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Samos Volunteers is a Greek NGO focused on providing psychosocial support to the asylum-seekers who are detained on the island of Samos. The list of tasks each day would vary and include providing information about how to access services provided by the organizations on the island, childcare, and psychosocial support. I also branched out as the summer went on in order to experience all aspects of the work our organization did. I took the time to work in our warehouse, doing clothing distribution, where I helped people pick out clothes that helped them feel dignified, as well as teaching informal English lessons to service users at Alpha Land, our camp outside the main detainment center.

Taking the time to explore the different aspects of the job helped me develop a holistic picture of the support that we were providing for asylum-seekers. While childcare, clothing distribution, and language classes all seemed to be different services, they were part of a unified effort to reduce the barriers that asylum-seekers face during their petition for refugee status. Though this summer gave me the opportunity to glimpse the hardships that refugees face every step of their journey, from suffering under oppressive regimes, to trusting in expensive and dangerous actors who help them arrive in Greece, I got to really understand how grueling the actual process of navigating bureaucracy can be and how a person’s ability to understand it can make or destroy their chance of moving forwards.

Small obstacles such as not being allowed to bring children to an appointment with lawyers, dehydration, or the physical distance between the camp and the government buildings drained peoples’ ability to cope with what was arguably the most important part of their journey. My job at SV was to mitigate the tiny crises that might hinder a person’s chance at performing well in their interviews and petitions for refugee status. It is a job I have enjoyed in previous organizations I have worked with, that of smoothing the path for people. I practiced flexibility and understanding, so that I could adapt myself to whatever would be most useful to people at any given moment.

It was a very different experience than working in the policy field. My mission everyday was to meet people and respond to what they needed at the most basic level. This required facing major issues at a very granular level. Samos Volunteers uses its platform to advocate for policy changes, but all of these are based on the feedback we are being given by impacted individuals every single day. Work this summer was rooted in the realities of what asylum-seekers face as opposed to a system-level focus on the failures of governments to address the massive influx of refugees.