A Lonesome Journey to Freedom: The Hidden Struggles of LGBTQ Refugees
Inside the refugee camp / Samos, Greece
LGBTQ refugees, trapped in the brutal camps of Greece, are unprotected and rarely talked about, yet determined to find the freedom they were denied at home.
Evans first fell in love seven years ago, when he was 15. “His name was Nosa. We lived in the same room at boarding school. He was average height, a little plump, playful. I loved him very much. He was my first relationship, my first love. I was addicted to him.
“We were together for two years, until we got caught at the end-of-school party. A teacher found us in the broom closet of a classroom and started beating us with a stick. Then he called the rest of the staff. They came with the parents. Because my mother was there, she felt ashamed. For her, I had done an unforgivable forbidden act. After the beatings at school, when we got home, she had two men tie me up. I don’t know who they were. One man was holding my legs and the other was holding my hands and I was on the floor. They were older than me and bigger, so I couldn't resist. And there, she hit me and left a mark on my stomach with a razor blade. She took a stick and broke it on me, and she kicked me. Now I have scars on my stomach. My mom did that. She put a knife in the fire and burned my stomach. I was screaming. She kept doing it. After that, she said I should get out, I'm not her son anymore. She doesn’t want to see me, doesn't have anything to do with me. She is no longer my mother. I almost died.”
Evans (I cannot use his last name for his own protection) comes from a Christian Pentecostal family in the city of Benin, Nigeria. His father was a doctor who held a position at Benin’s university teaching hospital, his mother ran a small restaurant. Evans himself was a professional dancer before homophobia forced him to flee his country. Born on July 28, 1998, he was only 21 when he fled — young for someone who has to build a new life from nothing but his own resilience. By the time I began talking to him in November 2020, he was a refugee, trapped on the island of Samos in one of the most overcrowded and inhumane camps in Greece.
Homosexuality is illegal in Nigeria. Or, as Nigerian lawyer and activist, Richard Akuson, put it, “In Nigeria, gay men are portrayed as cancers eating deeply into the fabric of society—tumors that must be obliterated.” The law that dictates this, the Same-Sex (Prohibition) Bill, was signed on January 7, 2014 by Nigeria’s former president, Goodluck Jonathan. But as a 2015 Human Rights Watch report pointed out, even though the bill’s intent was to notionally prohibit marriage between people of the same sex, it has essentially criminalized all LGBTQ persons and those who support them, while giving license to the population to persecute, attack, beat, and torture anyone they see as queer.
Nigeria is far from alone in its homophobic attitudes and laws. At least 71 countries around the world criminalize consensual same-sex sexual activity; 43 countries specifically outlaw such activity between women; 11 countries impose the death penalty for homosexual activity, including Northern Nigeria (death by stoning); and 15 criminalize trans people, according to Human Dignity Trust. Most of these countries are in Africa and the Middle East, but Indonesia, Pakistan, and Guyana are also on the list.
The refugee camp on Samos holds people from many of these nations. While I was there, I met gay men and lesbians, Christian and Muslim, from Sierra Leone, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, and Iran who faced the same kind of violence Evans suffered. The irony is that, even as they escaped death or imprisonment by fleeing home, in Greece they now face homophobia from their fellow refugees who come from the same countries that they escaped, as well racism from many Greeks.
Evans is a tall young man with a strikingly beautiful face, a low and melodious voice, and the lanky but muscular build of the dancer he once was. He is deeply earnest and unfailingly polite, very religious — he plays drums and sings in church every Sunday — and also a fanatical devotee of exercise. Working out and religion are clearly what keep him sane.
When he and I talked over the phone during the months of Covid, he was usually in the dark of night because of the seven-hour time difference between Greece and New York. Sometimes I could barely see him, huddled in a tent lit by the light of his cell phone, or standing by the towering chain-link fence that surrounds the camp, under one of the giant spotlights glaring down on him like the eye of a cyclops. Often, as we talked, he cast nervous looks around.
“A lot of people here, when they see me, they shout ‘haram,’” he told me. “In case you do not know, it means forbidden in Arabic.”
He also had to keep an eye out for the police, he added, plucking at the scrap of cloth dangling under his chin. “If they catch you without a mask, they fine you 300 euro.” Evans and other single refugees in the camp are given 75 euros — about $90 — a month by the Greek government and the UN on which to live.
I began by asking him what he most wanted people to know about himself and his situation. Speaking to me in a formal British English, he offered this reply:
“I am 22 and a very simple person. I hate to see someone being oppressed. I hate this with so much passion. It is only yesterday that I saw a policeman hit a woman who was carrying a baby. Oh God… it makes me go crazy, it’s so hard to talk about. It makes me want to cry. This isn’t something somebody told me, I saw this with my own eyes. I like a place where there is justice. Where every human is equal, whether you are white, whether you are Black, I don’t care about your race. One day, I want to be a human rights lawyer so I can help refugees like us.”
He went on to speak about his life in the camp, sometimes hesitating and avoiding my eyes when the subject was painful; other times plunging into bursts of earnest passion. Once, when I asked him why he wanted to talk about all this in the first place, he said simply, “I needed to talk.”
