Volunteering with The Flying Seagull Project in Greece
I want to write about what I've been up to over the past couple of weeks, because so many of you helped me to do it, and helped other people who will be in Greece and beyond over the coming weeks and months. Your generosity is pretty humbling, to be honest - I hoped to raise £300 and the total so far, between the justgiving page and cash donations is over £800. For a bit of context, the Flying Seagull Project, which relies entirely on donations, sustained projects helping vulnerable children in dozens of places from the UK and France to Romania, India, Africa and Greece on a budget of £142,000. They make it go unbelievably far. Your donations will be very well spent.
I'm handicapped in this by the fact that a fellow 'Seagull' recently wrote a much better account than I imagine I'm about to produce, which you can read on her blog. She paints a beautiful picture of what the work is like. So if you've only got time to read one of these, you know, I won't be offended...
For those who've not been deterred...
A little about who the Seagulls are: Founded 10 years ago by actor, clown, musician, wildly-bearded ringmaster and fount of perpetual energy Ash Perrin, they have worked in 15 countries and on 3 continents. Their aim, as best I can distill it, is to bring laughter to children whose living situations make that harder than it should be. There's more to it than that, actually, but that's the headline. The starting point.
Between the training week I did in London in May (which, just by the way, was bloody brilliant and could run as a standalone training course for anyone wanting to entertain children) and the two weeks I just spent in Greece, I've worked with clowns, actors and musicians... but also with a paramedic, a mental health nurse, a toy demonstrator, at least a couple of full time mums, a local Greek student, an academic pursuing a PhD in play therapy... they've been as young as 20 and as old as their 40s and possibly early 50s. If you're thinking 'well, I couldn't do a thing like that...', you might be wrong.
A little about what I did in Greece: I stayed with between 3 and 6 other Seagulls in a small house near Ioannina in Eiprus, the mountainous region of Greece directly underneath Albania on the far West of the mainland. We slept variously in some combination of homemade bunk-beds, a small caravan and a bell tent in the garden. We shared meals, ate a lot of pesto and hunted in vein for the eggs laid in a secretive location by the ducks who live next to the caravan. We cooked for each other in an oven that needed to be held shut by a board that looked as though it might have been part of a worktop at some point. Our next door neighbour cut an startling figure dressed in black maintaining her garden with a scythe. It's comfortable, and the right kind of studenty and fun, but the budget's certainly not going on extravagant accommodation.
The nightlife is great too.
We drove in a large, well-loved van to four different refugee camps spread out over an area roughly an hour's drive from the house. We visit between 2 and 4 of these each day, for a couple of hours apiece. We also worked twice a week in a community centre which was providing a syllabus of activities for children from refugee families. There's also some work with the wider community - one of the camps is running a programme to 'twin' kids in the camps with locals. This week there's a large public event to mark World Refugee Day.
I'd love to be able to show you some photos of us at work, but for several reasons I can't. The first is that there's just not a second free to take any. From the minute we enter the camps - waving, greeting, tumbling out of every door (and window) of the van - to the moment we leave it - a sweaty, panting, dusty mess of a team scrabbling for any available bottle of water - the Seagulls are 'on'. There's no eating, no drinking, no going to the toilet... the aim is to create a bit of magic. Something completely unusual colourful, stripey, mad, otherworldly in camps where one of the biggest enemies seems to be sheer tedium. Another is that the Flying Seagull Project takes child protection very seriously. However, in no particular order, some of the stuff we do:
I can show you this... ladies and gents, form an orderly queue...
* An all-singing, all-dancing walk around the camp to round up as many kids (and adults, if we can!) as possible to get involved in the next few hours of majnoon (crazy).
* A warm up that's somewhere between an aerobics class led by Salvador Dali, a drill session by Monty Python and a tribal dance ritual to a duck god. The kids join in with familiar call-and-answer bits, competing to see who can anticipate the next instruction before it leaves the lips* of a Seagull, then eventually taking turns to lead themselves. (*beak?)
