Schio, 25th February
I will never forget the image of that boy, Jamal. Lying there on the ground in the woods, half naked, barefoot, his feet curled. What had happened to him had happened to many people: he had been found by the Croatian police, beaten, robbed of everything, stripped and sent barefoot back across the border.
I asked myself: what would have happened if we had gone a different way?
We began our work in 2018. A charity that my husband and I knew, who help people traveling along the “Balkan route”, had asked for our support. And so, my husband, P., left for Bosnia.
On his return, he told us about the terrible conditions people were living in in the woods. That was when we began our aid relays. We gathered some provisions with the help of friends, and rented a van to transport it. We did everything very spontaneously, it was even a bit disorganised, but that’s how our collective began. It then gradually grew and became more structured thanks in part to G., a student from Schio who was doing an Erasmus year in Athens, and who had had similar experiences himself.
The border police didn’t want us to have any contact with the migrants, and sometimes we had to find ploys in order to get to them. Once, for example, to justify all the sleeping bags, blankets and food we were carrying, we pretended to be scouts, with handkerchiefs and hats.
The situation in the Bosnian squats was critical. There were major hygiene problems and an outbreak of scabies. That was an issue we thought perhaps our charity could tackle. So, we took those plastic containers that are used for fruit at the market, and inside we put a small electric boiler, a battery, a shower hose and a gas bottle. And by adding a shower-tent from the Decathlon, we created a small portable shower.
From the summer of 2020, we went back and forth to the Bosnian border with our showers, ointments, scabies medicine and new clothes.
At first the migrants didn’t trust us. One member of our collective had to take a shower in front of them to prove that it wasn’t anything dangerous, or worse, subterfuge.
We did that for two years, during which time we heard many direct reports about the violence of the Croatian police. But then the migration route changed. So, the year after, we took our showers to Serbia, to the Hungarian border. We used up to 1000 litres of water and provided 150 showers a day.
There, people told us about the violence they had suffered at the hands of the Bulgarian police at the Turkish border. So that became our next destination in 2023.
In Bulgaria, there were government refugee camps, so our showers were no longer needed. But the situation was still serious.
Crossing that border is very dangerous. People walk for miles through the woods, often relying on smugglers. The Bulgarian police constantly carry out illegal expulsions to Turkey, and don’t hold back on using violence, they will shoot and ignore cries for help. I have witnessed with my own eyes, the conditions they arrive in: dehydrated, unconscious, dying.
Thanks to a mediator who works with a local charity and speaks Arabic and Bulgarian, we started to answer a helpline, available to people who have crossed into Bulgarian territory and are exhausted from their journey. Once we have their location in the woods, we bring them food and water and wait for help to arrive. The calls for help quickly multiply.
With all this movement, the police became hostile towards us. They tailed us, detained us for hours in their barracks and ordered us to stop going to the border. The problem is, if nobody monitors them, the border guards turn people away or leave them in the woods. Even dead bodies, sometimes very young boys, are not picked up if we’re not there.
That’s why we will return again this year, at the end of February. To restore a little bit of dignity in a place where it’s been lost.
