Ritsona and Malakasa camp are said to reside in between two large mountain ranges, tucked away securely and covertly in a valley, explaining the perpetual grey and cold compared to its sister city, Athens. It did not matter if the Athenian sun peeked and splashed across the forest-green awnings–relics of post-war apartment architecture– camp days required two layers of pants and the use of frozen digits that could barely register patients on the NGO laptops. While my feet numbed in patent leather boots and my fingers colored cherry red, I would greet a refugee who had walked over to our medical base in sunshine yellow crocs, all holes and no socks.
The camps in Greece, quite plainly, resemble prisons. Inside there are rows and rows of what look like tin boxes on top yellow earth. There are usually two fences surrounding these accommodations, topped with barbed wire and cameras. Whether to keep others from coming in or those inside from coming out, I am still unsure. On one occasion I was screamed at by a camp guard. I walked too close, nearly 100 feet near the camp entrance with my attending, Kate, who had traveled from the UK. We had been desperately trying to find the whereabouts of another NGO who was supposedly handing out diapers, an unavailable resource otherwise, to parents with young children. I wondered if the guard thought we were journalists, if maybe she feared the embarrassment of being exposed for participating in human rights violations.
Inside, people seemed to be in limbo, waiting in random lines and sitting along broken pieces of cement on the floor. The camp was quiet and mostly men were visible. Their crime inside was that of wanting to live. Despite there being multiple tin pods branded boldly with the UNHCR logo and some designated for medical care, unapproved NGOs were strictly forbidden from entering the camp to provide medical care. Refugees and asylum seekers inside were required to leave the premises and walk nearly a kilometer should they need to see a doctor for any reason, which was becoming commonplace as Medicines San Frontiers (MSF) began their slow retreat from their work in Greece. Although the refugee crisis was far from over, they had been in Greece since 2014. A stay beyond a decade was incompatible with their mission statement of short-term humanitarian aid. I reckon that even another decade more will still not be enough to alleviate the burden of suffering from refugees in Greece.
My first patient encounter stood out more than the ones in between. The universe laughed and sent an Iraqi father my way. For years I had strangely daydreamed of taking care of my own baba when he lived inside a refugee camp in Ankara, Turkey. Our patient in Ritsona was followed by a lumbering camp dog, a tag in his ear to denote that he was accounted for. I asked the gentleman how long he had made this furry companion and when he said six years, I was shocked. I then asked how long he himself had been inside the camp and he looked tired as he said eight. Later, while on the phone with my dear friend who had worked with UNHCR in Jordan, she taught me that the average length of stay in a refugee camp globally was now twenty-two years. Later this gentleman had returned, worried that he had been exposed to TB. His roommates had been tested positive for TB, and he was never isolated from them. We tried to report this event to the camp doctor, who seemed to be on the verge of quitting their work from frustration. Eventually a group of activists in Athens picked up the story, how Greece’s public health was being endangered because they could not even properly isolate refugees infected with TB in the camp, nor provide them with appropriate antibiotics if they tested positive.
One of my last patients was a young man from Afghanistan who was sleeping on the streets with a k-wire still in his arm from a horrible fracture he sustained after being hit with a motorcycle. The phone interpreter kept reiterating that the man had watched his friends and loved ones be beheaded in front of him. “This is how they treat us, Madam, this is what they do.” I assumed he was also Afghani in origin. My patient begged us for housing for the night and he smelled like he had not been able to shower in weeks. All I could offer him was an orthopedics consultation.
Sometimes my patient encounters were simple and sweet. One man from Somalia had never known a true winter and was experiencing dry skin—to his perplexion– for the first time. Another was a Ukrainian woman who was told she had a perpetual hepatitis A infection that would never go away. She nearly cried when we explained that this concept was virtually impossible, and it was only mild hepatic steatosis. Many times, patients came with blood work that was meaningless to them, written in Greek, and handed with hasty circles around bolded numbers. The consultation was simply explaining the results, but the appreciation for their gained understanding was grand.
Other encounters were nearly painful to sit through. I hated watching the perpetual scratching of the patient with scabies who was not going to receive permethrin. The organization had realized that handing out this treatment was futile; patients would reinfect themselves if they went back to the same accommodations inside the camp. One man was so desperate to receive benzyl benzoate from us that he paid to take an hour train to Athens just so he could acquire one other pair of clothes. This way he could wash his only pair of clothes, the ones on his back, for the first time. Many patients had to have multiple teeth pulled as their dental carries ravaged the bone to nearly nothing. One patient nearly shouted in frustration during a consultation when we informed him that there was no way to acquire housing for him in Athens even though he was disabled and had a frozen right ankle joint. One Kurdish woman kissed Kate on the forehead when we told her we would look for an NGO that offered food and warmer clothes for her and her elderly mother. We were never able to get either for her at the camp.
Our clinic in the city of Athens was situated in Victoria Square. The street it was on, Filis, was famous for being the heart of the sex working district. Each door with two lamps with rusted Victorian trim indicated a brothel. From what I heard, every side street contained women from a certain ethnic background, as if the workers could be tasted and sampled by region. “10 euros for 10 minutes,” is what our medical coordinator told me. I had to force myself not to glare at the men coming in and out of those lamps lit doors at all hours of the day. You could do anything in 10 minutes. You could do anything for 10 euros. Victoria Square was also where many migrants lived. Our patients could conveniently walk to our clinic if they had been relocated from their camp. Frequently, I would tell my mother over the phone that I heard more Arabic than Greek while walking to work. Around us were Indian, Syrian, Kurdish, and Lebanese cuisine, authentic and cheap. Just a four-minute walk from the clinic was a falafel restaurant that I later learned was owned by a Lebanese man named George. It turned out he had helped and befriended my family friend in Arizona, Bdoora, when she herself had been a refugee and fled Iraq nearly thirty-five years ago.
There was a moment on my trip where I felt that all of humankind’s atrocities had been laid in front of me. The amount of human suffering felt amplified by the way it was dually neglected and forgotten by my world in the US. I could barely look at my phone until I saw AI videos of a Gaza riviera, tweets justifying ethnic cleansing, negotiations blackmailing countries for their natural resources in return for ceasefires, and the overall continued criminalization, dehumanization, and othering of migrants as illegal aliens. It seemed for every refugee that I helped, nearly 1000 more were taking their place as USAID funding was gutted, the US was turning its back on its duty to the WHO, and doctors doing humanitarian work were being captured and tortured as war criminals and traitors of the western world. I texted a friend one day, “all that inspires me these days is rage.” I was someone who wanted to profoundly believe in the power of love to save. It was the integral piece to my faith and the basis to my vocation in medicine. I felt defeated, and even then, I struggled to give myself space to feel sorry for myself when my patients were doing infinitely worse. The only thing that separated me from the baby girl born in Ritsona was the lottery my father won in 1993, granting him an interview for asylum to the United States. And the knowledge of that fact, that my present life rested on the tenuous fortune, or perhaps the merciful miracle, of immigration officers in Turkey or the state of foreign affairs policy in the US, haunted me. This reflection will seemingly never end, as I know the international refugee crisis never will. All I know for sure now is there is much work left to do.
Natalie Nabaty is a medical student from the class of 2025 at UACOMP with so many passions she struggles to juggle them all. Between playing guitar, dancing traditional Assyrian line dances, and studying global health, writing is a skill she is happy to refine while in medical school. She graduated from ASU with a Bachelors in Biology and a minor in Psychology. Her special interests include migrant health, global neurology, and medical humanism.