GREECE

Since May 2016, AWB has offered trauma-healing treatments in Greece where tens of thousands of people from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries live in refugee camps. Many refugees experience significant trauma from war, displacement, dangerous migration, and loss of friends and family. Immigrating to EU countries like Germany is not a possibility for them because they migrated to Greece after the border to the rest of Europe was closed in March 2016. They are stranded in Greece until they receive asylum there, or are likely to be deported back to the Middle East. Greece cannot provide an economic future for them (many Greeks have no work) and deportation can mean death.

In 2020, AWB-trained acupuncturist Gaia Ivri (right) set up an AWB-sponsored clinic for refugees on the island of Chios in Greece. Gaia is part of AWB-Israel, and received her training as part of AWB’s Medicine of Peace project in Israel-West Bank.

In 2021, AWB-Greece incorporated as it’s own non-profit and is working out of a wonderful store-front clinic space in central Athens where refugees and residents can receive integrative, trauma-informed healing services including acupuncture, massage, tui-na and herbal medicine. This project is being coordinated by Eirini Tsilafaki, a practitioner from Athens with help from Gaia Ivri.

MEXICO

In 2019, in response to the large number of people stranded in refugee camps at the US/Mexico border, AWB began offering treatments, practitioner trainings, supplies and monetary donations to support trauma-relief efforts for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. 

The health status of many asylum seekers in Mexico (including many people from Central America, Haiti, and Africa) is increasingly precarious because the Mexican government stopped providing health insurance coverage for migrant. Refugees will have to rely on services provided by clinics like Espacio Migrante and Prevencasa (sponsored by the Refugee Health Alliance), more than ever. Uniquely, these two clinics provide integrative care, including natural therapies like acupuncture and herbs. AWB has partnered with these organizations as well as with the Parteras midwives in Tijuana, Mexico, sponsored by the Refugee Health Alliance. AWB did four service trips to work with the midwives in Tijuana, before CoVid prevented us from doing in-person field service.

We also have joined the InnSpot, an AWB-affiliated Military Stress Recovery Project clinic based in San Diego, to offer treatments at the US Deported Veterans Center in Tijuana.

“When I think of the service work that we do I realize how intimate it is. As I treated the children and their mothers seated on the floor of the tent with a platform floor, I felt energetically intertwined…so aware of the physicality of our treatments…treating the mothers with curious children pulling on my arms and knees to be able to see what I am doing. So much mutual love.

 

Nour,Shahein, and all the other people in the EKO camp are foreigners here in Greece-just like me. In theory they can leave this place, but they are not free. I can drive away, use my passport and fly back to my home. They have no status here – no connections, family outside the camp, options to get a job or make a choice of where to live…they are essentially in prison. And yet we are similar in almost every other way.”

 

Amy Schroeder

AWB Voluteer at EKO Refugee Camp