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Sunday, December 13, 2015

The Athens lawyer who became a guardian to refugee camp children

Among thousands of refugees in Greece, the most vulnerable are the unaccompanied children. Daniel Howden meets Christina Dimakou, who gave up her job in the capital to care for them in Lesbos Christina Dimakou is not yet 30, but she has four children, one of whom is 17. She shares neither a nationality nor a past with any of them. Two of them are from Syria: the 17-year-old girl fled Damascus after soldiers attempted to kidnap her and her brother, who escaped conscription; there’s a 10-year-old from Iran who longs to go to school for the first time; and a young girl from Afghanistan who has lost her family. For now Dimakou is their guardian. She cares for them within the confines of Moria, a makeshift hilltop camp for refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos. Her charges spend their days behind chain-linked fences where a discarded Minnie Mouse in a torn pink dress, caught in the razor wire, is the only indication that this is the children’s area. Continue reading...


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com