"They don't have anything. They've left everything behind," she adds. "They've seen horrible things, in their countries and on the way here."Despite the difficulties of her job, Michailidou, 36, is upbeat and friendly, quick to smile. She tells me why phones have become a critical outlet for refugees, allowing them to find out the latest news and send pictures to family. Many migrants showed me pictures of their former selves, when they had different haircuts and weren't wearing secondhand clothes. In those old photos, they are often smiling.
Earlier during my visit to Lesvos, I met Faisal Nasan Agna, a 47-year-old Vodafone dealer who moved from Syria to Greece in 1990, He now sells SIM cards and and chargers to refugees, "You know the meaning of the phone for them?" he asks me, sitting at a cantina outside the Moria refugee detention center a short drive from Kara Tepe, "The phone is family, the phone is connections, You can lose everything in your house, but take it with you in your phone." -- Ben Fox Rubin, Mohammed Ali walks through the faded-red, corrugated iphone screen protector xs max steel doors of an abandoned stone-and-brick building overlooking the Aegean Sea along the port of Athens, The inside is dank, dark and stuffed with tents..
Ali, a 26-year-old Syrian, wears a checkered shirt with an open collar and jean shorts. His hair is gelled, his beard closely cropped. He walks slowly between the tents as people living there walk up to him with questions. One man asks about his wife's medical needs. Another asks Ali to help him turn on his dead phone. Ali greets people warmly, listens patiently and does his best to offer guidance. He speaks carefully when he replies in English, his accent both British and Middle Eastern. Life is safer but uncertain for Mohammed Ali, 26. "I just want to be at level zero, because here we are before level zero..I was in Syria a number and here I am still a number. I have to be a person."For months, he's been making rounds like this at the Piraeus port, volunteering as a translator and assistant for those with medical needs, unaccompanied minors and single mothers with children.
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 iphone screen protector xs max 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 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.
