“She was about to die. It took six hours last time we dug a grave for one of the Syrian refugees we found in the forest. Should we have just started digging?” Tomas asked, desperately searching my face for an answer. It was the morning after this particularly harrowing encounter and it was evident that he needed to talk to someone.
Tomas and I were providing health services to refugees and asylum seekers in Harmanli, a small Bulgarian town near the Bulgaria-Turkiye border.
Medical care was supposed to be provided by a large international NGO in the refugee camp in the town, but their doctor was rarely present and was unwilling to provide anything except the most rudimentary of care.
Since other organisations were not allowed inside the camp, the two NGOs Tomas and I volunteered with had set up a medical station in a park nearby. We provided diagnosis and treatment for conditions like viral upper respiratory infections, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), pneumonia, scabies, and bedbug bites, but most of what we did was wound care.
Many of the refugees and asylum seekers had walked for days or weeks through thick forests, swift rivers, and dangerous mountain passes to reach Bulgaria, and as a result, had wounds all over their bodies. Once they arrived, they were placed in refugee camps or detention centres where scabies and bed bugs were rife. Most wounds got infected in this environment. And with inadequate nutrition – I heard from many that the food provided was often writhing with maggots – there was little hope for wound healing.
The NGO Tomas was volunteering with often did search and rescue missions in the thick, dangerous forests that refugees and asylum seekers had to cross to get from Turkiye into Bulgaria. Many died trying to make the crossing. When families could not be found, and to respect Muslim burial rites which require bodies to be interred quickly, many of these refugees ended up being buried by strangers in a faraway land in unmarked graves. Even in death, there was little dignity.
After a few hours of resuscitation efforts, the Syrian refugee woman Tomas encountered that night was able to continue walking for a short period. A few days later, we heard that a body had been found in the forest that matched her description.
I had almost 10 years of experience doing this kind of work, but as 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 anguish that I saw 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 greater violence perpetrated by Frontex and European border police.
These are some of the stories I heard while working in Bulgaria, a member of the European Union, over 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. He had angry red welts all over his back, as if he had been whipped repeatedly. I could not help but think I had seen these kinds of wounds only in textbooks while learning about the brutal transatlantic slave trade. I started cleaning the wounds and applying ointment gently.
I asked him if he would be willing to provide testimony, which I would then hand over to the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a coalition of organisations documenting human rights violations in border regions. He agreed.
I needed a translator. So I called a friend, Dr Nasir, an Afghan refugee who I had worked with when he and his family were living in the prison-like camps of Lesvos. He translated Muhammad’s story from Dari into English as I listened intently.
Muhammad was from Jalalabad. Decades of war, poverty, and famine had left his hometown in ravages. He fled hoping for safety and the ability to earn some money to send back to Afghanistan so his family would not starve. It took him weeks to cross through Iran and Turkiye to reach the Bulgarian border. In a place where many of the refugee camps and detention centres were littered with swastikas and “migrants leave now!” graffiti, he felt there were few prospects for integration in Bulgaria. So a few weeks before we met, he left on foot for Serbia, hoping to reach Germany through the Balkan route.
At the Bulgaria-Serbia border, Serbian border police detained him and beat him up for hours, alternating brass knuckles with whips. Muhammad found it hard to walk after his encounter with them. He was missing several toenails. Serbian border police officers had pulled them out one by one.
Up to that point, Muhammad had been stoic in recounting his story, occasionally wincing when the iodine solution stung. Dr Nasir told him we would be witnesses on his behalf on the Day of Judgement, and that his suffering would not go unheard. At that moment, I looked up to assess the stitches on his forehead, where Serbian border police beat him repeatedly, and I saw his kind hazel eyes filled with tears upon hearing Dr Nasir’s words.
After attending to Muhammad’s wounds, I was greeted by Ahmed with a hand on his heart and a warm “salaam”. Ahmed lived in the camp and had volunteered to be our Arabic translator. He had a gentle smile and immaculate manners. Before he fled Syria, he was a volunteer ambulance driver for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in the worst-hit areas of Deir Az Zor.
