What a night and what an immersion into the refugee situation! About 1am as we were concluding a beautiful circle in which friends were expressing their exhaustion and their learnings from the past two weeks of intensity, we received news that hundreds refugees were arriving in Gyor Hungary without food or water. So, as the newest and least exhausted, I volunteered to drive the supplies to Gyor. The abundant stockpile at the Vienna train station was tapped and I arrived in Gyor in a pouring rainstorm around 4am.
What I experienced at the train station was beyond anything I could have imagined. The train station was crammed full of a couple thousand refugees – many families with young children – who had been shuffled about like tired, hungry and thirsty chess pieces by confused and overwhelmed governments over the past several days. One told me that he has had one shower in the past 15 days. One woman was trampled in the crowded station. This whole scene was overseen by 4 overwhelmed volunteers and 20 policemen.
At least we had brought a load of food to help, we thought. But we were quickly told in no uncertain terms not to unload any food for fear that it would incite a riot or panic. We were also informed that the refugees would be transported to Hegyeshalom where they would presumably be left to walk the final 3 km to Austria.
So we drove back toward Austria to assess the situation at the Hegyeshalom train station. What we found there was quite the contrast. There were no volunteers, only 4 policemen and a group of drunks at the adjoining bar. Quite the reception committee and not a safer place to distribute the food.
So, next we drove to Nicklesdorf, the Austrian border town and found a large Red Cross shelter with a couple hundred beds, a portable kitchen and tons of semi-organized clothing and shoes. The refugees arrive only minutes after us and were greeted by a stressed out Red Cross commander yelling and threatening and trying to control a terribly chaotic scene. The next hours are a blur of ripping open the plastic bags of carefully prepared lunches, removing the cans of beans for which there was use, separating out the apples which refugees don’t like and won’t eat, distributing the prized unsquashed bananas and disposing all those that had become casualties of the bean cans and putting out the rest of the food (along with thousands of unsustainable bottles of water), and rummaging through piles of clothes to find ones that would fit the needs of each refugee. Interspersed were moments of appreciating the beauty and patience and respect exhibited by most of the refugees and questioning the need for uniformed and armed soldiers who were utilized by the Red Cross to impose order.
In the midst of the exhaustion and the overwhelming conditions at the shelter, we learned that between Three and four thousand refugees were now at the border without food and all our resources were depleted. And there were another TEN THOUSAND coming in the next 24 hours. So, I contacted Waltraud the coordinator of the network of volunteers in Vienna who began mobilizing 50 volunteers and loads of food to be moved to Nicklesdorf. And I had to accept the consequences of having been going close to 30 hours without sleep and head back to Vienna to care for myself. Later this evening I will probably return with Mischa and Melinda to work another shift.
I am deeply moved by the enormity of humanity moving through this region, by the implications of this migration upon Europe, by the ineptitude of government systems and by the truly amazing response of civil society. The magnitude of this situation today is beyond words. How can we as a global community of humans hold this with consciousness and love?
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