“Esther and I still speak regularly. She as the current director of Boat Refugee Foundation, I as her predecessor. During our last phone call, I wanted to encourage her to stay strong. Because it is incredibly tough to keep going in this context of growing polarisation and hatred, unwillingness from politicians and policymakers, and measures that sometimes undo your work entirely. I told her: ‘Keep believing that the good people are the majority.’

When I founded Boat Refugee Foundation in 2015, it felt like a different social climate than we see today. The attention to the issue was enormous. It dominated the news daily, and the general attitude in society was one of goodwill towards people on the move. How different it is now. The world seems divided into two camps; there are no other options. It’s black or white. There’s no room for nuance, and facts often no longer matter. You’re almost forced to pick a side — for or against. But I know from experience that there is so much grey in between. The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ is not black and white. That’s why I always want to put humanity and justice first. It makes decisions easier — and you never have to wonder if you’re on the ‘right side.’

I think back to 2019, when there were 10,000 people living in camp Moria. An incomprehensible number. 10,000 people in a refugee camp in Europe without access to basic necessities. You could hardly call it living. And the boats kept coming. At that point, there were more refugees in Greece than at the height of the crisis in 2015/16. With one major difference: now, people were completely stuck — back then, they were still allowed to move on.

Tell me how you don’t get frustrated when, as a doctor, you see as many as 125 patients in one evening, many of whom have been sexually abused during their flight — both women and men. When a young woman tells you she was raped, in front of her family, by five soldiers, who then shot her husband. And then you have to send that woman back to her tent, with nothing more than a pill and a referral to a psychologist. Tell me what that does to you. What it means for her. We could have put hundreds of psychologists to work, and it still wouldn’t have been enough.

I once heard a beautiful story from a pastor that gave me comfort. The pastor kept helping, kept preaching to people who didn’t want to listen. When asked why he continued and why he didn’t give in to despair, he said: ‘I do this so that it doesn’t change me.’ That struck me deeply. Sometimes I felt as if Boat Refugee Foundation was crying out in the wilderness. We toiled, worked long days, but nothing changed at the root of the suffering. The boats kept coming, the queue outside our clinic grew longer every day, the conditions remained terrible, and the waiting list for our school never shortened. Europe still seemed unwilling to offer a warm welcome, and our teams were exhausted.

Yet we kept going. To this day, volunteers are present in the refugee camps to support those in need. Loyalty matters. Because there must be people who bring smiles to children who cannot escape their nightmares. Who play trumpet amid the ruins of their lives. Who take their hand and jump rope with them on the pink sidewalk chalk next to the barbed wire.

There must be doctors who make balloons from plastic gloves for the 14-year-old girl who was raped on her journey. There must be people who say: ‘Come into my arms. Here you are safe.’ There must be people who place band-aids on broken hearts — of children whose mothers drowned.

There must be people who paint the word LOVE in large white letters on the fences of Camp Mavrovouni — and who are LOVE. I always want to be among those people.”