Refugees arrive in boats on European shores. Ben White/ CAFOD. Flickr. Some rights reserved.
After three weeks on the Greek island, I am struggling to make sense of what I witnessed. I saw lives being saved by extraordinary volunteers from all over the world as overcrowded rubber dinghies docked on Lesvos beaches. But, not everyone could be saved. In the three weeks that I was there, 36 people drowned trying to cross the Aegean Sea, seven of them children. I witnessed the ghostly remains of their boats washed up on the beaches of Lesvos the next day.
One cold night, a baby died in an unheated tent in one of the camps on Lesvos. I felt the kind of sorrow and anger I had not felt since the siege of Sarajevo, when it seemed that my life had no value to European governments which simply stood by and watched as genocide took place in my country. I also felt something I did not feel in Sarajevo, something I developed living in the privileged world – guilt.