“I came to Samos in October of 2019,” he told me early on in our conversations. “I was in danger at home. My country, Nigeria, my mom, they made me want to commit suicide or do something harmful to myself. I don’t want more persecution and bullying. I just want to live my life. But I’ve never seen anything like this camp in Samos. I don’t make friends here because they’ve hurt me in the past. Also because of my sexual orientation, I don’t feel safe here. But my asylum interview is not until next year, September, and until then I’m not allowed to leave, so I’m stuck here. I’ve never lived this kind of life before, where they treat humans as if we are animals.”
Dan Chapman, who works with a NGO called Samos Volunteers and runs a secret LGBTQ support group for the camp’s refugees — secret because to be overt would put its members in danger from other refugees — says he hears comments like this all the time. “The biggest issue here is that the camp offers no protection to people who are facing attacks and discrimination for being queer,” he told me. “This comes as a shock to most people because they think that as soon as they arrive in Europe, they’ll have their rights protected, at least more than they were before. And then they find out that they don't have them protected at all.”
Dan, 23, who is British and queer himself, has been working with Samos Volunteers for more than three years now, but this has not mitigated his frustration. “Today I had to tell an 18-year-old boy that the best protection I could offer him from the middle-aged man threatening daily to rape him is an attack alarm,” he wrote on FaceBook not long ago. “And last week I had to explain to a woman that even though she'd been raped multiple times for being LGBT by the same man, the passivity of the hospital and the police mean she still has to live in the camp with him. She is petrified that tonight it will happen again... I don't know how anyone survives the camp at all.”
The Meaning of Fear
As a boy, Evans lived far from such dangers. “My parents were strict but we had a loving home, a good family, and we lived in a nice apartment on a city street. Every morning, the first thing I did was go to my father’s room and say, ‘Good morning, Father,’ and then go to my mother’s room and greet her as well. Then I would tidy my room, make the bed. My parents didn’t let me go out and play with friends, so I would put on my earphones and dance, or play with my little brother. I liked best to dance and listen to music.
“But even as a child I could not bear to see people suffer. If people came in hungry to my mother’s restaurant but couldn’t pay, I would cry and plead with her to feed them anyway. She liked that about me. She said I had a good heart. But she didn’t like me to be in the restaurant because I kept giving away the food to people who couldn’t afford to eat!” He cracked a rare smile.
Life, he said, was easy for him as a boy. But then, when he was 13, he learned the meaning of fear.
“That was the age I began to have feelings for men. I felt okay with my sexuality because I didn't cause it, I just grew up that way. I was fine with it. But I saw some videos on the Internet of people who had caught gay people red-handed, abused them, flogged them, treated them disparagingly. This created fear in me. I thought that if my mother or someone else found out, the same might happen to me. That's why I didn't tell her about my feelings. I never told my classmates at school, either.”
His parents sent Evans to boarding school around this time; another normal move in his world. They wanted him to attend a mixed school with girls, but he insisted on going to a boys-only school. He was afraid of girls, or rather he was afraid of the pressure his society would put on him to court and marry.
Evans’ father had just been killed in a car accident a few months before he and Nosa were caught in school, but Evans said his father would have treated him just as harshly as his mother did.
“Sometimes, things like that, I just don't want to remember...”
He fell silent here and looked away, his young face creased into a knot of pain. Evans is not the only queer refugee I met on Samos who was tortured and then disowned by their own family. One was kept prisoner in his basement and beaten every day for a month by his parents before they threw him out of their home forever. Another, a 22-year-old from Sierra Leone, was caught with his lover by his uncle, who called in the neighbors to beat them. He managed to escape, but his partner was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. A third, a young woman from Cameroon, was not only expelled by her family; they took away her children.
“After my mom told me she's no longer my mother,” Evans continued, “I had to get out of her house for good. I was bleeding, I was in pain, I had bruises all over my body, but I was afraid to go to the hospital because I didn't want anyone to know what had happened. So I went to the ring road area in Benin and slept on the sidewalk.”
He slept in the street for four days until he found a job in a gas station, the owner of which paid him enough of an advance to rent a room. Later, Evans also learned how to make furniture. “But I don’t like to remember my mother now.”
Dino Dancers
While Evans was pumping gas, a young man handed him a brochure for a group called the Dino Dancers, named after its founder. “Something inside me made me understand this was a group for gays. Maybe because in the brochure, the dancers were all men. I always had a passion for dancing. So I joined the group.”
Soon the Dino Dancers were performing at parties and carnivals and were paid well enough for him to leave his job. “We danced to any song. African dance, Congo dance, Cameroon. I know all the steps. I was assiduous. I practice even here. I have a mirror and little speakers in my tent, and I practice in front of the mirror and try to learn new moves. We were paid well, but if the crowd liked what we were doing they would throw money at us too. My dream was to be on Nigeria Idol.”
