COM Outlook Spring 2020

32 | DR. KIRAN C. PATEL COLLEGE OF OSTEOPATHIC MEDICINE banana. Although I was glaringly underqualified, there were times when I was still the most medically experienced volunteer on the scene. The volunteer relief effort in this seaside village of Sikaminias was somewhat disjointed. Inter- national aid organizations like the Red Cross were not permitted to set up due to local politics, so small organizations and individ- uals like myself devised a make- shift infrastructure. A Norwegian couple cooked chickpeas all night for incoming refugees, and a Palestinian-Danish group set up an outdoor boutique of donated clothing. The village café became an operations com- mand center for volunteers. We sipped coffee on the patio, debat- ing logistics and how best to utilize personnel and donated goods. Our role in the larger effort was to make wet and exhausted refugees healthy enough for a two-hour walk and one-hour bus ride to Mytilini, the island capital, where there were long-term camps and immigration processing. Some refugees would be cleared to catch a ferry to Athens, while others would be condemned to live in these apocalyptic tents indefinitely. Their lives were directly influenced by the conference-room decisions of EU leaders, several of whom responded to the refugee crisis by closing their borders. Vexing Predicament One of the harder things I had to do was abandon an Afghan family at one of these long-term camps. A British volunteer and I had driven them to the hospital earlier to get the little girl’s thumb, which she had somehow severed while crossing the Aegean Sea, checked out. She calmly sought my attention on the beach in Sikamini- as to show me exposed bone and loosely tethered soft tissue. Luckily, a nearby physician gave her medicine before we drove two hours down the winding road to the hospital. Just one of the nine extended family members in our van spoke some English. He had worked for the U.S. military in Kabul before the Taliban found out and sent him a letter explain- ing two options. Either he could continue work- ing for the United States and be publicly killed by the Taliban, or he could fulfill a suicide-bombing mission in Europe and go to “paradise.” He escaped with his family, and now we were all in Mytilini, pleading with the hos- pital staff to examine the girl’s thumb for free. Other children and teens made the journey from Afghanistan or Syria with no adult guardianship. They grabbed whatever would fit in a backpack and said goodbye to everyone in their lives for what could be the last time. I was reminded that no one chooses to be a refugee, and that displace- ment is always the last resort. Many of the orphaned travel- ers adapted unbelievably well. On an EMT shift at the bus stop between Sikaminias and Mytilini, I met a crew of Afghan teens who were dancing to Farsi rap and devouring canned falafel balls. They wanted to know about American girls and seemed genu- inely devoid of worries. Yet, nothing in their lives was certain. Did they wind up in Germany or the Netherlands? I cringe to think they still could be trapped in a Greek refugee camp for lack of proper immigra- tion status. If they did settle somewhere, are they finishing high school? Do any of the teachers know Farsi? We can hope that their European classmates appreciate the sociopolitical mess they fled— and what it might be like to leave home for good. Back by the water in Sikaminias, aid workers crashed the café dur- ing lulls in raft arrivals and looked with binoculars toward Turkey. If we saw a bobbing black dinghy with orange life jackets, we could Afghan teenagers pose for the camera. STUDENT Perspectives STUDENT PERSPECTIVES (continued from page 30)