WHERE JESUS WOULD SPEND CHRISTMAS

Opinion

By Stephanie Saldaña | Dec. 22, 2017

In the city of Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos, Christmas is approaching. A tree on the main square is alight in blue; a Nativity scene has Mary and Joseph standing vigil beside the baby Jesus. Locals are busily shopping for gifts and sipping coffee at cafes.

Just 15 minutes up the road, at the refugee and migrant camp called Moria, it is not Christmas but winter that is approaching. More than 6,000 souls fleeing the world’s most violent conflicts — in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo — are crowded in a space meant for 2,330. The scene is grim: piles of trash, barbed wire, children wailing, rows of cheap summer tents with entire families crammed inside and fights regularly breaking out on the camp’s periphery. The stench is overwhelming.

I have visited many refugee camps in the Middle East, but never have I seen anything like Moria, a place Pope Francis has likened to a concentration camp. I have also never understood the true meaning of Christmas — a story in which Jesus was born into a family that became refugees — until I visited the people who are now forced to call it home.

Among them are Kareema and her elderly mother, Kamila, who spent the past few years trapped in Deir al-Zour in Syria under the rule of the Islamic State. (I’m using only the first names of the refugees I spoke with out of concern for their safety and their pending asylum applications.) “There was no electricity; we were using oil lamps. It was as though we returned to the Stone Ages,” Kareema told me. Though they suffered terribly — “We left because there were no longer doctors, hospitals or health care,” she said — nothing prepared mother and daughter for Moria. “If I would have known, I wouldn’t have come,” she told me. “I would have died in my own country.”