Later, when I visited Evans in Samos, he took me to see what he called his “tent” where he practiced his dances, the place that had been his home for the past year. Because journalists are forbidden to enter the camp, he suggested that I carry a plastic bag and disguise myself by exchanging my summer dress for long pants and a shirt. “This way you will look like a refugee, Ma,” he said with a quick smile, using the Nigerian name of respect for an older woman. I dressed as he suggested and we climbed the hill, taking a back way into the official camp and slipping past the police guard booth as nonchalantly as we could.
Set on a former military base built to house 648 people, and run by the Greek government with UNHCR help, the camp looks like a teeming slum crammed inside a prison. Seared into the side of the mountain that rises above the port town of Vathi, it is surrounded by concrete walls and hurricane fences crowned by barbed wire, with towering spotlights glaring down into the camp all night. Inside the fences, dozens of white shipping containers are shoved end-to-end and stacked in rows up the hill, while squeezed into every inch of space between are hundreds of homemade wooden box shelters, squashed together into a rabbit warren clogged by litter and flies.
Evans and I wove down suffocatingly hot and narrow alleyways, while I peered in the doorways of one box after another, most of which were pitch black inside. A pair of shoes, a tattered piece of carpet, a plastic bag, a bottle of water, the bare feet of a sleeper. It’s a wonder they hadn’t all died of Covid under such crowded and unsanitary conditions. The camp does have a quarantine area for those who test positive and their families, which is no more than a prison within a prison. Evans pointed out that locking healthy family members in a compound with the infected seems less than wise.
Evans’ box was crammed in at the end of a row of similar boxes, each pressed tightly against its neighbor and sharing a sheet of plastic draped over their roofs, with a passageway so narrow that when someone opened a door, we could not pass. The boxes were about six feet square and seven feet high, most without windows. Evans’ box, too, had no windows, no light, very little air, and was as black as a tomb inside, even in the bright Greek sun. The place put me in mind of the cells of a vast wasps’ nest.
Inside, though, Evans’ box was clean and orderly, with a real wooden bed, its headboard painted the pale pink of a little girl’s bedroom. In the back, he had placed a small deck of three shelves holding condiments and cleaning supplies, a bag for his clothes, a hanging cloth of shoe pockets for other items, his single burner cylinder stove, and the battery-powered lamp he used as his only light. He had no windows, he explained, for fear of rats and thieves. But he did have the mirror in which he practiced his dance moves.
Originally, asylum seekers like Evans were supposed to stay in Samos and other island camps only temporarily until they were transferred to the mainland. But since March 2016, when the European Union struck a deal with Turkey to keep refugees out of Western Europe, they have been languishing in camps for years, trapped in miserable conditions in a country that has neither the resources nor the will to keep them. Covid and the current anti-immigrant government, Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy), have only made things worse.
The Trumpian idea behind the deal was to discourage refugees from coming at all, but of course people do not flee their homes for any reason other than pure desperation. By the spring of 2019, the camp population in Samos had reached a mind-boggling 8,000; local citizens were up in arms about their island being overrun by Muslims and Africans; and the Greek government was talking about building a new camp deep in the mountains, where refugees would be locked in and kept far from any town or village, hospital, or NGO. I went to see that camp in June, 2021 and found a vast patch of bare land holding row upon row of white metal shipping containers, placed tightly together and surrounded by 20-feet tall hurricane fences, with nary a tree or flower in sight. It is exposed, hot, and hideous. That detention center, named Zervou, opened in September 2021, applauded by EU and Greek officials, deplored by refugees and their advocates.
Home-built gym, Samos refugee camp, June 2021, Helen Benedict
After we left Evans’ shelter, he took me outside the official camp to where hundreds more shelters have spilled over the surrounding fields and olive groves in what has come to be known as the Jungle. Here he showed me the gym where he works out, a scattering of objects over a bare patch of earth: A set of barbells made of an iron rod with blocks of rough cement on each end that were molded in a bucket. Weights and a chinning bar made of scrap metal. A bench press that seemed to have been expanded out of an old wooden chair. A punching bag made of plastic stuffed with rags. “We go around the town looking through the rubbish bins for these things,” he told me with a rueful laugh. “I work out here every day, boxing, weights, or else I go running in the hills.” He then told me not to take pictures in case I got caught; he would take them for me, instead. Later that evening he sent me 72 photographs of the camp and the Jungle, including this one of his gym.
Charles
Evans’ membership in Dino Dancers not only gave him an outlet for his passion, it also provided a cover for his sexuality. “Everybody in the group was gay, so we picked up some lesbians so we would not look suspicious, because if you are never seen with women in my country, it is very, very risky. In Nigeria, people think we gays are useless in society, that we pollute the earth.”
He sent me several photos of the Dino Dancers, himself among them, a dashing group of young men dressed in white sports shirts and artfully torn jeans, making the goofy faces and victory signs everyone makes in selfies. He then sent me a video of several young men who, having been accused of being gay, were forced to strip by a crowd, then whipped and made to dance naked while the women and men circling them shouted and jeered.
“Those guys in the video, I know them, they were my friends. Once you are caught like that, it’s only by the grace of God you will even get to the police station. The people will kill you before that.”
