Help LHR Face Challenges Beyond the Shore

A happy and healthy New Year from all of us at Lighthouse Relief! 

As we take stock of all we have been able to achieve over the past year, in spite of the enormous challenges, we know none of this would have been possible without your steadfast support.

We are thrilled to share this update on what you have enabled us to achieve in the past few months. Since our last report, we have been busy, both in Ritsona Camp and in Athens, where we launched a brand new Emergency Response Project to meet urgent needs on the mainland.

Ritsona Camp: Providing Crucial Psychosocial Support through a National Lockdown

When we last reached out to you, we shared that we had been able to restart our activities in Ritsona Camp in October. Greece implemented its second national lockdown in November, but thanks to our team’s strong reputation for COVID-safe policies across all our programming, we were granted permission to continue our Child Friendly Space and Youth Engagement Space in Ritsona Camp despite the lockdown. With the vital help of our Resident Volunteers, we have been able to provide safe and supportive spaces for children aged three and four, as well as youth aged 15 and up, to socialise, learn and express themselves. 

The ongoing lockdown, which is now entering its fourth month, is the third lockdown for camp residents, and it has further increased their stress and isolation. It has been a very difficult year and challenging past few months for residents in the camp, and the increased stress risks can take a toll on the mental health of an already vulnerable group. 

In our Child Friendly Space, our team is holding activities indoors and enforcing strict sanitation procedures, as well as mask-wearing and “washy washy,” otherwise known as hand sanitisation. In the past months, we welcomed an average of 67 children weekly, ages 3 and 4, who delighted in colourful crafts-making activities, singing songs, as well as discovering the various toys and books selected by our team to help stimulate their imaginations.

In addition to this, Resident Volunteers, with the support of the Resident Volunteer Programme Facilitator, and CFS staff, have been facilitating emotional regulation exercises for the children in the space. These simple breathing and stretching exercises give the children some basic tools to quiet their minds, relax their muscles and reduce stress. 

The psychosocial support we provide has been especially crucial in these past months. The majority of children in the camp have not had access to a single day of formal education in 2020. Our team is determined to continue to provide the highest quality informal learning and play to these young residents at such a crucial stage of their development.

In our Youth Engagement Space, we continue to provide a space for residents to unwind, socialise and receive informal support. The YES team were happy to continue to offer support through their drop-in center and activities such as chess, table tennis and the ever-popular foosball.

English language workshops, meanwhile, have continued on the Youth Online Space, where our YES Facilitator is also gathering and sharing resources, including an online library where residents can access books and other materials in English, French, Arabic and Farsi. Resident Volunteers are also playing a vital role in ensuring the running of the YES. From helping the team to manage the space, and ensuring the respect of anti-COVID measures, to facilitating their own creative workshops, the RVs are invaluable to our team. 

In the past months, we have been particularly inspired to see how our newly formalised Resident Volunteer Programme continues to grow. RVs have participated in trainings on topics such as  Emotional Regulation, Conflict Mediation, and Workshop Facilitation. These trainings support them in their roles, while equipping them with tools that can help them build towards their futures.

Our RV Programme Facilitator has also been working on a range of activities to help RVs develop positive coping mechanisms, introducing practices such as art therapy, gratitude practice and mindfulness. RVs are a crucial part of our programming, strengthening our relationship with the community and enriching our activities.

Our Emergency Response Team Launches a new Project to Support Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Athens

Since we formally ceased our operations on Lesvos, our Emergency Response (ER) team has been working tirelessly to pivot our operations to meet increased needs on the Greek mainland. In the past months, they undertook an in-depth research process, meeting with a dozen other organisations doing important work all across Greece, with the aim of identifying the most pressing needs for refugees, and any operational gaps that exist. It was clear that significant needs were developing on the mainland. 

In March 2020, the Greek government cut the support that refugees could access after they receive a positive asylum decision. Whereas refugees previously had six months of financial and housing support in order to find their own housing, get a social security number, and seek employment, they now only have 30 days to do so.

