Singaporean aid worker Gabrielle Tay with a Syrian refugee family who were confined in Vial refugee camp on Chios island for 10 months, in January 2017. The family was eventually allowed to leave for Athens. PHOTO: Gabrielle Tay

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Athena Centre is located in Athens. It is located in Chios.

SINGAPORE — In January 2016, Singaporean Gabrielle Tay found herself patrolling the beaches of Chios, a scenic Greek island in the Aegean Sea, at the height of the worst refugee crisis since World War II. Alongside other humanitarian workers armed with relief supplies like blankets and clothes, she received boatloads of mainly Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war in their country.

“Chios was receiving, I think, 15 to 20 boats a night,” recalled Tay, now 41. “And each boat was carrying about 80 people. And sometimes it's two, three boats coming at once.”

Amid the chaos and stress of the journey, tragedy was inevitable. “There was a baby that the mother was holding, and the baby suffocated, because (the mother) was so frightened during the journey,” said Tay, a former corporate lawyer.

“We can never forget the screams when she realised that the baby was not conscious.”

Three years on, Tay is the founder of non-profit organisation Action for Women, which reaches out to refugee women. It runs two centres in Chios and Athens respectively: the Athena Centre for Women and the Halcyon Days Project. They provide legal, medical and psychosocial support to victims of gender-based violence.

The former centre has supported more than 1,000 women, while Tay says the latter hosts some 150 people a day. She runs the NGO with a team of seven other women and divides her time between Athens and Chios, which is is just a short boat ride from Turkey.

“I'm the lowest paid I've ever been, but I'm the happiest, if that makes sense,” said Tay over Skype from Chios, a lively personality who laughs often and loudly.

An ‘awakening’

View photos Refugee children behind the fences of Vial refugee camp, often christened 'Vile' by volunteers for its terrible living conditions, on the Greek island of Chios in April 2016. PHOTO: Gabrielle Tay More

It all began in the summer of 2015, when Tay returned to Zurich - where she had been based since 2009 - from holiday to see the refugee crisis unfolding in real time on television. Triggered by key events such as the Syrian civil war and unrest in Afghanistan, more than a million migrants and refugees arrived in Europe that year.

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), about 5.6 million people have fled Syria since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011.

Tay told Yahoo News Singapore that she was jolted out of her self-confessed privileged existence by what she saw. “People were walking through Europe, sleeping rough in the train stations in Budapest. That’s when you go ‘What is going on?’”

“Before 2015, I was reading the news like everybody else. For example, you read about the wall that Trump is building along the border, and you go, well, how does that concern me? Not a lot.”

She added, “Until it comes to your doorstep, and it makes you question things.”

Together with a Hungarian friend, Tay asked for donations of supplies to bring to refugees at the Serbia/Hungary border, where thousands of refugees had gathered. So many people contributed - tents, sleeping bags, clothes and more - that there were enough items to fill two six-tonne trucks.

Over an “intense 72 hours”, they gave out all their supplies to entire families camped out in open fields amid freezing temperatures while waiting for transport to Budapest. “You meet somebody that looks about and is the same age as your father, and you just go, ‘This could be us’”.

Having set up an association - which eventually became Action for Women - to better process funds and donations, Tay and her friends next went to Presevo, a town on the edge of Serbia and North Macedonia, where thousands queued overnight for travel visas to move freely around Serbia. They witnessed many hypothermia cases and exploitation by smugglers, said Tay.

“They would get to people in the queue and offer to take them straight to Belgrade for like four or five hundred euros. But the driver drives them, like 20, 30 kilometers away, points a gun at them and says, get out. And then they have to walk back to where we were.”

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