“It’s hard to enjoy yourself when something so bad is happening so close,” said Louisa Bahr, a 20-year-old from Germany, who with her friend Joana Nietfeld scrapped the last days of their summer vacation in Croatia to help refugees at several trouble spots.

Bahr and Nietfeld were offering tea, coffee and hot chocolate to some of hundreds of refugees at the Opatovac transit camp, 10 miles from Bapska, having lent a hand on the Serbian side of the border at Sid and at Bregana, Croatia, on the border with Slovenia.

They were traveling light, having left most of their things in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, and borrowed equipment from other young traveler-volunteers to set up their help point at Opatovac.

Next to Bahr and Nietfeld outside the state-run camp — only staffers of major NGOs are allowed inside its wire perimeter fence — Fabian Ruf and Fabian Dingetschweiler from Switzerland cooked soup on a portable stove and whipped up fruit smoothies in a blender.

The two drove from Zurich with a trailer filled with supplies.

“We managed to raise about 4,000 Swiss francs [$4,100] from friends, and we brought food, clothes, medicine and other things from Switzerland,” Ruf said. “I saw on TV what was happening with the refugees. I had time after finishing my engineering studies and before starting work, and so I decided to use the opportunity to help.”

At Opatovac and elsewhere, the major NGOs follow well-practiced but sometimes inflexible systems to provide basic care to refugees. The volunteers can be more imaginative and responsive and can offer less-conventional forms of help.

Along the Balkan route, they not only offer food and drink but also help set up Wi-Fi hot spots and places to recharge cellphones, using their technical savvy to offer cheap and quick solutions to refugees who rely on smartphones for information, communication and navigation.

As different bottlenecks and crisis points appear along the refugees’ route, volunteers coordinate efforts and direct one another to where they are most needed, using social media and interactive maps.

Earlier this month at Roszke, Hungary, on the border with Serbia, young Europeans slept on a closed highway with hundreds of asylum seekers after dozens of people were hurt in brief clashes between a small group of stone-throwing refugees and Hungarian riot police using tear gas and a water cannon.



The presence of the Europeans reassured the refugees that they would be safe that night and, when Serbian buses arrived the next day to ferry them to the border with Croatia, the volunteers promised to follow the buses to make sure they did not take their passengers back south to Macedonia or to a detention camp.

Basti and Ilias are two men you would want on your side in case of trouble.

They are big, they sport dark glasses and striking ginger beards, and their black T-shirts carry strident slogans. The back of Ilias’ shirt reads, “In this dying world we are the final resistance.”

“We saw how it was a disaster at Roszke … how groups like the Red Cross and UNHCR had too much work to do and too little organization, so we decided to get involved,” said Basti, from Regensburg, Germany, as he handed out bottles of water and his friends cooked food for refugees in two mobile kitchens.

Basti and Ilias declined to give their surnames, as did many volunteers who did not want to publicize their efforts or make their presence on the Balkans route known to relatives, employers, university professors or authorities back home.