From time to time one school year or another here takes a
day off for an ‘excursion’. That is to say, the pupils are sent or taken to
some place or other and left to run around, while the teachers sit and smoke
and chat and drink coffee.
Yesterday’s excursion was to the harbour town. An odd but
easy choice; nearly all the pupils live in the harbour town and the schools themselves
are there. Later that day one of the pupils told me all about it, as the ‘excursion’
had proved unexpectedly dramatic.
As pupils were hanging out on the ferry jetty, they were
surprised by the sudden arrival of the police, in the uniforms they rarely
wear, wearing also surgical masks and carrying weapons. They told the pupils
they must move away from the area, but they were able to see what was
happening: the Port Police, also masked and armed, brought in a heavily-laden
boat, carrying about fifty passengers, including pregnant women and small
children: a fisherman had found them wandering lost and confused on the nearby
deserted island of Jura, where they had been dumped by one of the mercenary
parasites who take all the refugees’ money for the promise of entry to an E.U.
country.
The Port Police did the decent thing and gave the refugees
bread and mineral water, and fruit juice for the children, paid for out of
their own pockets. (The refugees had nothing but the clothes they stood up in.)
These Syrians (as they are thought to be) will now be taken to a refugee centre
in Volos on the mainland.
That’s all; I have no comment to make and I have no
photographs, but as, at least here in the island, false and exaggerated rumours
will by now be circulating, I thought I should give the eye-witness account of
about the most level-headed and intelligent of the pupils, my young friend
Anastasia.
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