“She was going to die. The last time we dug a grave for one of the Syrian refugees found in the forest it took us six hours. Should we start digging now?” Tomas asked curiously, searching my face for an answer. It was the morning after this particularly harrowing encounter and it was clear she needed to talk to someone.
Tomas and I were providing health services to refugees and asylum seekers in Hermanli, a small Bulgarian town near the Bulgaria-Türkiye border.
Medical care was to be provided by a large international NGO in the city’s refugee camp, but their doctors were rarely present and unwilling to provide anything more than the most rudimentary items of care.
Since other organizations were not allowed inside the camp, Tomas and I, two NGOs, volunteered to set up a medical station in a nearby park. We provided diagnosis and treatment for conditions such as viral upper respiratory infections, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), pneumonia, scabies, and bedbug bites, but what we also did was wound care.
Many refugees and asylum seekers walked for days or weeks through dense forests, fast rivers and dangerous mountain passes to reach Bulgaria and, as a result, suffered wounds all over their bodies. Once they arrived, they were placed in refugee camps or detention centers where scabies and bedbugs were plentiful. Most wounds become infected in this environment. And with inadequate nutrition – I heard from many that the food given was often laced with maggots – there was little hope for healing.
The NGO Tomas volunteered to conduct search and rescue operations, often in the dense, dangerous forests that refugees and asylum seekers had to cross to get from Turkey to Bulgaria. Many people died trying to make the crossing. When families could not be found, and to respect Muslim burial rites which require bodies to be buried immediately, many of these refugees were buried by strangers in unmarked graves in distant lands. Even in death, there was some dignity.
After a few hours of resuscitation efforts, the Syrian refugee woman Tomas encountered that night was able to walk for a short time. A few days later, we hear that a body has been found in the woods that matches his description.
I had about 10 years of experience doing this kind of work, but when Tomas and I talked about what he saw that night, I found that I had no words of wisdom for him. I felt the same pain that I had seen written on his face.
We were trying to provide medical care to a group of refugees and asylum seekers who had fled some of the world’s most violent conflicts in places like Syria and Afghanistan, only to be met with even more violence by Frontex and European border police. Had to face.
These are some of the stories I heard while working in EU member Bulgaria in the late summer of 2024.
I met Muhammad under a tree in the park near the Harmanli refugee camp. He had wounds that looked suspicious. There were angry red spots all over his back, as if he had been whipped repeatedly. I couldn’t help but think that I had only seen these kinds of wounds in textbooks when learning about the brutal transatlantic slave trade. I started cleaning the wounds and slowly applying ointment.
I asked him if he would be willing to testify, which I would hand over to the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a coalition of organizations that document human rights violations in border areas. He agreed.
I needed a translator. So I called a friend, Dr. Nasser, an Afghan refugee with whom I had worked when he and his family lived in prison-like camps on Lesvos. While I listened attentively he translated Muhammad’s story from Dari into English.
Muhammad was a resident of Jalalabad. Decades of war, poverty and famine had ravaged his hometown. He fled to safety and in hopes of earning some money to send back to Afghanistan so that his family would not starve. It took them several weeks to cross Iran and Turkey to reach the Bulgarian border. In a place where many refugee camps and detention centers were littered with swastikas and signs reading “Migrants leave now!” graffiti, he felt that Bulgaria had few prospects for unification. So a few weeks before our meeting, he left for Serbia on foot, hoping to reach Germany via the Balkan route.
At the Bulgaria–Serbia border, Serbian border police detained him and beat him for hours, taking turns with whips. After encountering them, Muhammad found it difficult to walk. Many of his toe nails were missing. Serbian border police officers took them out one by one.
Until then, Muhammad was hesitant to tell his story, sometimes panicking when the iodine solution pricked him. Dr. Nasir told them that we will be witnesses on their behalf on the Day of Judgment, and their suffering will not go unnoticed. At that moment, I looked up to assess the stitches on his forehead, where Serbian border police had repeatedly beaten him, and I saw his kind brown eyes fill with tears as he heard Dr. Nasser’s words.
After tending to Muhammad’s wounds, Ahmad greeted me by placing his hand on his heart and saying a warm “salaam.” Ahmed lived in the camp and had volunteered to be our Arabic translator. He had a gentle smile and impeccable manners. Before fleeing Syria, he was a volunteer ambulance driver for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in the worst-hit areas of Deir ez Zor.