While Evans was in Dino Dancers, he met another dancer named Charles. They were both 18. “We were in a deep relationship from 2017 to 2019. It is very hard, but sometimes it releases me to talk about it. Charles was handsome. He had a nice body, muscular, he went to the gym, he was tall and dark-complexioned. I loved him very much. After rehearsals, we'd go to my house, sit together, just like someone would with their boyfriend or girlfriend, and talk. He's very funny, he's got a lot of energy, he smiles a lot, he was playful. He was such a nice man.”
Evans told me this in Samos, sitting on a terrace in the sun, but he grew so sad that he looked away, his entire body clearly yearning to run from the subject.
On September 18, 2019, Evans and Charles went to the funeral for a fellow dancer’s mother. “A funeral is usually a two-day party in my country. We drank until we were drunk. When we got back to my house around 7 or 8 at night, we put on music so the neighbors wouldn't hear us. The house was kind of like a hotel, with opposite rooms down a hallway and one bathroom everyone shared. This is common in my country.
“We started making love. We locked the door, but we didn't know the neighbors were listening. They broke down the door and found us. I can't explain how they found out, but they suspected us, maybe because they saw us going into the room together and we acted like you do when you have a girl. More than ten people came in and started hitting us with sticks, kicking us. For over half an hour, they beat us, shouted, caught more neighbors' attention. There were women there, too, shouting, ‘To jail with you!’ The only face I saw was of the man hitting me. He had a thick beard.
“They were beating us not only with sticks but cutlasses. I have scars on my buttocks and my head and on my leg from the cutlass. I had my pants down to my knees when we were found and someone tried to cut me off with a knife, so I put my hand in front to protect myself. I have a scar on my hand from that now. Then this same man hit me in the face. You can still see marks on my face from that, too.”
Indeed, Evans has a wide and shiny scar that curves from his left ear to his jaw, but it only shows in direct light.
“One of the men was holding me by the pants and the others were hitting me. I realized they were about to kill us on the spot, so with all my might I hit the guy who was holding me and I was able to pull up my pants and jump out the window. I started running. I was chased, other people in the area joined in. I didn't look behind me to see how many there were, but there must have been at least ten and they were yelling.
“I ran and I jumped into a place like a hole… in Nigeria we have a lot of moats [ditches]. People don’t normally go into those places, they are full of bushes and trees. I jumped inside and I stayed there for two days, hiding.”
Late on the second night, Evans climbed out of the ditch and went to find a woman who owed him money for a chair he had made for her. Seeing him shoeless and bleeding all over his face and body, she demanded to know what had happened. He refused to tell her, only asked for the money, which amounted to about $7. He found some shoes on the street, and caught a bus to Lagos.
“There, I went to a man called Robert. He and my father had worked together, they were close friends. Robert had already heard what had happened. He was the one who told me about Charles. He told me that the mob beat Charles to death.”
Wanted
Evans showed me a picture of the wanted poster that the Nigerian police had sent around the country, and the warrant for his arrest. The warrant is also for Charles, never mind that he was murdered.
Robert would not allow Evans into his house, saying it would get them both into trouble now that Evans was wanted by the police. But he did give him some money before sending him away. With it, Evans bought some clothes and a bus ticket.
“I didn’t know where I was going, I just wanted to be safe from people who would do to me what they did to Charles. And I was crying, crying because Charles was dead. I was so scared of being caught that I didn’t even know where I was when I got there.”
After riding across six West African countries for a day and a night, Evans arrived in Sierra Leone on September 21, 2019, bewildered, lost and afraid; exactly the kind of young person who attracts predators.
“I was in a very busy place, a market, scared and crying. Then I saw a man who said his name was Abdul. I pleaded with him to help me, so he invited me to come to his house. But when he got there, he said he wanted to take me to his mosque. I said, ‘But I am a Christian.’ He said he could not allow me to stay in his house if I am a Christian, that I would have to change my religion if I wanted to stay. I said I could not change my religion for anything, but please, just help me. He would not.
“So I went into the streets, saw an unfinished building and slept there. A guy noticed me and asked why I was sleeping there. I didn’t tell him my sexual orientation or anything about myself, I just told him that I didn’t have any family, any relatives, anywhere to go, and that I needed help.”
The man introduced himself as Mohammad from Guinea, and offered to help. “He sounded like he was just being kind. He bought food for me. I was scared, and he was willing to help me, so I just grabbed onto that. I didn’t know what he was planning.”
Mohammad took Evans by bus over the border to Guinea.
“In Guinea they speak French and it’s also a Muslim country, so I felt I was moving from the frying pan to the fire. When we arrived, Mohammad took me to this big marketplace and asked me to wait for him there.”
While Evans was waiting, some policemen approached and asked what he was doing, but because of the language barrier, he couldn’t explain. His phone battery was dead, so he couldn’t call Mohammad, either. “So they threw me inside the cell. I was there for three days. On the third day, they released me because they couldn’t find out anything about me.”
