Idomeni camp. Photograph by author, all rights reserved.
What made him easily identifiable to me was a small cut on his left cheek, nearby his lips. The wound had a ‘C’ shape and it was covered in what seemed to be dried blood. He looked younger than ten years old and was waiting in line to get a portion of food in the transit centre of Idomeni – now turned into a dreadful refugee camp – at the Greek border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It was lunchtime and I handed him a plastic bag with some cooked pasta, a piece of bread, and an orange.
“Only one bag per person” is the standard response to everyone who asks for an extra portion of food in the queue. The per capita criterion is quite common in the distribution of humanitarian relief handouts. Donors usually base their norms of distributive justice on this rule, as it supposedly ‘guarantees’ the equitable distribution of goods amongst the recipients, as Barbara Harrell-Bond argued in Human Rights Quarterly back in 2002.