He showed me photos on his phone of his life in Syria – teaching mechanical engineering to a group of eager students. He quickly flipped through the photos and videos. One of them was trying to save an infant whose head was partially severed by the drone strike. I wondered what motivated him to help his fellow refugees after he had already seen so much. The care that refugees have for each other always amazes me.
Soon a young Syrian woman wearing a niqab approached the tent, where we diagnosed and treated the women and performed physical examinations, which required more privacy than the park allowed. Halima, who was about 20 years old, told me that she was feeling dizzy. When she was 28 weeks pregnant with triplets, she and her husband decided to make the dangerous journey from Syria via Turkey to Bulgaria. Despite her pregnancy, she was repeatedly beaten by traffickers in an attempt to induce her to run faster. Once on Bulgarian territory, an NGO helped take her to hospital where she gave birth to three stillborn babies.
I took her essentials and gave her a multivitamin and some feminine hygiene products. This felt completely inadequate. I couldn’t even understand what she had lost. He embraced me in gratitude and his lips were in silent prayer for me and my family.
Later I met 17-year-old Yasmine from Syria and her elderly father Ali. Yasmeen was diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease due to strep throat a few years ago. Strep throat is something that can be easily treated with a course of antibiotics under normal circumstances. But years of war in Syria had left health care infrastructure in tatters, leaving many people like Yasmin denied basic treatment and forced to live with chronic disease. There was very little I could offer. The monthly penicillin injections she needed for secondary prophylaxis were not available in Bulgaria.
I was fortunate to be able to purchase her father’s diabetes medications at a local pharmacy using donations from my family and friends. When we met to give him a few months’ worth of donated medicines, Uncle Ali, as I called him, asked us to come for tea. This was not the first time I was invited to a refugee’s home. Yet I was always amazed by such warmth and hospitality even in the most difficult circumstances.
The next day I and my medical coordinator returned to Sofia. We had a clinic there where we provided free medical care to refugees and asylum seekers who came to the capital city. During Friday prayers, I went to an Ottoman-era mosque in central Sofia where I met a Syrian Kurdish family: Aunt Fatima and Uncle Hamza.
They were excited to hear that I was a “guest” from Canada and insisted on inviting me over for lunch. Aunty Fatima prepared a feast of chicken and rice with yogurt salad, which we enjoyed eating with her 15-year-old son, Hussein, on the floor of their sparsely furnished apartment. I felt sad that this food was eating up their savings.
Uncle Hamza was 60 years old and his body shifted uncomfortably from side to side due to degenerative disc disease he developed during years of hard labor in Sudan. For nearly a decade, he worked as a construction worker there to save money while the war raged around his family in Syria.
As fighting reached untenable levels in his hometown, the soft-spoken Hussein made the treacherous journey alone from Syria to Turkey to Bulgaria. As an unaccompanied minor, he was able to bring his parents from Syria after almost two years as part of a family reunification program.
As our meal was about to end, I looked at my phone to try to figure out how to get back to the mosque through the maze-like streets of Old Sofia. Hussain shyly offered to accompany me back. As soon as we came back, he told me that he dreamed of becoming an English teacher. While waiting for two years to be reunited with his parents, he taught himself English and Bulgarian. I wondered how much he might have achieved if his circumstances had been different, if he had received a high school education like other kids his age.
A week later, it was time to leave. While I was waiting at the Sofia airport for my flight to Canada, the Bulgarian border police asked me repeatedly for my “documents”. I looked around and realized that I was the only Muslim woman at the airport and no other passenger was being harassed like this.
Police often do the same thing around the mosque in Sofia and in countless other places where refugees and asylum seekers seek respite in a country where there is frequent hostility and attacks by white supremacist groups.
I subconsciously started adjusting my hijab, thinking that if I looked well dressed then maybe the police wouldn’t mistake me for a refugee or asylum seeker. I caught myself in this thought process and realized something: I would consider myself lucky if I were mistaken for Muhammad, Ahmed, Halima, Yasmine, Ali, Hussein or Fatima, because they were the embodiment of kindness, courage, generosity and steadfastness. Great examples. The humanity I have known.
The names of all refugees and asylum seekers mentioned in this article have been changed to protect their identities.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
