becoming a complete disaster.
My book follows seven individuals and families who joined this aid effort. New Zealander Jenni James saved people drowning in the sea, worked to improve squalid camps, and even constructed a dinosaur-themed playground for refugee children. Ibrahim Khoury, from Syria, stepped off a boat himself in 2015 and immediately joined the relief effort, managing thousands of Euros in aid. English social worker Kanwal ended up managing an illegal housing accommodation that sheltered 400 displaced people. As All Else Failed demonstrates, these individuals, and many more, filled in for a faltering international aid system, providing support to desperate people.
I find solace in the grit and determination of the volunteers, who offer a stirring model for addressing global problems. Their efforts are not enough. In fact, the very existence of volunteer aid workers underscores the need for a more effective official relief apparatus. But rather than doing nothing in the face of overwhelming need and institutional failure, volunteers demonstrate how each of us, in small ways and large, can contribute something valuable.
One day in Greece, a young volunteer showed me around a community center that her small aid team had opened as a haven for refugees living in a nearby camp. The center—called, of all things, “One Happy Family”—was a ramshackle building, much of it renovated with repurposed junk. The operation never had enough money, but it somehow stayed open. When I asked this volunteer about the prospect for the coming months, her answer perfectly captured the spirit of the aid effort. “I don’t know how we’ll do it,” she told me, “but everything is feasible somehow.”
About the Writer
Dana Sachs is a journalist, novelist, and cofounder of the nonprofit Humanity Now, which supports grassroots teams providing aid to displaced people. A former Fulbright Scholar, she is the author of three works of nonfiction: The House on Dream Street, The Life We Were Given and All Else Failed, as well as the novels If You Lived Here and The Secret of the Nightingale Palace. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and Mother Jones. Sachs lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Website: danasachs.com