Former Tawa man, now head of UNICEF Greece, makes a passionate plea to the kiwis

Four sleeping faces could be mistaken for a pajama party if it weren’t for the asphalt that is now your bed. They all appear to be under the age of five, none have pillows, but that’s the least of their problems.

The four babies and their families escaped from one hell and landed in another on the picturesque island of Lesbos in Greece.

The Moria refugee camp to be exact, an overcrowded facility that housed more than 12,000 people but could only humanely house just over 2,000. It was razed by fire on Tuesday.

READ MORE:
* Little remains of Europe’s largest refugee camp after the second fire
* Coronavirus: Europe will prohibit the arrival of foreign travelers, France imposes blockade
* 82 migrants missing at sea in a shipwreck near Tunis
* Greece sends refugees back to Turkey
* Migration crisis: 70 years after World War II, nothing has changed if you are a refugee

As the veil of smoke lifts from the camp and images emerge of the fire-ravaged cages, the dire situation is obvious. People need food, shelter, and someone who cares.

And that’s where the former Tawa man, now director of the Unicef ​​arm of Greece, Luciano Calestini comes in.

Before the massive fire was put out, Calestini’s team of five on the ground in Lesbos was able to extract more than 400 orphaned refugee children and place them in a hotel with caregivers, where they will remain until permanent housing is found.

“This very morning, 406 children who lived in this camp without any relatives, completely unaccompanied children, have now been transferred to mainland Greece in a much safer situation than before the fire,” he said.

“We can breathe a sigh of relief and it’s those kinds of things where we’re looking to create other opportunities to improve the lives of the remaining children on Lesbos, all of them 4,200.

Calestini said work to help refugees was made more difficult in the absence of durable political solutions.

The events that unfolded served as a strong reminder of the urgent need for an EU Pact on child-sensitive and human migration that respects children’s rights to adequate protection and services across Europe.

“This camp has been a struggle for a long time. It has been one of the black marks of the migration crisis over the past year, ”he said.

“What I hope is that through the tragedy of this fire that destroyed the camp, we can press a reset button and seek more durable and appropriate solutions for these 4,200 children.”

Amid a global pandemic and economic crisis, Calestini knows that what she is about to ask her fellow Kiwis may stretch the friendship a bit, but the immediate trauma, particularly for the more than 4,000 children, means there is no time to walk.

“Talking with my fellow Kiwis, the simplest thing that people can do to help, and I am aware of how far you are, is to pick up the phone or connect to the Internet and support the organizations that are on the ground, be it UNICEF Or anyone else, ”he said.

“It’s funding, we need funding to ensure that we can maintain a response for the next three to four months to ensure that these children can go back to school, most of them have not been to school for a year. We need resources to make sure basic needs can be met. “

And UNICEF has also used its office spaces to transform a support center near the camp into an emergency shelter. It temporarily houses the most vulnerable, including pregnant women, children and people with critical needs.

Calestini said the refugee crisis in Greece has spanned more than five years and has caused tensions within the Lesbos community with high tensions with some negative reactions from the community.

Before the mass migration, Lesbos had a population of 70,000 people. He understood that it was a great request from the community to share their space with a large number of newcomers, but work was being done between the government, NGOs and community stakeholders to alleviate the agro.

It’s an extraordinary time to work in, ensuring the health of your workers amid a coronavirus pandemic, and global finances are straining and needs are at their highest and growing point.

And it is necessity that keeps Calestini burning midnight oil to help those in the camps. Those who are not considered vulnerable sleep under trees, roads and fields.

“People just did their best to find options,” he said.

“We have transformed our office spaces on the mainland into a makeshift shelter and now that all 406 children are in hotels, that space can now be used to accommodate single mothers, so essentially in the next few days staff will only find immediate short-term housing solutions and that will give us some time to find longer-term options with our other key partners, which are the Agency for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration and the Greek authorities ”.

The Associated Press reported that authorities have discovered that both fires at the camp were deliberately started, with the first Tuesday night sparked by residents angered by quarantine measures imposed to contain a Covid-19 outbreak after it 35 people tested positive.

Aid agencies have long warned of dire conditions in Moria, a facility built to house just over 2,750 people. The camp is home to people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia and smuggled to Lesbos from the nearby Turkish coast, and has become a symbol of what critics say is the failure of Europe. to handle with humanity the situation of migration and refugees.

In the coming weeks, the Vice-President of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas, responsible for migration affairs, and the EU migration commissioner, Ylva Johansson, will present a new “pact on migration”, aimed at ending years of disputes about which countries should be responsible for managing migrant arrivals and whether their partners should be obliged to help.