I am here tonight
because I gave a promise to a 12-year-old boy from Afghanistan.
His name is Hamid,
and this is his photo.
Hamid left by himself from Kandahar in Afghanistan.
He left behind his five brothers, his parents
and the terror imposed by the Taliban.
Hamid was thought to have the best potential amongst his siblings.
He was the best student.
What he wanted was a chance to have a normal life.
He wanted to stop struggling to survive every single day of his life.
He wanted to stop being afraid.
These were his words to me:
"I've walked all the way to Turkey,
through the mountains, the valleys and the deserts of three countries.
After four months, I reached the coast.
I had never seen so much water before.
The small boat to Greece was full of people.
Women and babies were crying.
Thank God, we arrived alive.
But we were arrested by the police.
I ended up in prison.
It is difficult when I think how many days I was there.
What did I do wrong?"
Hamid was detained with another 40 minors
in Amygdaleza, a detention centre for refugees in Greece.
After being released, he spent five months living homeless in Pedion tou Areos,
one of the largest public parks in the centre of Athens.
"I was alone again.
Every night men would come near me.
They would drink beer and do drugs.
One night, an old man came
and offered me 20 euros to go home with him.
I started running to get away.
I was afraid of the police because I had no papers.
I did not know what to do or where to go.
I didn't speak any English nor Greek,
so I couldn't ask for help.
Someone led me to a centre for homeless people in Omonoia Square.
I started sleeping in one of the corners of the square.
On Christmas Day I met Amadou,
who brought me to The Home Project shelter.
Everything has change since then,
and I can now tell you my story.
Hamid was one of the fortunate lone refugee children.
You see, he ended up in one of our shelters.
Sadly, this is not the case for the majority of the kids.
Hamid is one of thousands of children travelling all alone
amidst the biggest demographic change since the Second World War.
They are what we call in official terms unaccompanied minors.
The reasons they travel alone vary.
Many have lost their parents during the journey.
Others are sent away to escape war, poverty or persecution.
They are all in search of a better future.
Travelling alone and unprotected, they are exposed to all sort of dangers,
from child abuse to organ trafficking to sexual exploitation.
As we speak,
children in the centre of Athens, right next to us,
are selling themselves for sex in order to survive.
What awaits refugee children on the other side of their epic journeys
are closed borders in Greece,
where there is a chronic lack
of social welfare facilities and services to accommodate them
and provide for them the necessary safety and protection framework.
More than 1.5 million people
have reached Greece since the beginning of 2015.
More than 9,000 lives have been lost while crossing the Mediterranean.
Many were children, and many of them were travelling alone.
The term migrant or refugee crisis
cannot begin to explain the complexity of this phenomenon.
40% of refugee arrivals are children.
Of those, we don't know exactly how many,
and this is part of the problem,
are thousands of children who travel and arrive in Europe all alone.
According to official estimates,
100,000 unaccompanied minors
sought asylum in the European Union in 2015.
13% of them are children younger than the age of 14.
Hamid is one of the 6,512
officially registered unaccompanied minors in Greece.
This is a four-times larger number than the corresponding period a year ago.
And note this:
after the EU-Turkey agreement,
despite the general decrease in the number of arrivals,
the number of lone refugee children is constantly increasing.
What has happened is
that with the closure of the borders these children are now trapped in Greece,
and all the relevant shelters are in full capacity.
As a result, today, more than 1,000 children
are homeless and in urgent need of protection and support.
They are spread all over the country,
living in the streets, in camps, in detention centres, in police stations.
They are suffering
from all sorts of physical, emotional, psychological and sexual violence.
These children are the victims of a cycle of violence.
They start off fleeing from violence,
but then they experience it again once they reach European borders.
They often suffer from the injured hero syndrome.
You see, they arrived in what they thought would be their promised land,
where they thought all their troubles would be over,
only to experience more violence, more insecurity and more abuse.
The children that arrive at our shelters are often more traumatized
by what they have experienced after their arrival in Greece, in Europe,
than what they have endured during their perilous journeys or at home.
Now I know, I have bombarded you
with a lot of numbers and a lot of heavy information.
