The first days

Last Sunday we all came together at The Student Hotel Amsterdam City to have dinner with the whole group. We must say guys, we had an amazing dinner at The Pool which is the new restaurant that just opened there. Here we met all the volunteers that we were going to Lesbos with.

After a short night of sleep we all came together on Monday morning at 4:30 am to go with the bus to Schiphol. We arrived at the airport after the 3 hour flight. We were all impressed by how beautiful this island is! On the first sight when we arrived we did't see any refugees yet, but we all expected to see so many after seeing all the media that we saw back in Holland. After we had a lunch we went to have a tour through a bit of Mitilini and saw a lot of amazing things already.

We arrived at the port and that was the moment we all realized what is really going on here. Directly after we got there we started helping the other volunteers with giving out clothes. We think we already saw like 300 refugees which all were so happy with us giving them some nice and warm clothes to sleep in. The look in their eyes was telling their whole life story. All of them are going to probably the worst part of their lives so we are trying to give them maybe a bit of a good time in the time that they really need it. After this long day of traveling and working directly the whole team was super tired. Still we went to have dinner with the whole group at a really nice restaurant in the city center which is created by a refugee. This is also the place where all the volunteers come together at night to have a little recap of the day and get to know each other. After dinner we all went quit fast to bed since we it was a really tough and long day.

The next day we woke up early again to start our day to sort out many clothes at the warehouse located in Atika. Normally there are only 4 people working in this warehouse where they work really hard to sort all the clothes out that people send in. Today we were with almost 30 people, so we could do work what they normally do in almost 2 weeks (!!!). It was really nice to see that the warehouse was so full of boxes with clothes, which means that there are a lot of people all over the world sending some over here. We visited the refugee camp after we were done with most of the clothes and there it was madness. They were protesting about opening up borders and having signs up with a lot of journalists from all around the world. We stayed there for a little time because it was really hectic. With a lot of clothes we went to the port again to give away clothes like we did yesterday. It was a really busy day again and today we were with a much bigger group than yesterday. This gave us the chance to have some quality time with some refugees. We played with them and laughed a lot, even that we don't speak the same language. We even had some kids that were really excited to be with us and helped us with giving out clothes, tents and sleeping bags to others. After that they came with cameras and wanted to take pictures with us!

Tomorrow we will go to the refugee camp again and help over there.