I met Ali a few days earlier as he walked around the port on a windy, cloudy June afternoon. (The government evicted people from the area five weeks after our visit, moving hundreds to government-run camps.) We sat on large concrete blocks as he told how he got to Athens. In August 2015, while studying English literature in Damascus, he was targeted by Syrian soldiers for reasons he still doesn't understand. He says he was given 24 hours to leave the city. He fled to Turkey, taking a bus through territory controlled by the Islamic State. On his way, the terrorist group abducted him, jailed him in a room for two months, made him grow out his beard and memorize jihadist texts. They eventually let him go, but he was abducted again by Kurdish fighters and held for about three weeks, when the Kurds thought his long beard meant he was part of the Islamic State.
Ali says he tried to cross into Turkey eight times but was repelled by gunfire along the border, During one attempt, he tells me, he saw a woman and her baby cut down by sniper fire, He eventually made it across Turkey then took a dinghy through rough waters to Lesvos, He arrived iphone 7 screen protectors there in March, Life is safer in Greece, But Ali is frustrated by his uncertain future or when he might be given asylum, if at all, "I just want beginning," he says, "I just want to be at level zero, because here we are before level zero..I feel nothing change, Like, I was in Syria a number and here I am still a number, I have to be a person."-- Ben Fox Rubin..
Mytilini's lively tourist hub is a short drive from the detention camps of Kara Tepe and Moria. Boats dock in front of the waterfront plaza, which also hosts a mix of hotels, fresh seafood restaurants and souvenir stands. There's a United Colors of Benetton a few streets down from a fish market and city hall. Tucked away in one corner is a dealer that specializes in Nokia repairs. It's an essential stop for refugees when they first land on Lesvos. Last summer, when the migrants started coming to the isle en masse, the shop served 100 refugees a day, says one of its owners, who didn't want us to use her name. "The line was so long, they couldn't enter the shop," she says, through a translator.
The most popular buys: a Samsung 9300i smartphone, which costs 300 euros new, and low-cost phone chargers, the cheapest costing about 5 euros, Now they get only four or five refugees a week, -- Richard Nieva, A migrant living in an official government camp near Thessaloniki, Greece, opens Google Translate and taps out a few haunting words, At Diavata, an official government camp in Thessaloniki, five refugees from Afghanistan sit in a tent built from canvas that's been slung over a tree branch and some metal beams, They iphone 7 screen protectors came to Diavata after the Greek government shut down the camp at Idomeni in May..
One is eating lunch, a sandwich from a ration box, while another uses a broken sign to fan himself and swat away flies. They want to show us videos from the web about Idomeni, but the Wi-Fi isn't working well. So they disconnect, then try connecting again. The Wi-Fi network is called #NETHOPEFREEWIFI. No password. One of the men, named Jawad, tells me there are people from several countries here. He picks up his phone and opens Google Translate. He taps out a few words and shows me the screen. We ran the war came here Trapped.