«Volunteering at METAdrasi for three weeks was life changing. I learned what community, team work and advocacy through direct action look like when done effectively. I learned that you can be in a room where everyone speaks a different language and we can all communicate just fine.
METAdrasi teaches the illuminating lesson of love, using as a tool to address the devastating reality of unaccompanied children traveling through foreign countries to escape war and oppression – social, political and economic – by taking these children in and caring for them as their own.
I cried because of the resilient beauty of the human spirit, while volunteering at METAdrasi. The Greek grandmother cooking, hugging, pinching cheeks and tearing up as another child leaves the home in Lesvos to journey to another in Athens. In saying goodbye to a talented, teenage, refugee artist, who is travelling alone with her younger brother; she helped me put together a solo exhibition in Athens. I encouraged her to keep creating, showed her artwork, taught her techniques and was able to stand in as a benevolent adult – something that had been done for me as a child under a different set of dire circumstances.
To me, this is the single most valuable thing Ι have done as an adult, the most revolutionary act of art Ι can muster, was to stand in solidarity with her.»
#solidarity #Lesvos #Greece #refugeecrisis #UnaccompaniedMinors