* A range of games, familiar to the point of ritual but with unexpected twists. Sneaky-sneaky is Grandmother's Footsteps, but you've not seen it played right until you've played it using the no-hands bum shuffle variation. Monster is British Bulldog with attitude. The Box is an oasis of panting respite where imagination and creativity get free reign as an invisible box of fluctuating dimensions and featuring infinite permutations of seals and locks is passed from player to player. The contents can only be revealed in mime, and the range of possibilities is infinite, although some crowd favourites crop up over and over. I remember umbrellas, showers, all manner of animals, teenage boys applying lipsticks and nail varnish... I'll never get over the five minutes of confusion before we realised that one young Syrian boy had painstakingly dug, filled and begun to splash around around in an entire swimming pool. I think there may even have been a water slide in there. Sometimes it's a gun, and the Seagulls in the circle defuse the tension in unison... 'ooh, a water pistol'.
* Singalongs with actions and dances, taken from innumerable different languages, some of which I assume are completely invented. The language barrier is a real challenge at times - probably the majority of the children I worked with speak Arabic as a first language, but others were native Farsi, Kurdish, Dari, Pashto or even Hindi speakers. I was delighted to find that my (incredibly limited) Turkish helped me bond with kids who had spent time in Turkey or teenagers who had learnt it at school in their home countries. Some of them may even have understood more or less what I was on about. Of course there's a certain amount of English flying about, but we're not there to teach it to children who aren't terribly likely to end up in English-speaking countries. Most of the ones who shared their hopes for the future with me spoke of either Germany, Athens or Sweden.
* Special activities - Sometimes we rigged up a cinema screen improvised from a bed sheet stretched over a homemade wooden frame and showed films to either the kids or whole families. Others we produced a catapult and bag of water balloons. I helped run a football training session with dribbling, heading and shooting practice, clumsily attempted origami, made kites and helped kids learn to spin plates and walk across tightropes. The undisputed star attraction is the rare appearance of the bouncy castle - a huge, run-through gauntlet with a climbing net and slide.
* Clowning around - pratfalls, daftness, improvising moments of humour with anything to hand... if you break off for a moment to take a phone call on a discarded shoe, there will always be someone, speaking some language, on the other end.
* Keeping order. A sad reality is that there's never a session that goes by without a fight breaking out. These kids get limited schooling and live in a very harsh and competitive environment. Families are usually big and loyalties are fierce. Culture clashes can be an issue, positions in the pecking order are hard-won. It's one of the biggest differences I found with the work I've done with children in Italy, Spain or Turkey. And it's one hundred per cent understandable, given the circumstances of these kids' lives. But it can escalate alarmingly quickly, and between almost any two kids. It's distressing to see three or four year olds, boys and girls alike, fighting with the intensity and rage of grown adults. Prevention is everything - spotting a situation before it escalates, and putting yourself in the way, leading kids off in different directions, working hard for eye contact and to provide a distraction until the moment passes. Meanwhile the rest of the team need to keep the remainder of the group just as occupied as they were before - it's a true team operation.
A little about why it matters: As anyone who's worked in education or social development will know, play isn't just 'fun and games'. It's a system in which we learn to express ourselves, to win, lose and draw, to create, to share, to communicate, to resolve problems, to experiment and to discover who we are as children and even as adults. How can we stand by as an entire generation of children from troubled countries grow up without this? What hope does it give for the future of their communities if they miss out on it? If, insha'Allah, they some day make it out of these tented purgatories, how can we ask them to integrate successfully with peers in their new hometowns when they've not had these fundamental experiences in common?
Kids are kids the world over, and they will make their own entertainment even when there is nothing organised for them... but it's the structured nature of the FSP play that I believe makes it such a productive intervention. Every activity has a developmental purpose hiding beneath the knockabout surface. By entering their world not as authoritarian figures in the khakis of the NGO workers but as clowns and fools, we want show them that mistakes and imperfections are not only forgivable, but often hilarious. By walking the line between discipline and fun we try to incentivise them to make their own choices about when to respect authority and when to question it.
