By New York Times
“Even if you are healthy, in Moria you’ll get a problem,” said Amir Ali, a 27-year-old from Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, who lived in Moria for more than 11 months.
“That’s not a place to put people in,” he said. “The police cannot control the camp.”
He left Moria, found a job as a house worker and then as a seamster, rented a house in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, where he has chosen to stay, his asylum application accepted.
Others have been placed by the state in a makeshift camp, which is not much better, on the fringes of Moria, in an olive grove.
Ali Zaid, 23, an Iraqi from Babylon, has been living in the makeshift camp for more than five months. He left Iraq to flee the Islamic State after his brother was killed, he said.
He showed the outdoor shower, a hose in the open, biting cold of the Aegean winter. The space was covered with garbage, plastic bags and used body soap containers.
“Very cold, very cold, very cold,” he said in limited English.
Mostly through family and social media, some still follow events back home. Syrians recently protested the siege of the Damascus suburb of Ghouta by the government of President Bashir al-Assad.
Some have lost hope their applications will be accepted and are desperate to get out.
A 20-year-old Algerian, who would give his name only as Anas for fear of running afoul of the authorities, said he had tried to smuggle himself off the island multiple times in trucks being loaded on ships for Athens. Each time, he was discovered by military officers.
He knows the chances of his asylum application being accepted are slim.
“We from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, can’t go,” he said. But he keeps on trying.
“Every day I’m here,” he said. “Sometimes I try, sometimes not. It’s hard to leave.”
In the international pecking order for asylum, Syrians, Iraqis and sometimes Afghans stand a better chance because their countries are actively at war. Still, not everyone makes it, separating friends.
For the women in Moria camp, the situation is often worse.
A 30-year-old woman from Afghanistan, who asked that her name not be published out of fear of being hunted down by her former spouse, described how she fled Afghanistan a year and a half ago, when her husband of 13 years tried to kill her.
In Turkey, she said she was sold to a smuggler, who imprisoned her in a room with no light, gave her no food and raped her for a week.
When she eventually arrived in Moria, things got worse. “I wanted to kill myself when I saw the situation,” she said.
At first, there was no place for her in the overcrowded sections that separate single women from men, and she was forced to sleep in a tent with both men and women.
One night, she lost her way in the dark and found herself in the woods of Moria. A man grabbed her from behind and raped her.
She went to the police, but after she filed her complaint, they sent her back to Moria. “I wanted to kill myself,” she said.
Giannis Mpalpakakis, the director of the Moria camp, which is run by the Greek state but largely financed by the European Union, acknowledged the challenges that he and his team are facing and insisted that they were doing their best, given the extreme circumstances.
“We are trying really hard to help these people; we are not indifferent,” he said.
“Overcrowding is a huge issue for us,” he acknowledged. “Moria is the most overcrowded place in the world, if you divide the number of people living here by the square meter.”
Yet the numbers arriving are expected to rise again as the weather warms. The slow processing of cases reduces the population at the camps, while the trickle of new arrivals replenishes it.
Graves on the island, old and new, betray the dangers of the sea crossing. Boats have capsized and run aground. Rescuers patrol the coasts even now.
“We need to increase the flow of migrants from Greece to Turkey, and decrease the flow from Turkey to Greece,” said Miltos Oikonomidis, a European Union policy officer.
Since January, only 64 people have been sent back to Turkey. Yet 2,698 people arrived on the island of about 86,000 people.
An additional 2,365 were moved to Athens, while 147 left Lesbos voluntarily. There are currently more than 7,800 refugees across all of Lesbos.
“No matter the efforts that are underway in Moria, the point is to reduce the influx of refugees,” Mr. Oikonomidis said.
But that will remain difficult to do. Some are not just fleeing war; they’re seeking opportunity, freedom.
“You’re thinking about the future,” said Isaac Hielo, a 29-year-old from Eritrea, who said his family had died of AIDS.
Does he have hope?
“Yes,” he said with a smile. “Tomorrow is another day, yes?”