The Build-Up

The way I ended up in Greece for ten days is pretty much a miracle.

It began two years earlier in the summer of 2016 when I was visiting my dad in Vietnam. 

For several years, my dad had been traveling back and forth to Southeast Asia, having loved that part of the world since the Vietnam War era that dominated his early childhood. By the middle of 2016 he had been living there teaching English for about a year. That summer I was between jobs, so I eagerly took the opportunity to do one of my favorite things (i.e. travel) and see my dad. 

It was a full trip. My dad was on break from teaching, so we traveled from almost the top of Vietnam to the bottom and back again, with a slight foray into Cambodia. 

The pertinent part to this story though, is a tour we took while on an island in the south. It was a snorkeling excursion. (Aside: snorkeling is totally amazing and you should definitely do it if you ever have the chance!). On the boat with a hundred or more tourists, my dad and I were the only westerners/English-speakers besides one man from Latvia. 

I cannot even remember the man's name, but we had a lovely time talking to him, soaking in the sun and swapping stories. He was multi-lingual (of course) and had traveled all over the world for his job. He told us that whenever his work sent him somewhere, he would stay a few extra days on his own time to explore. 

"Perfect," I thought. I want to travel, and here is someone who has been basically everywhere. "What is the most amazing place you have ever been?!" I asked (with a disproportionate amount of gusto). His response was that the Greek islands were the most beautiful place he had ever seen. So, right then and there, I decided to move Greece to the top of the list of places I would visit if I ever got the chance. 

Fast forward several years to my second Christmas at my job. My boss uses Christmas as a time to hand out yearly bonuses, and that year--having heard me talk about wanting to go to Greece half a million times--he lovingly earmarked my Christmas bonus as travel money for a trip to Greece (in the form of old $100 bills that he knew I would have trouble parting with for any less illustrious reason). 

Fast forward several months to March 2018. Having returned from a vacation, my boss once again brought up the idea of traveling to Greece, this time in the form of joining his wife and their church on a short volunteer trip to work with refugees for a week. 

The seeds of desire planted two years earlier in Vietnam, combined with the money and the suggestion from my boss (which came with the tacit permission to take the week off from work), made saying no seem sacrilegious. So, I made one of the more rash decisions of my life to join the team of ten people leaving in less than six weeks. 

When I agreed to go, I knew very little more than the word "refugees" and even less about Greek refugees. I did a preliminary Google search of "Moria (the name of the refugee camp in Lesvos, Greece)" and the results were dismal. One image you likely run across if you look up Moria on the internet is of a chain-linked fence above a stone wall, spray-painted with the words "Welcome to Prison." The news articles are reports are even less flattering. 

At that point, I began to wonder what I was getting into. What kind of awful place was Moria? What would it be like to not only see such a place, but spend an entire week there? 

Team meetings helped. The team leaders had been multiple times, and they had a perspective that the media can never have--God is doing things, bringing hope and accomplishing His purposes even in the most dismal, depressed and hopeless places. Sure, there were dangers, but God was interrupting the tragedy of Moria with His Goodness, and we were poised to be a small part of that. 

In spite of the excitement and positivity of my team leaders, I was still prepared to enter into one of the most discouraging and taxing weeks of my life. Yet, that is not at all what I encountered in Moria. And that is what I am excited to share.