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The winter is coming and the situation becomes more and more threatening for refugees. No border kitchen is supporting refugees on the island of Lesvos, Greece. Unfortunately our supplies are very limited and we need your support now!
The situation on Lesvos:
Since months thousands of people are on an escape. They escape from war, terror, repression, totalitarian regime and exploitation over decades. They whish for a more comfortable life in Europe.
Instead of helping the people in need, Europe decided to close down the borders and ignore the complicity of the situation. Humans who put themselves in a high risk and came full of hope for a life in peace in Europe are facing a similar scenario here in Lesvos. The authorities prevent them from liberty of action and put them in camps with degrading conditions. They are forced to submit to the organisation of this so called “Refugee crises”. Furthermore refugees are partly helplessly exposed to the agitation and attacks of Greek racists.
We from “no border kitchen” cannot accept this. Every human being should have freedom of movement and should be able to decide on their own how they want to organize themselves, irrespective of their origin.
According to official numbers (UNHCR) around 16000 refugees are placed on the Greek islands. The actual number is not known.
At the moment 6000 refugees are held around Mytilene. The two main refugee camps Kara Tepe and Moria together have a capacity of 3500 people and are therefore hopelessly overcrowded.
Kara Tepe is a camp mainly for families; around 1000 humans are registered here. That makes Moria a hotspot with 5000 humans, how many humans are actually “living” there is not known.
Moria
Moria became a notorious camp, even big NGOs left the camp because they don’t want to support the conditions in there. There are twice as many people living as the camp has capacities. People are divided by nation and treated differently. This promotes racism. Conflicts between these groups are part of daily life.
The sanitary conditions are terrible.
For food the waiting times are often one to two hours (for a very small meal) and the supply of clothes is insufficient.
Especially now, in the winter time, people are freezing in their containers or tents.
In this chaos humans are exposed to a lot of stress. There is no room for privacy.
Some people are in the camp for nine months already as their application for Asylum is processed very slowly or not at all. Some people don’t have the chance to apply for Asylum at all.
Many people cannot endure these conditions and choose to sleep in empty buildings or on the street. These people have to hide from police because they are obliged to sleep in the camps.
Work of “No Border Kitchen”
No Border Kitchen supports the idea of equality.
Everyone should be able to choose how to organise themselves where to move, where to sleep.
For this we created a social center together with the refugees where people can meet and talk. We cook 600 meals on a daily basis (400 for the social centre and 200 for people who live on the street).
Everyone is welcome in the social centre. Some come from the camps to eat, many others left the camps and try to live on their own with only 80€ per month or without money at all. Impartial of that we try to support groups of people who left the camps (around 80 people) with boxes of food two to three times per week
We try to gather donations everyday (clothes, blankets, medicine).
Winter is coming and many people don’t have warm clothes and blankets.
As we are not an official NGO this is a challenge everyday.
In addition Greek public authorities try to interfere with our work as equality makes controlling the refugees harder.
At the moment we are the only group that supports self-organized refugees in this manner.
We are financed mainly by donations from Germany (around 6000€/month),
but as more and more people are coming and we have to prepare for winter the money is not sufficient. If you want we can send a financial summary of the last 3 months.
What can you do?
We are looking for more support. We need financial support, contributions in kind, like clothes (especially jackets), shoes, medicine or practicable things like paper cups for food distribution, cooking utensils, power generator, old mobile phones (only way to keep contact) and so on…
In addition to that we are happy about every helping hand!
You can find more information on https://noborderkitchenlesvos.noblogs.org/
Facebook: No Border Kitchen Lesvos
Twitter: @noborderkitchen
Email: noborderkitchen@riseup.net
Please take a minute and have a look at our work. Maybe you cannot help yourself but know someone who can.
Donations to this account:
Rote Hilfe OG Salzwedel
IBAN: DE93 4306 0967 4007 2383 12
BIC: GENODEM1GLS
Comment: NBK Lesvos
No human is illegal!