Most of all, I love the Flying Seagull philosophy because it's about giving kids agency. So many tiny choices that we all took for granted in our childhoods are denied to a child who has been forced from their homeland and lives in a storage container, tent or repurposed classroom with only a curtain for a door. We offer them a choice from the very start. Our activities are not in any way compulsory, and anyone and everyone is free to drop in and out as they like. We empower them to create imaginary worlds, to lead warm-ups, to pick and start the songs we sing as we maraud around their camps announcing our arrival. They love to mimic our traits and satirise us. A couple of days ago a group of boys aged about eleven, completely unprompted, told us that they had prepared a performance for us to watch. At the end of our session they formed us and the others into a neat circle and acted out a series of slapstick sketches in Arabic from (we think!) a TV show. It meant so much to us that they felt they could organise this, and that they wanted to do it with our logistical support, but for our entertainment. It was just joyous to see them making their friends and family roar with laughter, briefly uniting a divided community through riotous and incredibly irreverent humour in which authority figures from the military and religion got (in every sense) a good kicking. It was subversive, teenage. And I'm sure that the work that Seagulls have been doing in that camp for months now helped create a situation where it could happen.
These camps are deeply troubled places, and I'm very aware that I didn't see the worst of them, by a long chalk (there's a great video of Ash and a colleague from another team that had been working elsewhere in Greece talking about the realities in some places at https://www.facebook.com/flyingseagulls/videos/1455482014522773/). But the Flying Seagull workshops are abundantly joyful experiences. One day we were rounding up a horde of eager youngsters as a coachload of new families arrived in one of the camps. We greeted them briefly, didn't try to recruit them to join us too much - they were weary from travel, nervous and no doubt had a long afternoon of registrations and inductions ahead of them. But I was so delighted that the first view the children getting off that bus had of that camp was of children just like them laughing and dancing. I was almost happier still for their parents.
A little bit about why I'm writing this: I'm doing it to tell you something about where your money's been going. I'm doing it in the hope of inspiring some of you to follow in my footsteps. To an extent I'm doing it to help me process what's been going on, because it has been an incredibly intense and emotional experience, especially the part where it was time to leave. I've been deeply saddened by having to say goodbyes to some of these young people, and find it very hard that my diary probably won't give me chance to get back out there until next summer. The juxtaposition of the harsh conditions these people are living in (just isolated examples one camp saw a family left on their own at the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere for weeks on end, another had a protest over the living conditions which saw living quarters infested with scorpions, one camp was filled with heart-wrenching graffiti about how there could be no celebrating Eid 'until I can be in the same country as my family again') with the youthful enthusiasm creativity and sheer normalcy of the kids we worked with really did create a roller coaster of emotions. I was completely inspired by some of the Seagulls who've given up months and even years of their lives to this work. I desperately hope to be able to return soon, and to persuade some others to go in the meantime.
A little bit about what you can do to help: First of all, I cannot recommend becoming a Seagull enough to anyone who has an interest in working with kids and a desire to help this situation. You don't need to be a five star performer, an experienced clown, a teacher or a certain type of person. You just need energy and an open heart. The project runs training weeks in London about two or three times a year, and you can find details of these at https://www.facebook.com/flyingseagulls/. You need to be available for an initial two week visit to the project, and to cover your own travel to and from Greece. It's an unbelievably rewarding experience where you'd be hard pushed not to learn a lot about kids, yourself and just by having good chats with the extremely smart, kind bunch you'll meet out there. And some of the places you stop for lunch are ridiculously beautiful.
Secondly, http://www.theflyingseagullproject.com/support-us/ has a number of ways in which you can financially support the team and their work, either by making a donation or doing some kind of fund raising. There's an option to make a monthy contribution if you're able. Also, my justgiving page at https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/sandy-king is still open for another three days.
If I can answer any questions or give any advice from my very limited experience of the organisation, please drop me a line (I'll probably pass you on to someone more knowledgeable, but will be happy to do so).
If you've made it this far, fair play. I've rambled on long enough, and will let you get on with your days. But if you have supported what the Seagulls do in any way so far, or are able to do so in the future, then a huge, huge thank you and (the traditional end of session farewell) lovelovelovelovelove from a huge number of children who don't have a way to thank you in person. Unless you go out there... which... you know... you could...
