Our journey from Greece to Northern Europe to meet with leaders and collect stories along the refugee route has begun! We’re one week in, and in case you haven’t been following my daily updates on The Syrian Circle’s Facebook page, let me give you a quick summary.
GREECE has the weight of the world on its shoulders, or at least that’s what it seems like as of February 2016. Between political unrest, suffocating debt, and a massive influx of people, Greece has been having a pretty rough year (and that’s all I’ll say without getting political)—Now to the reason we’re even in Greece: refugees.
The arrival of refugees in this part of the world is nothing new. It has been happening for hundreds of years with one people group or another as wars have been fought and different populations have fled oppression.
However, what distinguishes this movement of people from any other is the sheer scale of it. With over 1 million refugees arriving on European shores in 2015 alone, that number is only expected to increase exponentially as 2016 progresses. One Greek woman explained to me in Athens, “this is not just a tragedy, this is an exodus.”