Bay Area mom creates havens amid chaos for the littlest refugees

It’s been nearly a year since Nilofer Jafari fled her home in Afghanistan with her husband and three young children, racing into an uncertain future in an unfamiliar land to escape the Taliban.

After a tumultuous journey, fraught with peril, took them to Iran and then Turkey, they braved rough seas on a small, rickety boat packed with other refugees from war-torn regions and arrived in Greece, settling in a makeshift camp crowded with thousands of asylum-seekers like themselves.

As the family waits to hear if their request for asylum status in Germany will be approved, Jafari was able to find her daughters some semblance of stability thanks to Belle Sweeney, a Bay Area alpaca farmer who created safe spaces for children to seek refuge at the Elliniko refugee camp in Athens.

“We are happy that there is something like this for the kids,” Jafari told The Chronicle in Farsi in a phone interview from the camp. “It’s better than having kids gather and get into fights. They play there.”

Sweeney, a Sebastopol resident, founded the Schoolbox Project in 2016. The nonprofit organization converts old shipping containers in Greece into a safe haven for children in the midst of turmoil and offers sessions seven days a week in art, music, math and English, and also distributes food, toys and clothing.

Jafari’s 8-year-old and 4-year-old daughters paint, knit, and are sometimes treated to ice cream at the Schoolbox Project. Her youngest, at 1, is too young to be separated from her mother, Jafari said.

“Life is very difficult,” the 29-year-old Jafari said. “But it will pass.”

Sweeney, 33, combined her experience as a volunteer at refugee camps in Greece with her background as a foster parent, and that’s how the Schoolbox Project was born.

When she first visited the camps in Greece in 2015 to work as a volunteer with some of the millions of refugees who had escaped their war-ravaged homelands of Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, what stood out to her were the children who arrived by boat.

Some were angry. Some were quiet. And some were aggressive.

“What is far more difficult is to support a child to find his place in the world who has invisible and hard-to-understand challenges,” said Sweeney, who’s been a foster parent for 10 years. “The children all feel like my children.”

But they all had one thing in common in Sweeney’s eyes. They acted like some of the children she cared for through the Bay Area foster care system. She felt a kinship with the kids arriving by boats on the shores of Lesbos, in Greece, who had survived displacement, atrocious living conditions and recurring violence.

A mother of four, two of whom were adopted through the foster-care system, Sweeney said one of the first children who started coming to the Schoolbox Project was a boy who was continuously kicked out of the program for being “violent and doing unlovable things.”

That child reminded her of one of her own.

“I have a child who’s hard to be with, and you have to dig deep to figure out what they need in that moment,” Sweeney said, adding that the boy became a representation of the children she wanted to reach through her project. “These children ask you to dig deep and find new wells of patience you didn’t know you had, to look at distress as communication and undesirable behavior as a symptom of an unmet need.”

Close to 175,000 refugees arrived in Greece by sea in 2016 — 37 percent of whom were children, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. There have been over 430 arrivals so far in 2017.

“People who have been forced to flee their homeland to stay alive, to escape violence and war and conflict — it’s a very traumatizing experience for any human being. Young refugees suffer uniquely,” said Chris Boian, a spokesman for the UNHCR.

Nearly 90 percent of refugee children have expressed feelings of stress to camp volunteers, said Amy Richmond, a child protection adviser with Save the Children, an international organization that promotes children’s rights and provides relief and support to children in developing countries.

Not only have refugee children from Syria and elsewhere in the region witnessed family members and friends being killed, but the instability of living in a camp and lack of information on one’s legal status can intensify the initial stress and trauma that kids experience, Richmond said.

Programs like the Schoolbox Project are crucial in providing kids with a stable environment where they can establish healthy coping mechanisms, she added.

“Even though children have experienced traumatic events, children are remarkably resilient,” Richmond said, adding that with the right tools and child-friendly spaces, they “are able to bounce back.”

Sweeney, who works as an alpaca farmer and beekeeper in the Bay Area, bought the first shipping container in Greece in April 2016, before the Schoolbox Project officially existed.

“I realized I needed something tangible. I walked past a shipping container with some Greek writing on it and a phone number and took a picture of it,” Sweeney recalled. “I called them and tried to find someone who spoke English.”

Each container costs about $3,200, she said; they are purchased through donations to the Schoolbox Project.

The next day, a truck with a crane appeared at the port near Athens with one large delivery for Sweeney, a shipment that was was met with a great deal of resistance from the port police.

“Who’s in charge? Whose box is this?” Sweeney recalled police asking. “It took about two hours before [the police] ultimately let us put [the shipping container] down.”

Within hours, muralists were decorating the exterior of the shipping container with pink and red flowers, blue skies, and thick, luscious trees. Meanwhile, volunteers were being recruited from Facebook to staff the office-style box, which is temperature-controlled and has windows.

Now the Schoolbox Project has a total of four shipping containers with various activities staffed by volunteers at two camps: LM Village, a summer resort operating as a refugee camp, and the Elliniko camp, a former airport, in Athens, both of which are largely made up of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Monica Julian, a child protection specialist for the Schoolbox Project, returned from a trip to Elliniko several weeks ago and said she was especially concerned by how kids under age 3 were coping with the stress. One child about 18 months old caught her attention in particular.

“You would normally engage them by smiling and they smile back. But this kid was just deadpan. No emotion at all,” Julian said.

Other signs of trauma that Schoolbox Project volunteers are on the lookout for are hoarding of toys and food, acting out, bullying, and isolation. Many children have a fear of loud noises and often “hit the deck” when planes fly overheard, Julian added.

They are often short-tempered, explosive and aggressive, and in some cases the stress can be too much.

“Back in the spring, there was a teenage boy who tried to light himself on fire,” Julian said, emphasizing that the most effective help for children was having a safe place that offered consistent care.

For Sweeney, working with children who exhibit poor impulse control, aggression and post-traumatic stress hits close to home. It’s her parenting background that has made the Schoolbox Project so personal for her.

“This crisis is too big for anybody to get to opt out from participating,” Sweeney said.

Schoolbox Project fundraiser

The Schoolbox Project is holding a “Dine and Donate” event on Jan. 25 at the Ramen Gaijin restaurant, 6948 Sebastopol Ave. in Sebastopol. Sweeney is also hosting a booth on Jan. 29 at the Community Engagement Fair in Santa Rosa.