When this new regulation took effect at the end of May, over 11,000 refugees in these so-called “exit schemes” were left without any support — with even their scarce cash assistance taken away, and were forced to seek housing in the middle of a pandemic. Many recognised refugees, including thousands transferred from the islands, were left struggling with homelessness, living on the streets in the middle of a crowded square in Athens. 

In response, our team designed a pilot project deploying a skilled streetwork team to provide support to refugees, asylum seekers and migrants experiencing homelessness. In December, we launched the pilot phase of this project, setting out to provide vulnerable people with essential items, information, and referral to other services. Through the month-long pilot phase, the ER team supported a total of 145 people, including 61 families, distributing 45 non-food items and 166 “first contact” kits, including croissants and juice. 

These needs will only increase this year, as asylum seekers are transferred to the mainland and asylum procedures are sped up.  

In the coming months, we will continue to build out our programming in Ritsona Camp. We have just re-launched our Sports Programme, on a smaller-scale and in COVID-safe way,  targeting children aged 9 and 10. 

In Athens, we continue to help vulnerable individuals, including refugees, and asylum seekers, taking the learnings from our pilot phase to strengthen our approach. 

On an organisational level, we are in the process of developing a three-year strategic plan, which will consolidate our mission and chart the next 36 months of our programming.

We look forward to sharing further updates on all our programming in our next report!

Finally, we would like to thank you for everything you do to make this work possible. We look to the future with optimism,  knowing that with your support, we are stronger and more determined than ever. 

Links:

• Our Website
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The past four months in Greece have been marked by momentous shifts for asylum seekers and refugees, from ongoing COVID-19 restrictions to increased insecurity and uncertainty on the Aegean Islands. As we mark the five year anniversary of the founding of Lighthouse Relief, we take stock of these changes, and all that we have been able to achieve thanks to your support. Today, it is more important than ever to continue providing support to people seeking asylum in Greece.

When we last shared an update with you, we had paused our primary operations on Lesvos, with a small team of our long term volunteers remaining on the north shore to support new arrivals with essential items, in coordination with our partners. In Ritsona Camp, we were supporting youth through an online space, while also planning ways to restart our activities in a safe way.

Since then, much has changed for us and for our teams in Greece. We invite you to take a look at how our programmes have evolved since then - how we have navigated the challenges of the past months, as well as difficult decisions with which we have grappled.

Ritsona Camp: A Digital Space & Restarting Activities

Ritsona Camp, mainland Greece, is now home to almost 3,000 people - more than four times its population in 2017. Thanks to your support through the years, in 2019, we reached 55 percent of the camp’s residents through our Youth Engagement and Child Friendly spaces.

After over four months of quarantine, our physical spaces in camp were in urgent need of rebuilding and restructuring - from new flooring and weatherproofing, to walkways and electrical work. Our Ritsona team worked directly with the community from the start to revamp our spaces, building a new roof and fence completely from scratch.

Despite the past months being a difficult time for Ritsona, we were moved and grateful to see the youth coming together - rebuilding these spaces not only for their peers, but also for the youngest generations of camp residents: “several youth told me this week they wanted to be part of rebuilding Lighthouse because it is a place for everyone, and we should all work together to get it open as soon as possible,” our YES Manager shared.

While rebuilding the space, the YES also adopted new strategies to make sure that our programming remained safe and socially distant, integrating more seating areas to accommodate the growing number of youth in the space since the recent expansion. As lockdown measures began to ease in Greece in the late summer, our team was thrilled to be able to relaunch our in-person activities in Ritsona Camp in early August.

When we launched our in-person activities in the Child Friendly Space, we also made significant changes to ensure that our programming would be COVID-19 safe. We focused on the age group of 3-4 years old, as they have no other formal or non-formal educational activity available to them, and they cannot go to Greek schools - at this crucial development phase, children need opportunities to play and learn in a safe space. In order to make sure our spaces are hygienic, our CFS team started cleaning and sanitising the spaces three times a day, also sanitising any toys used, and distributing hand sanitiser to our young visitors. Our reopening of the CFS would not have been possible without your support these past months!

