By Sharron Ward. Originally posted 4 April, 2016.
This is the long version of the blog I wrote of my experience covering the refugee crisis on the island of Lesvos over the summer of 2015. The shortened version appeared on Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Filmmaker Sharron Ward writes about her personal encounters filming the hundreds of refugees who washed ashore bereft and broken on the Greek island of Lesvos during the summer.
I first heard about refugees washing up on the shores of Lesvos from friends on Facebook way back in January. They told me that while on holiday in the south of the island, they had woken in the middle of the night to find a soaking wet Syrian family with a new born baby on their balcony. They had nearly drowned at sea as their flimsy boat had capsized. A large focus of my work has been documenting the plight of Syrian refugees across the Middle East, but nothing prepared me for filming the desperate mass exodus that washed ashore on Lesvos this summer.
It was under the intense heat of the mid-day sun in the car park when I noticed a Syrian woman wearing stonewashed jeans and a khaki shirt. She looked worried as she held a tiny baby with elfin-like features who looked frail and limp. Samar Joukhadar explained in her broken English that her 2 and a half year old baby named Aieh had a hole in her heart and had Down’s syndrome.
