Up early and working with Drops in the Ocean doing clothing distribution into the main Idomeni camp was the call of the day. Serving 450 men a top of either a shirt or t-shirt .. it was amazing. Long, but good. To see that many men queue reasonably calmly with on a few raised voices on occasion was great to see.

This was a reasonably long shift of work to do from 9am until 2pm, 5 hours of crowd watching and making sure people don’t cut in line. But this is the most calm process of distribution I’ve seen and they’ve been working and refining their system since the big influx about 2 months ago. I’m not sure of this groups exact arrival providing distribution aid to the camp, but its been a good long while. It was great to see them handing out the exact number of tickets to the refugees, as there were numbers of t-shirts and shirts.

These guys have got their act together. The know that during a distribution to only give out one item, either all pants, all tops, all coats for women or men, or all baby clothes. That way there is no queue for an item that isn’t there and no potential riot of human beings desperating needing something that has run out of stock in that days distribution.

Its amazing to see that several refugees fluent in all the camp languages like Arabic, Farsi and Kurdish that I know of, were helping to organise and guide the distribution. Calming disputes and moving people swiftly on. Each person had a choice of 3 shirts or tops until it was all given out.

I was tired out but very happy to know so many people got a top that day, even if so many more are needed in a camp that approximates 11,000 people. 450 served is not a large percentage but there are also other crews from other projects doing clothing distribution around other sections of the camp.

 I also finally got to work with the Hummus Rights Project. That too was an eye opening experience, another system and project that works exceptionally well. It’s a pleasure to see so many people working fast together to make on average 4,000+ hummus wraps for distribution the next day.

This means every day there is a distribution and the next days meals are made .. this happens without fail every day and has done so for weeks. Today we had about 25 volunteers and this is the process:

1. Olive oil is spread out over two wraps.
2. Hummus is spread over that.
3. Potato (if there’s any made that day) and cucumbers are added.
4. The wrap is then rolled up
5. A ‘wrapper’ clingfilms the hummus wrap tightly into a sealed roll.
6. One wrap is put into a blue plastic bag.
7. One bottle is added to the bag.
8. 2 apples or 1 apple and 1 orange is added to the bag.
9. The bag is then placed into a crate.
10. Once the crate is full it is loaded into a van.

That in total is the sequence of what happens to make that hummus wrap. Seeing 4,000+ made in the space of four hours is like a well oiled machine of volunteers, cheering for every new bowl of cucumber being called for. Drumming table tops when oil bowls are refilled. Happy laughter for little mishaps that are quickly cleaned up.

This was an amazing day, up at 7am and not back in bed until 11pm but amazing. Clothes distributed and meals made. We made a small difference to lots of peoples days today.