Among thousands of refugees in Greece, the most vulnerable are the unaccompanied children. Daniel Howden meets Christina Dimakou, who gave up her job in the capital to care for them in Lesbos
Christina Dimakou is not yet 30, but she has four children, one of whom is 17. She shares neither a nationality nor a past with any of them. Two of them are from Syria: the 17-year-old girl fled Damascus after soldiers attempted to kidnap her and her brother, who escaped conscription; there’s a 10-year-old from Iran who longs to go to school for the first time; and a young girl from Afghanistan who has lost her family. For now Dimakou is their guardian.
She cares for them within the confines of Moria, a makeshift hilltop camp for refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos. Her charges spend their days behind chain-linked fences where a discarded Minnie Mouse in a torn pink dress, caught in the razor wire, is the only indication that this is the children’s area.
More than 700,000 refugees have entered Europe through Greece this year, most of them wet and bedraggled arrivals on its eastern Aegean islands. Their coming has shaken Europe and changed the life of this determined lawyer.
Instead of practising law in Athens, where she passed the bar exam, Dimakou has moved her life to an island now famous for the refugees who wash up on its shores. It’s a life with few of the trappings of the metropolitan middle class with whom she grew up. Her working outfit is an aid worker’s bib, her hair tied back. She shuttles between the crumbling neoclassical architecture of the port city of Mytilene and the crowded refugee reception centre at Moria in a battered Toyota loaded with translators and the dirt from a thousand strangers’ shoes.
She is one of only a dozen members of the guardianship network, a fledgeling programme run by the Athens-based charity Metadrasi, designed to help the countless lost children who have arrived alone. Some have been separated from their families while fleeing Syria, others have taken it upon themselves to strike out and find a new home for relatives who will follow later. Many of them have been told they carry their family’s only hope.
Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/13/athens-lawyer-guardian-to-refugee-camp-children
