Hell's Gate to Heaven's Kitchen...

Well, I grabbed two hours sleep on arrival in Chios, after a cold wait for my digs at Chios Rooms to open and then hit the ground running. Headed over to the People's Street Kitchen of Chios to meet up with Ifty Patel. I had no idea it was a 2.6 km walk to where I was going and as I had no idea which direction to go in, I followed the satnav on my phone. Boy, was that a mistake. I could see the Souda Refugee camp which is about half way, but the satnav had me going down non-existant roads so I ended up on what effectively was the top of the old castle on a cliff high above the camp with no way to get down because I forgot my grappling hook in my other pants and couldn't abseil down to the port :).

So I went around, well, kinda sorta - twice - and ended up back where I started! Freakin satnav, eh? I had noted there were a set of very dark, scary stairs that led down from a hole in the ground and though I had the courage walk down two of them on my second pass through, it was just too creepy to go down into the bowels of the castle hoping there was an exit on to the beach area. By the third attempt, I decided that creepy or not, I was exhaustipated (new word for too tired to give a crap) and even if the stairs led to hell, I was going to have to risk it. I mean who knew what was down there in the dark? Could be an old sewer, or even a corpse but I sniffed the air carefully and could only smell dead fish and something undefinable though definitely unpleasant. So I turned the flashlight on on my phone, grabbed some courage from somewhere and headed down the drippy steps to Hades. At the bottom there were four arches that appeared to lead outside somewhere near the sea. One was way too eerie to even consider, two were too small to fit my rather rubenesque figure through, but one was just right and big enough to bend over double and squeeze through. Feeling a bit like Goldilocks gone mad, I burst out onto the beach, hoping I didn't freak out any passersby, the thought of which caused me to erupt in a fit of uncontrolled laughter at the weirdness of the entire situation. Because passersby wouldn't think that was crazy at all. How on earth do I manage to get myself into these situations?

What I did notice while crawling through to beach Hades, was lots of abandoned shoes, and a destroyed teddy bear, a girl's little purse and a pamplet in Farsi or Arabic maybe, that had washed in on the tide at some point - the flotsam of lives risked at sea to escape war and persecution. That was sobering enough to stop the giggles dead in their tracks.

I finally made it to the kitchen where the warm and energetic Ifty Patel and the Ching Hai Humanitarian group along with volunteers from the four corners of the earth make nutritious vegan meals to serve to the refugees twice a day, every day, and got stuck in right away. Most of the Ching Hai faction are from Korea at the moment and I've never met a group of happier, more loving, gentle people in my life. Their bright yellow jackets bring joy everywhere they go. The kitchen is well known on the island, and in the five days I've been here, they have served hot meals to countless hundreds of refugees.

I also had the honour to meet a fellow quiet warrior at the kitchen, Kostas Tanainis who with his lovely wife Lien collect and distribute clothing, shoes, backpacks and other essentials to the refugees. They work tirelessly and passionately to help the refugees in every possible way and I suspect they have angel wings hidden under their Tshirts! It really is a privilege to work with such wonderful people, including Mariela from Argentina, Lauren from Oregan, Siri from Denmark, Xeito from Spain, Else from Cyprus, Aoife from Ireland and the list goes on and on...