Monday night in Omonia

Omonia is our Athens neighborhood, with Omonia Square only a few blocks from our apartment and the Nea Zoi office only a few blocks further. Omonia is pronounced like ammonia, but more of an O sound starting the word with a slight pause - "O-monia". Many Athenians react negatively to references to Omonia, often because of its reputation for drug trafficking and use. As I've mentioned before though, we've been able to walk around together at night and still feel fairly safe despite crazy things going on around us. Passing through the main square or the plaza outside the Nea Zoi office (or in front of our apartment for that matter) we often see drug users who are clearly high, and the exchange of drugs back and forth. A few times, the main square has been actually crowded late at night with clusters of hundreds of users mingling together! The more popular drug in Omonia is heroin, and the high users often show slowed motor movements and responses, creating a scene of dark figures swaying and staggering in slow motion.

I describe all of this to provide a context for our outreach this past Monday night, when I had the chance to walk the streets of my own neighborhood to talk with Nigerian, Greek and Albanian women. It sounds funny, but the landmarks near our apartment are already familiar and wandering through recognizable territory added a different layer of surrealism to the evening. During our time of preparation at the office beforehand, I presented a brief seminar on heroin abuse and the symptoms of use and withdrawal. We hoped to better prepare the Nea Zoi folks to interact safely and effectively with heroin-using prostitutes. Compared to populations of sex workers in the UK or US, the women and men here usually are not using drugs, particularly the trafficked women. Only a small group also get involved with drugs, but many of those women can be found in Omonia's streets.

As we headed out from the office, we walked down the "back way" to the apartment through side streets instead of going through Omonia Square. At night, we usually avoid the back way, and I saw why as we passed through these narrow, dark streets with our team. On a corner not far from our apartment, we encountered four or five Nigerian women working. Apparently Nea Zoi knew these girls from encounters over a year ago, and the women hadn't been seen again until tonight. Several of the girls told stories of working in Italy for several months, and we suspect a trafficking ring is involved between Italy and Greece. As with the Nigerian girls at the hotels, these five women were friendly and English-speaking, allowing me more freedom in discussion and verbal compassion. And I love to be able to connect and communicate easily! One girl with the street name "Special" told me about her desire to work in medicine and get training as a midwife or a doctor. When I mentioned the Friday clinic and asked her if she wanted to be there to help, she absolutely glowed! All of the women were willing to complete medical surveys, and amazingly the discussion over medical topics often opened doors to more honest conversation. More about that later ...

Our route through Omonia took us by several bars that host prostitutes, and we met many Albanian and Greek women sitting at tables in front of the bars or waving at us from inside. With this group, my role changed to handing out cards advertising the clinics and smiling with the occasional "neh" and "yassis" (a new word for me, means literally 'your health' often used as a greeting or goodbye, or in toasts ... it's incredibly useful for my non-Greek speaking-ness). One woman talked my ear off in Greek as I kept saying 'English, English?' over and over. When I offered her a nail polish for completing the survey, she put her hands up as if refusing it, then ran off into the bar. I stood there for a minute completely confused. I mean, the nail polish is pretty cool and I hadn't gotten any flat-out refusals yet. But after a minute or so she re-appeared carrying a bag of chips that she thrust in my hands. And she gladly chose a bright pink nail polish from my bag as I examined her gift. A lot of these interactions pose similar language confusions and subsequent surprises for me, usually in the eager response of the women to the teams' attention and concern for them. This woman, her eyes laced with thick mascara and framed with bleach-blonde hair, drew close and grabbed my hands with an awkward English "tenk uuu" as my mind raced to memorize her face. Originally I hoped to complete a series of portraits of the women and men we're meeting. But I haven't been able to photograph the darker side of our time in Athens because it seems like a violation of trust and confidentiality. And at moments like this one, I wish a futuristic neuro-camera existed that could freeze frame her smile and bright eyes and save it permanently in my mind.