Evans finally found a place to charge his phone and managed to reach Mohammad and tell him what had happened. Mohammad said not to worry, he would take him someplace safe.
“I was thinking maybe he felt pity for me. I never knew he had negative plans for me, that he wanted to capture my heart so he could do what he wanted with me.”
Mohammad took Evans to a gated house and told him not to leave. “I never saw anybody like family or anything, so we were there alone.”
He paused here, looking distressed, so I asked if he was all right digging up all these painful memories. He shook his head. “It is painful, but sometimes when I talk about it, it relieves me a little.” Didn’t you see that house as a prison? I asked him.
“No, because Mohammad was giving me food, being kind. I was just seeing freedom. I was ok, I was alive. And he promised that he was going to help me leave the country for a safer place, so I thought he was a godsend. He never asked me for sexual favors, he wasn’t touching me. I never disclosed my sexual orientation to him, you understand, because I was scared.”
Evans spent a little over two weeks in the house, until the day Mohammad gave him an envelope and drove him to the airport. Don’t open this until you arrive, he said.
“I was so happy. He told me he was sending me to Turkey.”
When Evans’ plane landed, it was not, however, in Turkey. He was in Iran.
The Iranian border police opened the envelope, found a fake passport inside, and instantly arrested him. Sharing no language, the police and Evans could not communicate at all. Evans tried to call a number Mohammad had given him, but could reach nobody, and when the police called Mohammad himself, he hung up as soon as he heard a strange voice. So, unable to find out anything about Evans, the police locked him up for five weeks.
“The prison in Iran…I was badly treated there. The police shouted at me, hit my back with their hands, insulted me, dragged me around. I was separated from other people, I was alone. Sometimes I eat, sometimes I don’t eat. So horrible. As I’m talking to you right now about that, I just feel like crying remembering it.”
Having failed to find out who Evans was, the police finally gave up, took him out of the prison, and dumped him on a street near the airport — something that happens to refugees in Iran all the time. “I didn’t know where I was. I don’t know anything about Iran.” Lost as he was, Evans finally managed to reach Mohammad’s friend on his phone, who said he would come to fetch him.
“When he came, he was looking all around, very nervous. He didn’t speak English but he beckoned me to follow him fast. He pushed me into a car and told me to bend down in the back while he was driving. He wanted me to hide. Then he drove away at full speed to a very far place. He stopped the car, took me out, and locked me inside the trunk.
“I was in there a long, long time. I was crying a lot. He was driving at high speed with me inside the trunk all night. It was so frightening.
“When he let me out in the morning, the land around us was very wide, very big. Mountains all around. It was a big farm with a single house. He took me to a tent and I saw some white people there… they were from Afghanistan. He left me with them.
“That’s when the Afghans told me that I had been sold.”
They Didn’t Want Us to See Their Faces
That Evans was trafficked has since been confirmed by A21, a campaign run by the Human Trafficking Foundation out of London, an international organization dedicated to ending all forms of slavery. The group interviewed him in Greece and issued a report to help his asylum case. Evans sent me a copy of it.
“The Afghans told me not to cry,” he continued. “I was the only Black among them, but they were very kind to me, those guys. They tried to calm me down because I was so scared. They said don’t worry, we were sold too, but we are going to escape. They had a plan.
“We worked on the farm all day digging cucumbers, watermelons, and vegetables out of the earth. It was like a desert area, you can’t grow much in that place. The people there made us work long, long hours and sleep in a tent. All we had to eat was bread and water from the water trough. Nowhere to wash, so we just washed our hands and legs and arms. No toilet.
“We were hungry and thirsty all the time. One of the Afghans, he took a cucumber from the crop and ate from it. The men on the farm beat him seriously. There were bruises all over his body just because he tried to eat a cucumber.
“I don’t know who we were working for. There were a lot of people there but they kept away from us. They didn’t want us to see their faces. But it was hard to escape from that place. We were surrounded by a high wall and we were only allowed out to work.
“After we worked for five days, the Afghans said the time had come for our escape. That night, we climbed over the wall and dug a hole and hid our bags inside it. Then, at around 2 am, when everybody was asleep, we sneaked out one by one and climbed over the wall again. And we ran.”
Evans and his friends ran nonstop for two nights and days. Their only idea was to get as far away from the farm as they could. Evans grew so exhausted that at one point he was crawling on his hands and knees through the desert.
“We had nothing to eat and only the water from the ground to drink, streams. I got sick from that water. I was praying, ‘God, you provided for the Israelites in the desert. Now I am in the desert. Provide for me!’ Thirty seconds later, I found a biscuit on the ground. Just lying there. So I ate it.”
Finally one morning they met a man in a truck who agreed to drive them for some distance to a village. From there they continued walking until they met a group of people, both Black and white, on their own journeys.
“When I saw Blacks I felt a bit of relief, you understand? They spoke French but one understood English a little, so I asked him: where are we, what’s happening? He said we are going to Turkey.”
Evans and the Afghans followed the group for hours until they reached the Turkish border, facing dauntingly high fences and armed border guards.
