Credit:UN Photo/Michos Tzovaras
Whenever Huda Al-Shabsogh, a UNHCR field officer on the Greek island of Lesvos, entered the closed facility for unaccompanied minors at the Moria reception and registration centre for refugees, scores of children erupted in excitement.
“Auntie! Auntie!” they shouted happily in Arabic. “How are you today?”
Although Huda cared for dozens of new children each month, she knew all of them by name. Most were young boys aged 14-17, though she saw girls, too.
The majority stayed on the island for a few days to a few weeks, until UNHCR – along with partner NGOs and the Greek authorities – could help them find individual solutions.
“All of them needed advice, but sometimes they just wanted to chat,” said Huda. “They are very, very scared when they reach here.”
Huda is normally based in Amman, Jordan, where she is a UNHCR senior community services associate. She was temporarily posted to Lesvos to do similar work assisting the most vulnerable refugees, such as the disabled, single mothers, people with medical issues, or unaccompanied and separated children.
With colleagues, she identified and arranged for their individual protection needs, such as special housing, health services or urgent cash assistance.
On Lesvos, her first UNHCR posting outside Jordan, Huda focused on unaccompanied children. (Huda completed her UNHCR assignment on Jan 3 and has returned to Jordan. Other UNHCR staff continue her work.)
The process of identifying minors begins on the island’s beaches, where hundreds of refugees and migrants land each day after taking the short but dangerous 10-kilometre boat crossing from Turkey. Volunteers, aid workers for numerous NGOs, and UNHCR protection officers work together to find them among the arrivals.
Many minors declare they are adults in order to avoid being placed in closed centres by Greek and other European authorities for safety. The minors often consider it as a sort of detention as they are not free to come and go.
This makes identifying them particularly challenging. For this reason, there are no completely reliable figures on how many unaccompanied minors arrive on the Greek islands.
However, child refugees in general are on the rise. According to UN statistics, children now make up one in three of the refugees and migrants passing through Greece, skyrocketing from one in 10 earlier this year. From January to September, they lodged a record-breaking 214,000 asylum claims across Europe.
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Source & Copyright: UNHCR