It has now been 9 days since we had a boat landing on the
north coast and I am busier than ever! Since we haven't been receiving
boats, I've been reading a lot about EU asylum procedures,
qualifications, and returns in my tent at night and I've been making
more trips to Moria with my guitar in the daytime. Some really magical
things are coming together.
Last week I met an incredible group of people who fled
political violence in their home country. This was on the one day when I
left in a hurry without my guitar and one of these new friends told me I
needed to come back and bring it with me because everyone where they
come from is a singer. We spent most of the next day singing in the
shade of an olive tree that straddles the fence line of the detention
camp and shared a beautiful musical moment that brought us closer
together. In between songs they told me bits and pieces of stories that
reflected the very reasons why the international community felt
compelled to protect human dignity with legal instruments like the
Geneva Convention or the European Convention on Human Rights. And in
spite of horrible experiences like kidnapping, torture, murder, and now
this seemingly indefinite detention that none of us understood, we were
smiling, laughing, singing, dancing, clapping, tapping and whistling
out all the parts we couldn't remember in an olive grove on a Greek
island thousands of miles away from home.