PIEDMONT — In 2015, Kim Malcolm traveled to Greece after reading how the people of Lesvos were helping up to 6,000 refugees from the Middle East and Asia everyday.
Her two-week stint as a volunteer grew into a two-year, life-changing experience that she has published as “A Country Within: A Journey of Love and Hope During the Refugee Crisis in Greece.”
Her story begins on the beaches of the island of Lesvos and moves to Athens, where the longtime resident of Piedmont and Oakland finds connections with a group of refugees there, creating an unexpected family. Along the way, Malcolm also finds connections to her refugee grandfather.
“What impressed me the most was that the residents of Lesvos were taking in refugees that would come in on the beaches. They were feeding them, giving them dry clothes and finding ways to get them across the island to get to the mainland,” she said. “I went as a volunteer to observe the community that had been so generous with their resources and their time.”
When she returned home after two weeks, she immediately shut down her consulting business and returned, feeling so moved by what she had experienced and by the human drama that she wanted to continue helping.
During that time, she realized she wanted to write a book.
“At first I was going to write a book about the people of Lesvos and then I realized there was a bigger story,” Malcolm said. “The book tells the story of the people of Lesvos. It tells my own story and it tells about the refugees I got very close to in Athens.”
Once Greece closed the borders, refugees were stuck in Athens, many living on the streets, in temporary camps or abandoned buildings. Malcolm worked independently as a volunteer, using her own funds to help wherever needed, purchasing medicine, produce and dairy products to supplement the refugees diet of noodles and paying for taxi rides to the hospital.
Experiences in Athens are etched in her mind, like dinners held in the apartment of one refugee family where 15 or 20 people would gather.
“In the Athens heat of the night, there was so much food, love, dancing and music. These were people who had lost everything in their lives, their families, their homes, their futures; some of them were professionals but there was never a negative word,” she said. “We in the United States have so much so it was really humbling to be with people like that.”
Malcolm formed a deep connection with a young charismatic Afghan she met there, a young man with a wife and three children. She calls him Arian in her book.
Another deep connection that comes across in the memoir is Malcolm’s grandfather, a refugee before Armenian genocide of 1915. Her grandfather never wanted to speak of his experiences because he lost his entire family.
“Since he came through Turkey to reach France, I imagined he might have come through Lesvos and that’s why it was so emotional for me,” she said. “Through these young people I met, I felt his pain and sorrow of leaving his homeland and his family, knowing they would not survive.”
All of these stories and experiences are described in a non-traditional, flowing story, starting with how Malcolm ended up in Greece, and including the stories of the refugees she became close to, her grandfather, what happened in Lesvos and Athens and the fate of the people she became so close to.
Malcolm’s career as a bureaucrat in utility regulations didn’t prepare her for how close she felt to those whose life experiences differed so much from her own, how deeply she felt their drama and pain.
“This experience, first on the beaches, cracked me open, and it opened my heart to love an ad-hoc family of young people from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. I got more out of it than I put into it,” she said.
Malcolm has self-published this memoir and will donate any proceeds back into refugee relief. One thing this experience has revealed is that she wants to be a writer, telling stories about social justice.
She hopes her book will help people understand that we are all human beings with the same need for safety and security, noting that the United Nations believes that right now 26 million people are displaced.
“We as a world community and those of us who live in affluent and empowered cultures, we need to help; this is our world,” she said. “We can all do something; it might seem small but it might be really important. Once you open your heart to people it’s amazing how much you get back.”
FYI
What: “A Country Within” a memoir by Kim Malcolm, a resident of Piedmont and Oakland
Details: available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Country-Within-Journey-During-Refugee-ebook/dp/B07B5TMKDP/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521390320&sr=1-1
Information: www.kimmalcolm.com
Future events: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. April 28-29, Bay Area Book Festival 2018 exhibitor, downtown Berkeley
Author events: 7 p.m. May 24, East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Ave., Oakland; May 2018 (exact time and date to be announced), Montclair Presbyterian Church, 5701 Thornhill Drive, Oakland