The pink belt By Russell Berg (he/him), teacher, Nanaimo AMIRA¹ RAN TO ME across the floor of the bustling tent. Her squeal cut through the buzz of Pashto and Arabic and her threeyear-old curls bounced on her cheek. She wanted to show me her jeans. They were clearly second hand, with pink and orange animal patches sewn all over them, and she was intent on showing me each one. We sat on the floor of the UNHCR tent on the island of Lesvos in Greece. She exclaimed something in Urdu at each animal and I made the sound of each animal as she did. We smiled and laughed together. I had last seen Amira the night before, and she wasn’t laughing then; she was crying, and shivering, and there had been a look of desperate fear filling her eyes. I was driving a rescue boat and our crew was working desperately to get Amira and her family off a cliff face in the dark hours of the morning, with 14 TEACHER TEACHER Nov/Dec Nov/Dec2021 2021 14
the wind breaking the waves into frothy whiteness. It took two hours to get Amira and the rest of the people travelling with her off that rock. All of these people had run from the bombs and the bullets of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and, in a storm, had washed up on the shore of Lesvos, Greece. Amira and her mother were the first ones on the boat, and when her mother sat down just opposite where I was driving, Amira clamped her arms around my leg and held on for the next two hours. We got up off the floor of the tent and I noticed that Amira’s pants were too big; she kept pulling them up. The volunteers distributing dry clothes at the transition camp do their best, but not everything fits. I asked Amira’s father, who spoke some English, if it was okay for me to take her to get a belt. He nodded okay and I took her back to the distribution
tent. We knelt on the floor to rummage through the tattered cardboard box of belts together. At the bottom of the box of donated belts was a pink and orange belt that matched the patches on her pants perfectly. Amira’s mouth made a large “O” of delighted surprise. It was far too big for her, so I wrapped it around her waist twice and we went back to find her family. We sat down to talk some more, and it turned out that Amira’s father had learned to speak a little English from his brother who had been an interpreter for the German army in Afghanistan. The Taliban had decided that because her uncle had done this job, Amira and all of her family must die; and so her family had run for their lives and she found herself on Lesvos in need of a belt. ¹ Name has been changed to protect the family.