“The police started shooting at us, so everybody scattered and I lost sight of my friends. I thought maybe they had already crossed and I was alone. I knew I had to go, I was crying tears, but for a long time I could not move. Finally, I started crawling through the grass. It was very dark but the border police almost caught me. They shined their torch where I was lying. I lay there flat, without moving, for more than thirty minutes, waiting for them to remove their attention from that place. When they finally did, I continued crawling, crawling, until I passed them. The fence was very high. I climbed over it and jumped.”
Evans shook his head at this point — he was telling me this part of his story from inside his tent, where he was cooking a dinner of chicken and vegetables over his single cylinder burner. He cannot eat the camp food, he explained, because it makes him sick.
“On the other side of the fence,” he continued, “I didn’t know where to go. I saw some people who had already crossed and were hiding. They were all white and there were very many of them, so I followed them until we got to a village. That’s when the police came and arrested me again.”
This time the police took him on a drive that lasted a night and a day until they reached a prison called Abangi in Izmir, where many refugees are locked up while trying to reach Greece. But at least the police gave Evans something to eat.
“That was the first time I had food since I had run away with the Afghans. I never saw them again.”
The Turkish police kept Evans in prison for about two weeks, then released him into Izmir, the coastal city where refugees from all over the Middle East and Africa go to find the smugglers who can procure a boat to Europe.
“I was sleeping in a park in Izmir for about two days when I met a guy from Ghana. His name was Nana. He told me he could help me get to a place where I could get asylum, not like in Turkey. I thought he was just a fraudster like the other gangsters in the area, but to avoid a struggle I gave him $100 I had left over from the money Robert gave me. I didn't have any confidence in Nana, but when he came later that evening and said to follow him, I did, not knowing what else to do.
“Nana put me in a truck. Other people were there. Black, white, all sorts of people. We were taken to a house… it was a mechanical shop, like a garage, full of old cars. We waited there a day.
“From there they took us in a bus for a very, very long time. We arrived at ten at night, and waited in some long grass till about four in the morning. We were told to be very quiet. Then one of those balloon boats came and took us.” By balloon boats, Evans meant the kind of gray or black inflatable dinghy that usually carries refugees across the sea, typically overloaded and almost impossible to steer.
Here Evans laughed.
“I thought I would die! I know a little how to swim but there were too many people on that boat. I’d never experienced something like that in my life. The sound of the sea… oh God, I almost met it, seriously. I started off sitting on the edge but then I moved towards the middle because I didn’t want any shark coming to get me. I’d watched movies about sharks eating people in the sea. Oh God!” (He was laughing more than ever as he said this). “I was crying in the boat, I was so scared. It was cold and windy… it was the 21st of October, very cold. The waves were so big. And we didn’t know where we were going. I couldn’t see anything in front of me but clouds. I look behind me, I see clouds. I look to the left, I see clouds. I look to the right, see clouds.”
At eight in the morning, the boat arrived in Greek waters, where the Coast Guard approached them. “Everyone is rejoicing, people shouting, ‘Thank you, God!’ and I’m, ‘What’s happening?’”
The Coast Guard pulled close and transferred the passengers from their dinghy to the deck. But they gave them nothing to eat or drink, no blankets or dry clothes. The boat then sailed to Samos.
“We were so wet and cold. Very, very hungry. We were taken to a small room, dirty and smelly. They asked us questions, like which countries we came from and all that, then they dropped us in the camp. I was begging for food, I was so hungry! Finally, they gave us some. And after they registered us, they sent us out to find somewhere to sleep on the ground.”
As often happens to refugees when they first arrive at the island camps in Greece, Evans was shocked by the filth, crowds, and chaos that greeted him — not at all what he had expected from Europe. “Never had I seen a place so dirty.” Inside the camp, there was not an inch of room to sleep. Like many, he had to find a patch of ground outside the fence on which to lie down. Eventually, he found a box and lived in it for months. Twice he lost his home in fires, along with all his belongings and clothes; fires spread quickly in the camp because the gas cylinders they use for cooking explode so easily. And on October 30th, 2020, the camp was shaken by the worst earthquake Samos had experienced in decades. “That was so scary! I was sitting on the floor of my tent and the ground started moving back and forth. I ran out — my thought was to go down to the city. Everyone was screaming, running helter-skelter. The refugees ran down to the city, and the city people ran up to the hills! Later we found out that the hills were safer.”
When Evans first arrived in Samos, he felt mainly relief.
“I had just been through hell and now I had some peace. I had been running for months and at least nobody was trying to kill me. But I started having nightmares about people chasing me, and those made me go to MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors without Borders] to see the psychologist. She gave me a medication. It helped but I don’t take it anymore.
“But life is just a mess here on Samos. I was coming from the city the other day — I’d gone to buy some food — and some police started shouting, ‘I’ll mess you up.’ One used his head to hit me on my nose and he hit me on my back with his truncheon. The police know there is nothing we can do about it, so they treat us any way they want.”
