Michigan Student Helps Vulnerable People in Athens

When one Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan under­grad­u­ate decid­ed to offer assis­tance to imper­iled peo­ple in Greece last sum­mer, she thought the process would be sim­ple: go over, do her job, and come home con­tent. But, in ret­ro­spect, she real­ized that the real­i­ty she faced was far more com­plex. “I went into it think­ing I’m going to go help these peo­ple, and I’m going to come out of it and I’ll have helped them and I’ll be sat­is­fied,” Stavroula Kyr­i­azis told The Pap­pas Post via phone inter­view. “But I came out of it and I learned that there was a lot more work that need­ed to be done.” Kyr­i­azis vol­un­teered as an intern with Sol­i­dar­i­ty Now, an Athens-based social ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion that oper­ates help cen­ters around Greece, offer­ing sup­port to any indi­vid­ual in need. With a staff that includes social work­ers, psy­chol­o­gists, trans­la­tors and a doc­tor, the orga­ni­za­tion most­ly assists refugees and migrants from coun­tries such as Syr­ia, Afghanistan, and Pak­istan, but it also pro­vides ser­vices to local Greeks. Offi­cial­ly, Kyr­i­azis worked as a secretary/desk recep­tion­ist, every day greet­ing ben­e­fi­cia­ries who came seek­ing help at the cen­ter in Athens; nonethe­less, the ris­ing junior said her title does not ful­ly describe all that she wit­nessed on the job. “It was more than just being like, ‘Hi, how are you? Write your name down,’” she said. “A lot of the time the ben­e­fi­cia­ries would just pour their heart out [in their native lan­guage] and just kind of look at me and the oth­er recep­tion­ist, and we’d have to fig­ure it out.” 

The 2017 migrant influx in Greece (29,595 arrivals) had decreased since its peak of 173,561 arrivals in 2016, but in a coun­try already grap­pling with eco­nom­ic tur­moil and crip­pling debt, the nation­al infra­struc­ture con­tin­ues fac­ing chal­lenges relat­ed to the refugee cri­sis. One of the most telling exam­ples is what Kyr­i­azis described as the Greek government’s “flawed sys­tem” for asy­lum appli­ca­tions, where bureau­crat­ic struc­tures and oth­er tech­ni­cal­i­ties reg­u­lar­ly impede the process for appli­cants. “Peo­ple need to fill out their asy­lum card and apply for asy­lum, but they don’t speak Eng­lish or Greek,” she said. “For inter­views in cer­tain lan­guages such as Urdu, the Greek gov­ern­ment only has avail­able inter­views on lim­it­ed days, twice a week for a few hours, so some peo­ple could end up wait­ing months at least [to get an inter­view].” The process is as com­plex as the diver­si­ty of the asy­lum seek­ers’ spo­ken lan­guages — Ara­bic, Urdu, Far­ci, Kur­dish, and oth­ers. Even though Sol­i­dar­i­ty Now had trans­la­tors on site, Kyr­i­azis said the lin­guis­tic vari­ety still cre­at­ed dif­fi­cul­ties for the staff. “It was nice when we had trans­la­tors, but we only had three or four trans­la­tors in the office,” she said. “If the ben­e­fi­cia­ries had to go to a social work­er or psy­chol­o­gist, some­times they could wait hours because they legal­ly need­ed a trans­la­tor to go with them.” Kyr­i­azis explained that Sol­i­dar­i­ty Now work­ers would direct peo­ple to where they need­ed to go — a doc­tor, psy­chol­o­gist, and so on — but con­stant­ly had to deal with anoth­er com­pli­cat­ing fac­tor: ben­e­fi­cia­ries not hav­ing mon­ey. “The prob­lem is that, first of all, a lot of these peo­ple don’t have mon­ey to take the bus,” she said. “A lot of times they wouldn’t even have mon­ey to get train tick­ets.” Fur­ther­more, Kyr­i­azis said that, while enter­ing people’s names into an online sys­tem, she had to pay close atten­tion to the legit­i­ma­cy of their iden­ti­ties, recall­ing an instance where one man had a fake under-17 birth cer­tifi­cate in hopes of receiv­ing gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits afford­ed to minors. “This one guy had print­ed off a Word Doc­u­ment ‘birth cer­tifi­cate’ from Pak­istan where he said he was 15, but he was clear­ly over 21,” she said. “A lot of times these people’s cer­tifi­cates were so torn up and taped because they’d just been through so much.” The Michi­gan under­grad­u­ate spent the whole sum­mer vol­un­teer­ing in Athens, but she said it was far from her first time across the pond; her father hails from a small vil­lage in the Pelo­pon­nese near Ancient Olympia and the fam­i­ly makes reg­u­lar sum­mer vis­its to Greece. In fact, Kyr­i­azis cred­it­ed her Greek-Amer­i­can back­ground for help­ing her to devel­op greater chem­istry with co-work­ers, say­ing that her her­itage was a source of per­son­al work­place moti­va­tion. “I iden­ti­fy as a Greek as well [as Amer­i­can], and these peo­ple were com­ing to my coun­try and I felt that I was work­ing for my home­land,” she said. “I worked in Argenti­na before I went to Greece and, although it was the same work, I didn’t have the same pas­sion and dri­ve as I did in Greece because it was in my home territory.” 

The intern­ship came through Michigan’s Oppor­tu­ni­ty Hub — a stu­dent sup­port pro­gram offer­ing resources such as prepara­to­ry cours­es, men­tor­ship and intern­ships; how­ev­er, Kyr­i­azis said she first heard about the offer through the university’s Mod­ern Greek pro­gram. Now enter­ing her third year study­ing pub­lic pol­i­cy with a minor in inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, Kyr­i­azis explained that she knows a Greek pro­fes­sor whom she had asked about sum­mer oppor­tu­ni­ties in Greece. “I was look­ing for some­thing with human­i­tar­i­an work — work­ing with NGOs, work­ing with some­one one on one,” Kyr­i­azis said. “She knew I was inter­est­ed in inter­na­tion­al rela­tions and told me she knew this orga­ni­za­tion called Sol­i­dar­i­ty Now and that she could send two Michi­gan stu­dents to go work with them.” The rest, she said, “just worked out,” as she end­ed up hav­ing an expe­ri­ence that has helped shape her future goals. “I’m real­ly inter­est­ed in inter­na­tion­al law and human rights. I think I want to go to law school, study inter­na­tion­al law and become an inter­na­tion­al human rights attor­ney,” she said. “I real­ized that, to make real change, I’m going to have to take more of a pol­i­cy approach to it than a help­ing approach,” A year has passed since Kyr­i­azis’ stint in Athens, but the aspir­ing attor­ney has con­tin­ued tak­ing action and gain­ing more inter­na­tion­al expe­ri­ence. This past spring semes­ter, she trav­eled to Ams­ter­dam in the Nether­lands where she com­plet­ed a three-week pro­gram about Euro­pean Union his­to­ry and pol­i­tics, imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing it up with six more weeks in Gene­va, Switzer­land study­ing mul­ti­lat­er­al diplo­ma­cy and French. The most impor­tant les­son Kyr­i­azis has learned through it all? “If you care enough, you can make a dif­fer­ence,” she said. “But you real­ly have to care enough.”