Another exciting development in the past months has been the launching of our formalised Resident Volunteer Programme (RVP). Our Resident Volunteers have played a critical role in our psychosocial support activities in Ritsona Camp for the past two years, and this August, we launched a formalised version of the programme to offer in-depth training and skills-building.

In early September, we were disheartened when Ritsona was placed under a lockdown due to Coronavirus cases in the camp. However, we took this as an opportunity to further clean, decorate and weatherproof our spaces in the camp while providing as much remote psychosocial support as possible. Our Resident Volunteer Facilitator has been finding innovative ways to provide psychosocial support and training to our Resident Volunteers remotely. Through pre-recorded videos, skills practice and online resources, she has been offering training on coping skills building, including tools such as self-compassion, gratitude, and journaling.

This week, we have been able to re-start our programming in the CFS, offering activities to Ritsona Camp’s young residents aged 3 and 4. We have also reopened parts of the YES, holding an in-person English workshop outdoors, with masks mandatory! Thanks to your support, we were able to ensure that all activities were carried out in strict compliance with hygiene and sanitation guidelines.

Lesvos: A Difficult Decision for Our Lesvos Team Amidst Increasing Insecurity 

In the past few months, we have witnessed a series of upheavals on Lesvos, impacting the security and human rights of asylum seekers and refugees. In order to demonstrate the impact of your support, we would like to share with you some of the challenges that we have faced on the island since June, and some of the ways in which we have responded.

Unfortunately, the process for people arriving to Lesvos has undergone significant changes, becoming increasingly militarised. Since May, upon arrival, people are taken to a quarantine camp located in the north of Lesvos - an extremely low-resource setting to which only the authorities and the UNHCR have access. In addition, and as recent news reports confirm, the illegal practice of pushbacks has significantly increased in the Aegean Sea - this has made it nearly impossible for people to seek asylum, a right to which they’re entitled by international law, and has greatly reduced the numbers of arrivals to Lesvos.

Thanks to your generosity and steadfast support, we were able to find ways to continue providing support to vulnerable people on Lesvos over the summer despite these challenges. We focused on the distribution of non-food items, such as clothing, hygiene items, and baby items, to people in the quarantine camp, through another orgnaisation on the north shore. Our Logistics Officer also further expanded our provision of clothing and other essential items to other organisations serving asylum seekers in the south of Lesvos.

In early September, we witnessed asylum seekers pushed into an even more precarious position, when fires devastated Moria Camp, where over 12,000 refugees and asylum seekers were residing. The day after the fires, we immediately supported our partners in the south of the island with urgently needed items, such as bottles of water, baby food, and dry food.

However, despite our efforts to continue providing support to asylum seekers on Lesvos, it is clear that with the changes described above, the role of NGOs like ours in the context of arrivals has become extremely limited. Though we have continued to help in any way we could, it is no longer possible for us to provide the same dignified emergency response that we committed to in September of 2015, five years ago. After much deliberation and painful discussions, we recently made the decision to formally cease our Emergency Response operations and to withdraw from Skala Sikamineas, the tiny fishing village that is the base of our operations. To learn more about this decision, we invite you to visit us online here.

In the short-term, we have focused on distributing needed items from our warehouse in the north to other organisations across the island, particularly in this time of acute need on Lesvos. We also worked to transfer some of our remaining stock of clothes and NFIs to the community-run warehouse in Ritsona Camp, from where it can be redistributed. In the long term, we are identifying the biggest needs both on Lesvos and on the mainland of Greece, to see how we can respond to the short-term and the long-term impacts of the fire, which are vast and multi-faceted. We look forward to sharing the next steps for our Emergency Response operations with you in the future.

The Immeasurable Impact of Your Support

We want to conclude with a wholehearted thank you for your support - not only in the past months, but since we launched this project years ago. It is thanks to your support that we have been able to provide a dignified emergency response on Lesvos for the past five years. You have also enabled us to continue providing psychosocial support in Ritsona Camp, where it is more needed than ever.

As we look forward to our next endeavours, we are humbled by your compassion, solidarity, and support - for this and so much more, thank you.

Links:

• Read Our Statement: A Farewell to the North