The police on Samos, and many citizens too, have grown increasingly hostile to refugees of all origins on their island these past years, but in particular to Africans. There was a time when at least some Samians were kind to the desperate people landing on their shores, welcoming them with food and clothes, but lately this welcome has all but disappeared. Indeed, as I walked around town with Evans, I witnessed so many incidents of overt, unabashed racism that I felt as though I’d stepped back in history to the Jim Crow South. Sometimes it was the look on a person’s face, or an outright refusal to serve him, but more often it was people shouting at him as if he were a dog, or talking to me, a straight white woman, about him as if he were an idiot child. This racism is so widely recognized that refugees and NGO volunteers alike routinely avoid certain restaurants, cafés, and shops where the bigotry is most brazen. It is not so easy, however, to avoid the police.
Fear is the Beginning of Failure for Me
Evans texted me in January 2021, after living for a year and three months in the camp, to say that he had received surprising news: his asylum interview had been moved up from the following September to that very week, January 27. We spoke over the phone again two days later, and he told me the interview had lasted six hours.
“I didn’t eat all day, I was too nervous to have an appetite. My lawyer went with me, but they said he didn’t have the authorization to stay, so I was interviewed alone. Fear is the beginning of failure for me, so I tried to contain every atom of fear inside me. But they noticed it and told me to calm down. Once I began speaking, I felt calmer. They asked me so many questions that even the interpreter was tired.”
In the translated transcript of his interview, Evans’ home country was written as the Congo, not Nigeria, which did make me wonder how tired — or indifferent — that interpreter was.
While awaiting the outcome of the interview, Evans was finding life at the camp increasingly difficult. Covid had prevented in-person meetings of the LGBTQ group, one of his great comforts, relegating its eighty or so members to communicating online; and more and more people were being evacuated, which made him feel left behind.
“But there’s a proverb, what cannot kill you makes you stronger. For me right now, when I wake up, the first thing I do in the morning, I walk to the gym. Or I go running. Then I come back to my tent, wash my dishes, clean up. After that, I stay in my tent, I don’t go out. People fight all the time here and I don’t want a fight. So I keep to myself.”
While I was in Samos, Evans took me for a walk along the route he runs every week, high above the town of Vathi, which climbs so steeply up the mountain that the flights of steps carved into the streets are almost as vertical as ladders. When we reached the top we stood and looked out at the glittering blue Aegean that stretches all the way to the horizon, a stunning, taunting view for refugees trapped in the camp below. “One day, I will be on a boat sailing out there,” he said wistfully. “I watch the boats every day and I wish.”
Later that week, he grew animated while telling me about the various Nigerian dances he knew, showing me videos and explaining how they evolved out of traditional tribal dances. “I dance to any music. Fast African music. Some American: Tupac, Justin Bieber. My favorite American artist is Akon. I like dancing to Drake, Rihanna, Beyoncé, anything. Some people here in the camp, they saw me rehearsing. Some Arab guys, some Sierra Leoneans, guys from Sudan and Cameroon, they were all begging me please to teach them how to dance. But I said no, I don’t have the time. The truth is, dancing with people makes me feel bad now, it brings back bad memories.”
He looked away, as he often did when his memories hurt, jiggling his legs, his brow creased. Most of the time, Evans comes across as calm, shy, and wise beyond his years. Yet, at moments like this, it would hit home to me that he is only 22, little more than a boy. He continued.
“When I first came to the camp, I cried for two months, tears and tears. Now I know that all the time I spent crying, it’s not really helping. Sometimes I have mood swings and sometimes I don’t want to talk to anybody, I just want to be alone and cry, but not compared to last year. There’s a little improvement with the help of my psychologist, but only by the grace of God will I get through this. I also cannot stop thinking about what will happen with my asylum decision, my future. It is what we all think about here, all the time.”
Even though asylum seekers who have fled persecution for being LGBTQ should easily qualify for asylum under the Geneva Convention Article 1A as having “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for... membership of a particular social group,” this is not the case in Greece. “The more someone has been traumatized, raped, or tortured, the more likely their asylum will be rejected,” Dan told me in June. “I see this all the time, to the point where I can predict it. It sounds like the opposite of what should happen, but it’s because traumatized people often can’t tell their stories consistently. This has been documented for decades, yet the asylum officials don’t get it. So they decide the asylum seeker is lying.”
Often, in the interview, asylum seekers will be asked to prove that they are gay by answering graphically invasive questions about sexual acts and their partners. “This kind of humiliation is routine,” Dan said.
In the camp, meanwhile, Evans and his fellow LGBTQ refugees were still dealing with daily insults and attacks from their homophobic compatriots. One man was ostracized by his entire community after they found out he was gay. A lesbian couple were beaten and raped, their assailants threatening to hunt them down and kill them. All live in secrecy and fear.
In early June, I accompanied Evans to the first in-person meeting of the LGBTQ support group that had been held since Covid, and was struck by the security precautions Dan and his colleagues had to take. They only accepted members who had been referred by psychologists, doctors, or their social workers, and who had a referral slip to prove it — referrals by friends or oneself were not allowed. And once everyone was inside the Samos Volunteers building, Dan locked the doors. “We have to be careful of infiltrators and people who might want to attack,” he explained.
