Where Have All The Migrants Gone?

I have a friend who walked 2 hours every day from Moria to get to Mytilini where he sat in a quiet corner of a cafe, nursed a coke or a coffee, and spent all day chatting with his family in Gambia. He couldn’t stand being in Moria and so these daily trips were his escape. He hated life on the island but was willing to wait out his asylum process rather than risk his chance for protection status by acquiring fake papers to make the trip to the mainland and beyond. Because he was given his ‘freedom papers’ which restrict his liberty of movement to the island of Lesvos, he resigned himself to spending his time like this. On Monday evening on the way home the police stopped him and asked him for his papers and he obliged. They looked them over, gave them back, and arrested him on the spot without cause.

Yesterday afternoon a former Lesvos volunteer who is now working in Athens contacted me to ask if I had seen or heard from him in the past days. I had not. When the police arrested him they also confiscated his phone so he would have no contact with friends, family, or anyone else who might be concerned about his disappearance.  I went to the police station and told them I was concerned about a missing person and gave his name. “Oh, you’re looking for one of the prisoners?” the guard replied. Yes, he might be one of the prisoners. They looked up his name on a long list, four pages in landscape, 12-point font, about 150 names. His was one of them. The young police guard saw no harm in having me talk to him for 5-minutes, so he opened the window of an iron cell door and shouted his name. I heard it echo down a corridor as more people shouted it out until he was found. I have no idea how big the space is where these arbitrary detainees are being held but in my imagination there were between 100 and 150 people in 7 or 8 small holding cells. With all the time I’ve spent bouncing my voice off the walls of various rooms as a singer, I can say with certainty that the voices didn’t travel far, not more than 15 or 20 meters and the natural reverberations of the hard concrete room were absorbed by bodies.

The Big Fish

Today I got a message from a friend that shocked me: 

"moi j suis a paris"

(i m in paris)

No exclamation point, no punctuation.

He succeeded in doing what everyone on this island dreams of doing by pursuing what seemed like the only option available to him: flight. I met him less than 2 months ago at the fence in Moria. As I read his message today a vivid image of our first meeting flashed through my memory. He pulls me to the side and shows me pictures of his wife and his daughter in a safe-house half a world away. He tells me his daughter asks him every day when she'll see him again and with hurt in his eyes he tells me he can't imagine when or how he will ever get there. When I met up with him in Athens two weeks ago, all that pain was gone and it was clear that he wasn't sticking around there either. He was very purposefully putting together the pieces of a 3000 euro puzzle to procure a temporary identity, fly to France and start over again. He is not the only one looking of an alternative to the legal route off the island.

Every day at the port, a group of would-be escapees stalks the ferry terminal from a distance. They sit on the pediment of a 15m replica of the statue of liberty cast in bronze after the 1922 population swap that brought the last wave of refugees to this island. From here, they study what people in Moria call The Big Fish and plot their escape. Some make their way there early in the morning to break into containers before they get loaded onto the ship bound for Athens. Some sneak around the rocky breakwall waiting for the right moment to dash into the belly of the beast and hide among the cars and passengers. Others pay 300 euros for a recycled travel document so they can buy a proper ticket and hope the police don't call their bluff. It takes a bit of cunning to pull it off.

Palios Love Song

I started writing this song the night before the pope came to town and finally got a chance to record it. I'll keep it up here for a couple weeks but I've also added it as a bonus track on the XENOPHILIA! EP which is still only available to people who support my crowdfunding campaign. I've been kind of regrouping - the CK team disintegrated as the boats stopped arriving and I've been offline, on the road, and generally figuring out what to do next. Right now I'm opening a support centre in Mytilene with a group of friends and I think it's going to be really great. We have a big mansion in the centre of town and are now organizing language courses, lawyers, psychologists, art & movement workshops, and transportation to and from Moria. Now that I'm settled again, I can start doing regular updates about what's going on on Lesvos. In the meantime enjoy this song before the paint dries... I just recorded it today!