So, lets pause for a few seconds and ask ourselves:
What is a child refugee?
It's a child in urgent need of a refuge.
It's a child in urgent need of a home.
At The Home Project,
we don't work with migrants,
we don't work with refugees;
we work with children.
Children that have been marginalized to the point of invisibility.
HOME stands for Help, Overcome, Motivate, Empower,
which is what we do with everyone that we work with.
Our mission is to support, protect, educate
and provide social integration services
to children that travel and arrive in Greece, in Europe, all alone.
We are currently supporting the operation of five shelters.
Four of them are for boys
and one of them is for girls and underage mothers with their babies.
We also have another five shelters in the making
that will provide support to a total of 200 children
and will lead to the creation of more than 110 jobs.
We are grateful to our founding sponsor,
the Libra Group,
that has enabled us, in less than four months,
to move from inception to set-up, and from set-up to operations,
proving by our actions
that solutions do exist, solutions are possible.
The Home Project shelter model is based on three pillars.
First of all, through our partners on the ground,
we provide a holistic network of services for the children
covering their basic needs,
such as food, shelter, of course, material provision,
medical and pharmaceutical support,
but also anything
that has to do with legal, psychological and social support.
All of our children obtain immediate access to education
and attend school in Greece.
The second element is that we create jobs.
We create jobs for Greeks, but also for refugees.
In order to integrate into any society, people need a home,
but they also need a job.
50% of our shelter staff comes from the refugee community,
providing role models for the children in our shelters.
The third element is that we add value to the local economy.
We all know what Greece has suffered after nine years of financial crisis,
so we find unused, unrented buildings all over the country,
we renovate them,
turn them into shelters,
and pay the rent,
and the property tax - the infamous ENFIA, for the Greeks in the room -
to the owners.
So, what we do, is we create a win-win situation for everyone:
for the Greeks, the refugees,
but also for the most vulnerable, for the children.
We create healing environments,
platforms of inclusion,
implementing a more organic, bottom-up form of social integration
that will lead to community engagement.
That's the only way
we can fight xenophobia, racism and violent local reactions.
Three elements are key in our work.
The first one is empathy.
We are in constant contact
with the children and the adults that we work with,
but also with our partners on the ground, at the front line of this refugee crisis.
We must be near them,
in order to understand their constantly evolving needs
and address them in the most efficient manner.
The second element is the creation
of a positive community of support around these children,
which is what we are trying to do here, tonight.
We forge and coordinate effective partnerships
between all relevant stakeholders:
NGOs, corporations, private donors, media, public authorities,
national and international organizations and foundations.
We act as a solutions platform,
and a channel
through which help can address the most urgent needs of the children.
The third element is efficiency and rapidity of operations.
Every minute, 12 refugee children are being displaced in the world.
Every minute we spend turning our backs on this problem
has a serious toll on human lives.
We are dealing with a very vulnerable population,
literally living on the edge.
Through The Home Project,
we not only provide a safe home,
we give a voice to the children, we make them feel visible and validated.
We might have managed to secure support for 200 children,
but there are still 1,000 that urgently need our help.
What would you do
if you had to protect your child's life
and bombs were falling right next to your house every single day,
or ISIS wanted to militarize your ten-year-old son,
or the Taliban wanted to marry your eight-year-old daughter?
What would you do?
I am not here tonight to try to shock you,
or disturb you,
or make you feel sad.
I just want to ask you not to look away.
Not to look away
and remain passive about the violence that is taking place right next to us.
These children could be our children.
These children are tomorrow's future.
By turning our backs to them,
it's like giving up on hope,
giving up on love,
giving up on a better world.
In what kind of a world do we want to live?
In what kind of a world do we want our children to live in?
There is no more time to be lost.
We really are on the edge.
Supporting and empowering these children
is a daily resistance to violence.
That is the promise we gave to Hamid.
That is the promise we give every day
to Omar, Taha, Osman, Ali,
Amadou, Mamadou, Diyar,
and to all the children living in our shelters.
You can now all do something
to help these children be visible
and become what they are,
children ... again.
Thank you.
(Applause)