“Please let me know if there’s anything you can do for this woman,” says the voice in the Whatsapp recording. “She’s about to give birth any day, she’s living in a tent, and the conditions are awful.”

Driving through northern Greece on a recent December night, a pair of volunteers from the grassroots aid group Help Refugees have just received this SOS from another aid worker. It is 7.32pm, and a young Afghan refugee is about to go into labour at one of Greece’s worst refugee camps. It is a few dozen tents on a remote and windswept hillside – but the government and the UN refugee agency can’t move her anywhere better. Can Help Refugees?

As the temperature drops to 3C, the group’s network whirs into action. A call goes out to Filoxenia, a housing project funded by Help Refugees, to see if it can take in the pregnant woman. Behind the wheel in the car, Crystallynn Steed Brown says if the worst comes to the worst, she will put up the family at her flat in Thessaloniki. But can they get to the woman in time?

It is a typical night for Help Refugees, one of three beneficiaries of the Guardian’s Christmas charity appeal. The group is one of the unsung heroes of the European refugee crisis, a young grassroots collective that has tried to create a more dynamic form of aid in Calais and Greece, where even seasoned aid workers admit their traditional models have failed.

Yamamah Matlaq with her newborn cousin in the Oreokastro refugee camp near Thessaloniki. Photograph: Alice Aedy

“Some of the bigger NGOs are starting to realise how they can utilise us because of our flexibility,” says Brown, as she drives through the night. “The bigger the organisation, the more they get caught up in the bureaucracy – and so they often reach out to us to see if there’s anything we can do.”

Help Refugees was founded in the late summer of 2015, after a group of friends decided to send a van of donations to Calais; it soon became one of the main suppliers of aid to northern France. With Calais now disbanded, the charity’s main focus has shifted to Greece, where about 50,000 refugees – 40% of them children – have been stranded in squalid and degrading camps since a shift in European migration policy in March.

The EU, major NGOs and the Greek government have collectively failed to provide adequate conditions. Help Refugees is attempting to fill in the gaps, funding more than 20 grassroots groups that are working to alleviate the situation.

Through its partners, Help Refugees provides food, infant care, safe spaces, building materials, building work and water infrastructure in dozens of camps; it funds rescue boats at sea; and organises housing for particularly vulnerable refugees.

And it’s this that sends Brown hurtling in her Peugeot hatchback through Thessaloniki. By now, another aid worker has managed to bring the pregnant Afghan to a local hospital, and her son, Ali, has become the world’s youngest refugee. But if Help Refugees can’t intervene in time, there is a danger that both mother and child will be out in the snow again within a few days.

Brown arrives after visiting hours are over, and is initially denied entry. But after grasping the desperate nature of the situation, the nurses relent, and Brown calmly explains to the mother what Help Refugees can do for her. “We will find you a place,” she says through a translator, also called Ali. “And if we can’t find you a place, you’ll sleep in my house.”

Brown leaves the hospital relieved to have made contact. But back in the car, her mood is more subdued. “I try not to be too emotional in this work,” says Brown, a former ambulance worker from Idaho. “But it’s pretty messed up when you stop and think that I just held a brand new baby in my arms. And if we didn’t step in and do something about it, that baby is supposed to move back into a tent in two days in freezing conditions.”

A visit to Oreokastro, a camp on the other side of Thessaloniki, hints at how dismal that would be. After passing the spot where Brown treated a refugee who tried to kill himself this summer, and another where a car recently ran over a Syrian child and his mother, we meet a Syrian father cradling his 10-day-old daughter. In the depths of winter, the newborn has been sent to live in a tent at this former cigarette factory. There is no electricity, and therefore no heating. A warmer tent has been erected for young mothers, but refugees say it has never been opened.

All of which leaves the young father fearing for his daughter. “Children are dying from the cold,” says Abdulhalim al-Matlaq, a builder who fled the advance of Isis in Deir ez-Zor, eastern Syria. “There’s no heating. No money. It’s just garbage.”

Matlaq and his extended family escaped Deir ez-Zor together last winter, and all 42 shared the same inflatable boat to Greece in February. They now occupy one long row of tents at Oreokastro, wondering if they will ever get to leave. They hoped to reach Germany, but the humanitarian corridor that once funnelled hundreds of thousands of Syrians through the Balkans closed in March. And in the months since, they have not been granted asylum elsewhere in Europe, due to the failure of the EU relocation scheme.

This limbo has been particularly traumatic for their children, who are among hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees with no access to school across Europe and the Middle East. Yamamah, Matlaq’s cheery 11-year-old niece, says the camp is too dangerous for her siblings to visit the toilet alone at night. To pass the time, they watch YouTube videos on her father’s phone until they get tired.

“We’re wasting our lives,” says Yamamah. Her father, minibus driver Abdulrazzaq, agrees: “It’s not even limbo, it’s five times worse than limbo. We’ve been here for 10 months, and it’s all a mystery. We don’t know if we’re going to another country, if our kids are going to get to study again, or have a future.”

His brother Abdulhalim has more basic concerns for his own child; he fears the camp is simply too cold.

Batul, four, Yamamah, 11, and Rimas Matlaq, three, watch videos on their father’s phone in the Oreokastro camp. Photograph: Alice Aedy

It is this kind of challenge that Help Refugees is trying to alleviate where it can. A few miles away, in another gloomy former warehouse, the group provides crucial funding to Nurture Project International (NPI), a small charity that gives pre- and post-natal support to Kurdish mothers at the Kalochori camp.



When we arrive, one nurse is teaching a Kurdish mother to wash her baby. A second nurse helps a 17-year-old refugee send breast milk to her premature daughter, who is still in hospital.

“I never thought I’d have my first child in a place like this – it’s too cold here for a baby,” says Sonya, the young mother. “If NPI weren’t here, I’d be in a really bad situation.”

The nurse, or international board certified lactation consultant, beams with affection. But in private, the tragedy of the situation looms larger. The conditions simply do not conform to western standards, says Fiona Lang-Sharpe. “You let go of many of the things that you know or you’ve learned, because you can’t go and buy things that you have at home,” she says, turning slightly emotional at the thought. “We will not leave them and we will not abandon them.”

Ultimately, Help Refugees doesn’t just want to make the camps better, it wants refugees to leave the camps entirely. A glimpse of this vision can be found at a block of flats in another remote suburb of Thessaloniki. Most of the buildings here were never inhabited, having been built when the financial crisis first hit Greece in 2008. But one of them has just been occupied by Filoxenia to provide refugees with a warm flat to live in.

Run by Samantha and Theo Nelson, former car dealers from Totnes, Devon, the building houses eight families in their own flats, and will soon welcome two more. After being cooped up in camps for months, the 54 residents can finally live in a greater degree of dignity.

“There’s quiet here, there’s privacy, and this is your house,” says Bozan Ibo, a Syrian Kurd whose family was the first to move into Filoxenia six weeks ago. “You have your own key. It’s a normal life like it was in Syria.” His wife, Mezgin, smiles in agreement. They have a fruit bowl on the kitchen table, and a washing machine – two luxuries they haven’t experienced for months.

“When I came here, I don’t know how to describe how I felt,” says Mezgin. “When I think about it I almost cry!”

Mezgin thanks the Nelsons, who in turn thank Help Refugees for making the project happen.

“Help Refugees helps with everything really,” says Samantha Nelson. “There’s their financial support, and also their support in general. They really understand what we’re trying to do.”

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