AN INCREASE IN THE NUMBER OF UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN ON THE MOVE IN SERBIA
During our field visits we have recorded an increased number of children, both those accompanied by their parents, and those travelling without a caretaker. At some of the occasions we have met up to 30 unaccompanied children in a group of approximately 150 refugees.
In a visit to an informal settlement in an abandoned factory called Sunce, near the city of Sombor, we spoke with a large number of unaccompanied children aged between 12 and 17 years old. At the settlement itself, the living situation had been difficult for a while at the time. High number of people moving in and out of the place meant considerable amounts of garbage, many cases of body lice, and insects which bite humans. Most of the people slept in the hangars of the abandoned factory on blankets they had found on the spot, with no covers for the body during the night when the temperatures get lower, and without clean clothes to change themselves into after a long while.
During a conversation with a group of people from Syria, many of whom were interested in the information about the asylum system in Serbia, how quickly they can obtain documents or a work permit, we were approached by a 15-year-old boy with still child-like seriousness and honesty and asked: “Will I be able to have my tooth fixed once when I get to Germany?”. He had one of his incisors broken on a football playground back in Syria and he did not have the time to see the dentist before his family sent him off to Turkey in search for safety.
The whole group who was prior to this in their own worries and asking about their own rights and obligations, the asylum procedure, and fingerprints databases, sharing also the horrors they had been through on the border between Turkey and Bulgaria – now stopped talking. With a kind smile to the boy, realizing he is still just a child, and his worries are also of a child, everyone from the group started sharing comforting words to him and convincing the boy that his tooth will for sure be fixed.
Although the boy was in a difficult situation, it was nice to see that despite the difficult situation he was in, he is still just a child, just a boy regardless of all the worries, and wants to look nice and has all his teeth.
The scene in which 30 or so grown men offers consolation to a boy that all will be right, also offers encouragement to us, heals and shows a high level of sensitivity and solidarity that people on the move develop and even maintain in the extreme conditions like their journeys are. Despite all the hardship and misery, everyone stopped for a moment to comfort a boy and provide to him a kind of support and safety, things which have been denied for these people for years now and things that they, just like the little boy, wish for while the uncertainty of their journey and their future continues.