“This camp, it’s not safe for anybody,” Evans concurred. “That’s why I don’t get close to people. I don’t want anyone to bully me. It’s happened to me in the food line here, which is why I don’t go there often. That is where the people shout haram when they see me.”
This wariness is visible in Evans’ face, his darting eyes and anxious expression. Even in the support group, where he should have felt safe, he kept apart. For several hours, the 23 men and women sat around on couches and chairs, chatting and playing games to break the ice, but although Evans was always willing to help by setting out juice and cookies or sweeping the floor, he eschewed the games and the talk, staying far in the back of the room by himself.
“When there is no freedom, it’s like being in a prison,” Evans said to me once. “I asked my psychologist at MSF today, ‘What is the definition of life?’ She said, ‘Life is like a circle, it has good, it has bad.’ I said, ‘No. Life is useful when you have freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of association. When these things are lacking, life becomes worthless.’ The life we are living here is like that. Worthless.
“Because of this, there are days when I feel like committing suicide or doing something drastic to myself. Then I just stay alone in my tent, crying, crying, crying. Then I sleep. And when I wake up, sometimes I feel better. But sometimes the stress continues.”
The stress Evans was feeling only grew worse after his asylum interview because he was so anxious about its outcome. A rejection could mean being deported back to Turkey, where he would face worse persecution than in Greece, or imprisonment in the new fenced-in detention camp described earlier. He tried to get his pro bono lawyer to help him, but this led nowhere, so in May 2021, after four months of waiting, he finally bucked the rules and went to the camp’s asylum office to find out for himself. After a stretch of begging and pleading, he persuaded the official in charge to look at his files. She told him the news he had hoped to hear since October 2019: he had been granted asylum.
Then came even more good news. The next day he received the ID card he had been longing for all these months: the card that allowed him to leave the island.
“Oh God, I was so happy. I carried that card like an egg!”
A few days later Evans was told that he was going to be evacuated to a camp called Serres, north of Thessaloniki, near the Macedonian border. Refugees are never given any choice about where or when to go, they are shipped around like packages. In Serres, Evans was to await official notification regarding his asylum. Once this arrived, the government would stop his cash benefits within a month and cut off his access to subsidized housing. This will leave him with one month to find a job to keep him off the street, in an economy with the highest unemployment rate in the European Union.
Evans and I spoke over the phone a week after he moved to Serres. He said it was better than Samos, with a real house to live in instead of a tent, but he still had to hide who he is day and night, even from his roommate. He also told me that he had found a live-in job on a farm near Athens, but that the bus ticket there cost 49 euros.
“Do you have the money?” I asked, fully knowing he didn’t but hoping he had managed somehow to borrow it.
“No,” he said, “my money for this month is gone. I have to buy food because there is no food service at this camp.”
No job without the money; no money without the job.
I hesitated, in one of those dilemmas faced by everyone who knows refugees — whether to help and, if so, how. I had long come to the conclusion that reporting on refugees requires a set of ethics that do not fall in line with the usual rules mandating that journalists should never give money or gifts to a source. I understand the argument: If you offer money up front, you risk making sources feel that they have to talk to you no matter what, and perhaps even to say what they think you want to hear, whether it’s true or not. In short, you might make them feel beholden to you in a way that pollutes the balance between interviewer and interviewee. But I had long discovered that it feels even worse not to help at all, especially with people who have lost everything, whom you have come to know well, and for whom even a few dollars can make the difference between eating or not, prison or freedom, even safety or danger. So I asked Evans if I could send him the money for the bus ticket — all of $57 or so.
He paused barely a second. “No thank you, Ma. It is too late for this job, anyway, I have lost it. But I will make it here somehow. With the grace of God. I will make it on my own.”
Just the other day, I spoke to Evans again. He still had no job and no official notice of his asylum status. “Are you okay staying in that camp?” I asked him. He replied with a phrase I had heard him say many times before, a phrase I have come to think of as the refugee’s refrain.
“I have no choice.”
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Should readers wish to help the refugees stranded on Samos, and other camps in Greece, here is a list of reliable organizations that serve them:
Samos Volunteers: https://samosvolunteers.org
Still I Rise: https://www.stillirisengo.org
Refugees4Refugees: https://refugee4refugees.gr
Med'EqualiTeam: https://www.facebook.com/MedEqualiTeam/
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Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven novels, five books of nonfiction, and a play. Her forthcoming books, the novel The Good Deed, and the nonfiction Map of Hope and Sorrow, are both about refugees in Greece, the work from which this article is taken. Benedict's coverage of sexual assault in the U.S. military inspired the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Invisible War and instigated a landmark lawsuit against the Pentagon on behalf of victims of military sexual assault. Benedict has published widely and spoken at Harvard University, TED Talks, West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the United Nations, among other campuses and organizations. A recipient of the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, among other awards, Benedict is also recently the author of the novel Wolf Season, the non-fiction book The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women in Iraq, and a play, The Lonely Soldier Monologues.