REFUGEES
RECENTLY-QUALIFIED PHARMACIST, DIVYA MALHOTRA, HAS JUST SPENT TIME WORKING IN REFUGEE CAMPS IN NORTHERN GREECE. HERE GLASWEGIAN DIVYA TELLS SP ABOUT HER EXPERIENCES.
PHARMACY VALUE HIGHLIGHTED IN MOST TESTING OF PLACES
T
he current refugee crisis is the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time. With more than 65
million people from the Middle East now displaced, it is estimated that one in 113 of those on the planet are now refugees, asylum seekers, or displaced. The camps in Northern Greece are now home to thousands of people, who have been displaced from Syria, Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan.
As Khan states, ‘Refugees are all victims of wars they didn’t start. They had normal lives before this.’
‘Refugees’ are people just like you and me. They come from good families, had good jobs and just because of their postcode this is now their life. No one chooses to be a refugee.
A few days after I sat my pre- registration exam, I flew to Northern Greece to spend some time volunteering in refugee camps. My first couple of days there elicited entirely different emotions and left me feeling an equal measure of anger, hope and sadness. The vast majority of the 58,000 refugees currently being detained in Greece are living in factory refugee camps that do not meet the sanitary, fire risk or safety standards necessary to keep livestock. They are filthy, hot, poorly wired and overcrowded, with little or no medical, educational, religious and communal facilities.
It is infuriating and profoundly heartbreaking to know that tens of thousands (40 per cent of the refugees in Greece are children) will grow up in these camps, with their only memory of their time on earth being of war, loss, grief, intolerance, racism, segregation, poverty and squalor. One of the hardest things to observe was young children, pregnant women, elderly and newborns sleeping on stones so sharp I couldn’t even walk on them, and in tents with strangers
22 - SCOTTISH PHARMACIST they now have to call family.
During this trip, I spent my time volunteering with Together For Better Days, a volunteer-run NGO, which is attempting to show that, with an equivalent amount of money to a ‘standard’ military camp, a permanent refugee residence can be built, where basic human rights and living conditions can be met. Together with other NGOs, they have converted an abandoned jeans factory and plastic recycling ground into a welcoming and dignified space for 700 refugees.
This camp has been striving to have all of the facilities of a functioning village, with amenities including an education centre, a permanent and sterile medical wing, a pharmacy, women’s centre, children’s play area and adults’ integration centre. During this time I led a project that involved transforming an old, rusty storage into an outdoor kitchen area.
Unfortunately, after five days, I had to return to Glasgow, but I was determined to help remotely and so, over the course of six weeks, I
fundraised and, thanks to the kind donors from the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, I collected donations of clothes, books, games, toys etc to send to the camp.
Two weeks after qualifying as a pharmacist I returned to Greece. I wanted to see a project through from concept to delivery and to allow my work to help the refugees on a broader scale. With thanks to Deans, Apple, Park Road and Kirkmuirhill Pharmacies I arrived in the primary care clinic with four suitcases of donated medicines.
I was shown the ‘pharmacy’, which was basically just shelves and crates filled with medicines. With help from the resident translators and a volunteer nurse, we spent the first two weeks building and streamlining a pharmacy, organising medicines according to body system, drug sub- class and individual medications.
I created a medication directory, took a full inventory, came up with minimum stock par levels for each medication, and then sourced
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