TWO West Somerset women who were bringing cheer to refugees from their specially built tea truck in Serbia have been forced to move on after the 1,000 boys and men they were helping were forcibly removed from a makeshift centre.
Now Lily Stephenson, 27, and Rosie Johnson, 22, of Wiveliscombe, have moved on to Sid, a small town near the Croatian border, to carry on their help – this time for refugees living in a forest and abandoned buildings near the local train station.
For the past three months, Lily and Rosie worked voluntarily in Belgrade providing 1,500 cups of hot, sweet tea a day, along with good cheer and a pleasant atmosphere, to scores of refugees – mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan who had fled from the Taliban – living in an abandoned barracks there, as reported in the Free Press on May 5.
After ten weeks without a break, the two women recently took a few days off and came back to find the unofficial centre was about to be demolished and the men and boys evicted and taken to camps. On May 10 the authorities moved in.
“In the past two days we have witnessed the most inhumane, disorganised and undignified behaviour from the Serbian authorities. We can’t believe what we have seen,” Rosie and Lily said via their Facebook site two days later.
“How can we even begin to put into words how it feels to watch your friends bundled on to buses bound for God-knows-where, young children separated from their relatives and friends, terrified faces of disempowered men blankly staring out of bus windows? Dear Europe, you should be ashamed.”
With no translators and utter chaos, Lily and Rosie graphically described the feeling of mass panic as the “Barracks family” was ripped apart and its community crushed, with over 1000 people displaced again and moved against their will.
Full feature in the Free Press (May 26)