Cicely Freeman, Yr11 WG, provides us with an insight into the refugee crisis with the below write-up:

On the 1st of March my older sister, Chloe (a former Cranbrook student - Class of 2012) and her boyfriend Jack, volunteered to travel to Lesvos, a Greek island in the northern Aegean Sea off the coast of Turkey. She will be spending a month there in total with Jack and has already spent two weeks helping deal with the refugee crisis. Meanwhile this is all during her third year of University where she is doing an Erasmuz in Munich, studying Chemistry in german. She is working with a charity called Skipchen, who are a group of anti-food waste campaigners based in Bristol. The Skipchen volunteers have been funded by the Help Refugees group in order to build a field kitchen in Lesbos and cook hot meals for refugees heading for Europe. On average they cook between 2000 and 3000 meals a day, with Chloe and Jack having regular night shifts from 1am-9am.

BDFM (Better Days for Moria) camp was set up by volunteers in November 2015 because the official camp couldn’t handle the vast number of refugees arriving, causing horrendous conditions. Since then it has morphed and grown and every night there are around 700+ sleeping in BDFM and 2500+ in the official camp, but it increases rapidly each day.

With the boarders being closed for a while, it is beginning to look more like a fixed settlement. However, it is meant to be used as a transit camp; meaning people would only stay a few days and then travel along the route via Athens and Balkan. No one knows what the future will hold…

Lastly I want to conclude with Chloe’s words sent this morning: “Last night police began random arrests of Pakistanis to deport them back to Turkey, but no one in the camp was informed. There is so much confusion for everyone. This situation gets more dire every day. Living and working with the same people can be quite tense and tonight I have a night shift. P.S I passed another chemistry exam!"