A BEACON OF HOPE
30 | June• 2019
nobody cross, you will die’,” says An-
geles, “The smugglers hated us,” she
adds proudly.
That’s also when they began their
night watch, building a rota of vol-
unteers to monitor boat positions,
translate and – in an emergency –
relay t he details to the coast guard.
“I walked with them step by step,”
says Mohamed, who was on duty
every night. The most challenging
was when the vessels passed into
‘silent spots’ where there was a weak
mobile phone signal, which meant
passengers couldn’t send GPS loca-
tions. In that case, the team used a
special set of laminated maps, each
showing a different area of Greek and
Turkish coastal waters and the most
common refugee routes. With these
and a formula The Captain had de-
vised – based on boat weights, motor
power and time, as well as winds and
currents – they could often calculate
approximately where a boat was.
As their operation grew, the work
quickly dominated their lives. By
February 2016, according to the UN
Refugee Agency, 2000 people were
travelling to Greece by boat every
night – a significant proportion of
whom were travelling to Lesbos. An-
geles fell behind in her business. Her
parents started to worry, urging her
to try to be happy in her own life.
Worse was the heartbreak of a boat
going down. Angeles is still haunted
by the night of January 4, 2016 when
she received a message from a passen-
ger who said their boat was filling with
water. She called the Turkish coast
guard, pleading with them to launch
a rescue. But no rescue boat arrived. “I
was on the phone, listening to a man
asking for help. Everybody was cry-
ing,” she says. “And finally, there was
silence.” She believes the boat sank.
That night, in tears, a shaken An-
geles was tempted to quit. “But I
thought,if we sink, the refugees will
die.And I told The Captain, ‘Perhaps
we lost one boat. But we rescue many,
and this is our job’.”NOBODY KNOWS EX ACTLY h o w
many lives have been saved by Red
Alert since then. But the Captain
has a running total of the boats
he’s guided: at June 2018 it was- Sometimes passengers get in
touch to say thanks. One man let
him know he had reached a recep-
tion centre safely; another reported
he’d managed to get into Germany.
“We’re proud of what we’ve offered,”
says Mohamed.
IF WE SINK, THE
REFUGEES DIE WITH US.
PERHAPS WE LOST
ONE B OAT, BUT WE
RESCUE MANY,
AND THIS IS OUR JOB