The Laundry Legion: Washing Clothes at the Samos Refugee Camp - Mike Stankiewicz
Before I begin and at the risk of getting started off on the wrong foot, I am going to make some assumptions about you, the reader. As you read this, you are probably wearing clothes. What’s more, those clothes are probably both clean and dry. They are probably different from the clothes you wore yesterday, and tomorrow’s clothing will be different still. Lastly, you will probably pass from today to tomorrow in a room with four walls, a roof, and a bed. Before you read any further, close your eyes and try to imagine a world where everything I mentioned above is an outrageous luxury.
Welcome to Samos, an East Aegean island with a refugee camp designed to hold 648 that is actually holding (as of Dec ‘19) over 7,500 asylum seekers and refugees who left their homelands in hopes of building a better life in Europe. The “lucky” ones live in containers inside the official part of the camp, while the majority live in makeshift tents in the surrounding woods. Here, there is no electricity, no running water, and definitely no washing machines. This is where Samos Volunteers, one of a handful of NGOs on the island, comes in. We run the Laundry Station.
At first glance, it may seem like a simple and not particularly important activity. Before I arrived, I had a vague idea of one big, giant washing machine that everyone throws their clothes into, and then comes back later when it’s ready. The reality is much more complicated. Our goal is to get everyone’s clothes washed, dried, and returned as quickly as possible while trying to make sure that everybody gets a turn and nobody’s clothes get lost. We do this with six stacked washer/dryers in a cramped space where a single day’s worth of laundry is literally stacked floor to ceiling. Since we serve over seven thousand people with just six machines, it takes around three months to get everyone’s laundry cleaned once. There’s a ticketing system, a bag checking system, a tagging system, a lot of communicating, and a lot of double checking to make sure the clothing a person drops off at the station in the beginning of the day is the same as the clothing they walk away with at the end of the day.
Every shift is different and has its ups and downs, but my favorite is the closing shift. Most of the time, this is an inspiring shift because people are picking up. You get to look them in the eye and give them not just clean and dry clothing, but the unspoken message that they are valuable, cared for, and human. There’s a dignity in putting on a clean shirt that you cannot appreciate until that ability is taken away. We get to give that back, and you don’t need a common language to understand how much it means to people.
But there’s a flip side. If we misplace a bag, we could ruin someone. Asylum seekers that come to Samos are likely to arrive with just the clothes on their backs. The majority are passing the nights in sleeping bags. On the day they finally get their ticket to have their laundry done, they are stuffing almost everything they have in the world into green plastic bags and then putting that in our arms. It’s like me handing over the keys to my house AND my bank account number. This is an insane amount of trust. In my second week, I was on closing shift when we misplaced a bag with two sleeping bags inside. Two. I will never forget the look on the guy’s face when we told him that we lost his bag. We are sorry. We understand that it’s all you have to sleep in; we are sorry. No, we can’t replace the sleeping bags with other sleeping bags; we are sorry. If someone brings back the lost sleeping bags, we will call you, but right now, there’s nothing we can do; we are sorry. We are so, so sorry. He was three years younger than me and slept on the ground that night. I pray that he isn’t still sleeping on the ground.
A shift that is less of an emotional roller coaster is the morning shift. You arrive and the station is quiet and peaceful. You start on the bags left to wash from the previous day before it gets busy. Around 9:00, when people start to make their way from the camp to the station, you need to spring into deliberate action. Laundry bags need to be checked, labeled, notated in the computer, and then finally put on the shelves marked “dirty.” Each person arriving is coming with a ticket, green plastic bags full of laundry, and their police papers. Some police papers are crisp and new while others are worn and faded from repeated use and therefore difficult to read. This fact, rather than being annoying, squeezes my heart as it means the person I’m talking to has been carrying around this piece of paper for months, sometimes years. I need to push this thought aside and continue. Those on the morning shift need to look individually at each and every bag, split the bag into two if it is too heavy, and give back any clothing that can’t go into our machines. Leather jackets, dresses with plastic beads, blankets too large for the washer to handle, etc. Can’t wash, I’m sorry. Once everything is checked, each bag needs a hand written label notating who the bag belongs to, how many bags total that person has, and what their pickup time is. It is important here to take your time as rushing leads to mistakes. Mistakes lead to lost bags. And a lost bag could mean that someone who trusted us has to sleep on the ground. Once the rush is complete, you can take a breath knowing that your slow and steady approach to the morning has set the rest of the team up for success later in the day.
Most of the shifts are in the middle of the day. They are also impactful but on a more personal level. You are working in harmony with both the machines and your shift partner to get each bag from the shelves marked “dirty” into the washer, then the dryer, then onto the shelves marked “clean.” But when all 6 washers and all 6 dryers are running, you don’t have as much to do except sit, wait, and talk to your shift partner. More often than not, I, an “external volunteer”, am paired with a “community volunteer,” an asylum seeker who signed up to serve with us despite living in the same harsh conditions as those we serve. It is here that I’ve heard the stories of those I am working beside. There are horror stories of why they had to leave their homelands, their jobs, and their mothers and fathers. But there are also stories of resilience, of getting this far, and of the dreams they have if/when they become European citizens. I am touched and inspired by each and every one of them but at the same time am very aware of the extreme difficulty of the journey they are on.
All people are created equal is something that I’ve always known and believed just as I’ve always known and believed that 2 + 2 = 4. It’s so obvious and said so often that it floats by with no actual thought or emotion. Working at SV takes this concept and makes it come alive. It’s no longer words on a page but something you can see and feel; it seeps into your bones. Working side by side, you learn from experience that there is no difference between external and community volunteer. It is painfully clear to me that the only reason I am handing back clean clothing rather than handing in dirty clothing is by the grace of God - or if you prefer something more secular, by accident of birth.
When you come to Samos, you are here to give. You give with your time, with any special skills, or just with a positive attitude. But Samos also takes from you. It takes from you any pretense that the refugee problem is manageable, that it’s okay to ignore the profound unfairness of what’s happening, or that people coming from the Middle East, Africa, or anywhere else are less deserving of the life that we as Europeans, Americans, and Westerners have been handed.
By the time you read this, I’ll be back in America with a roof over my head, a good job, and a toilet I can use without having to stand in line. I’m going to be fine. All of the community volunteers, the asylum seekers, and the friends I made in Samos are still stuck on the island. Will they be fine? Inshallah.
So I’ll ask again as we wrap this up: close your eyes and try to imagine a world where clean clothing is an outrageous luxury. That world is a lot closer than you think.
Laundry Station Processes:
Opening the station
Ticketing
Accepting bags
Getting bags into washer
Transferring from washer to dryer
Folding once dry and getting onto to shelves
Handing bags back
Flushing washing machine valve
Dealing with lost laundry
Shift change/Writing report
Closing the station