He showed me pictures on his phone of his life in Syria – teaching mechanical engineering to a group of eager students. He flipped through photos and videos quickly. One was of him trying to rescue an infant whose head had been partially severed by a drone attack. I wondered what motivated him to want to help his fellow refugees when he had already seen so much. The refugees’ care for one another always left me astounded.
Soon a young Syrian woman wearing a niqab approached the tent, where we diagnosed and treated women and did physical examinations requiring greater privacy than the park would allow. Halima, who was in her late 20s, told me she was feeling dizzy. She and her husband had decided to go on the dangerous journey from Syria through Turkiye to Bulgaria while she was 28 weeks pregnant with triplets. Despite her pregnancy, she was beaten repeatedly by smugglers trying to get her to walk faster. Once in Bulgarian territory, an NGO helped take her to a hospital where she delivered three stillborn babies.
I took her vitals and gave her a women’s multivitamin and some hygiene products. It felt wholly inadequate. I could not even begin to understand all that she had lost. She hugged me in gratitude and her lips moved silently in a dua (supplications) for me and my family.
Later I met Yasmeen, a 17-year-old from Syria, and her elderly father Ali. Yasmeen had rheumatic heart disease from a bout of strep throat she had experienced a few years earlier. Strep throat is something that would, in ordinary circumstances, have been easily treatable with a course of antibiotics. But years of war in Syria had left the healthcare infrastructure in shambles, denying many like Yasmeen basic treatment and dooming them to a life of chronic disease. There was little I could offer. The monthly penicillin injections she needed for secondary prophylaxis were not available in Bulgaria.
I had more luck buying her father’s diabetes medications at a local pharmacy using donations from my family and friends. After we met up to give him a few months’ worth of donated medications, Uncle Ali, as I called him, asked us to come over for tea. This was not the first time I had been invited into a refugee’s home. Yet I was always taken aback by such warmth and hospitality even in exceedingly difficult circumstances.
The following day my medical coordinators and I returned to Sofia. We had a clinic there where we provided free medical care to refugees and asylum seekers who had made it to the capital city. During Friday prayers, I walked over to the Ottoman-era mosque in central Sofia where I met a Syrian Kurdish family: Auntie Fatima and Uncle Hamza.
They were excited to hear I was a “guest” from Canada and insisted on having me over for lunch. Auntie Fatima cooked a feast of chicken and rice with yoghurt salad which we enjoyed eating together with their 15-year-old son Hussein on the floor of their sparsely furnished apartment. It pained me that this meal was eating into their savings.
Uncle Hamza was in his 60s and shifted uncomfortably from side to side due to degenerative disc disease that developed during years of hard labour in Sudan. For almost a decade, he worked there as a construction labourer to save up money while the war raged around his family in Syria.
When the fighting reached untenable levels in his hometown, soft-spoken Hussein made the treacherous journey alone from Syria to Turkiye to Bulgaria. As an unaccompanied minor, he was able to bring his parents from Syria nearly two years later as part of a family reunification programme.
As our meal drew to a close, I looked at my phone to try to figure out how to walk back to the mosque through the labyrinthine-like streets of old Sofia. Hussein shyly offered to walk me back. As we made our way back, he told me 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 more he would have been able to achieve if his circumstances had been different, if he had had access to high school education like other kids his age.
A week later, it was time to leave. As I waited at Sofia airport for my flight home to Canada, Bulgarian border police asked me repeatedly for my “documents”. I looked around and realised I was the only visibly Muslim woman in the airport and no other travellers were getting similarly harassed.
The police often do the same thing around the mosque in Sofia and countless other places where refugees and asylum seekers seek reprieve in a country where there is constant hostility and attacks by white supremacist groups.
I subconsciously started adjusting my hijab, thinking if I looked well-dressed enough maybe the police would not mistake me for a refugee or an asylum seeker. I caught myself in this thought process and realised something: I would count myself fortunate to be mistaken for Muhammad, Ahmed, Halima, Yasmeen, Ali, Hussein, or Fatima, for they are the greatest examples of kindness, courage, generosity, and unfailing humanity that 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 the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.