Feature: Lessons, activities help refugee children in Greece to adapt to new home

Every day at around 10:30 a.m.local time after finishing their breakfast, Samira, seven-year-old from Syria with her two sisters starts their lessons not at school as they should, but at an improvised classroom of an old hotel in the center of Athens.

Along with her new classmates also from Syria and Iraq, they all participate in the English lesson for beginners.

"What is this?" Salina Karavela, a 26-year-old Greek psychologist, asked the class. "This is a pen", they all replied with one voice.

Stranded in Greece due to the border closures along the Western Balkan route, Samira with her friends and their families are among the 20,000 refugees eligible for relocation.

As part of the hospitality and accommodation program "Home for Hope" run by the non-government organization "Solidarity Now" with the support of UNHCR and EU funding, thousands of refugees and asylum seekers have found temporary shelters in private apartments and other structures as well, such as collaborating hotels.

"Theoxenia", which is one of the two hotels that take part in the hosting project in Athens, accommodates 200 people, among them 60 children.

Apart from the housing, Solidarity Now provides a number of free services, like information, psychological and legal counseling, recreational and educational activities to refugee adults and children.

"It is important for us that these people have a normal life as much as possible, while they stay in Greece," Sophia Ioannou, head of communications and fundraising at SolidarityNow told Xinhua.

As education is an established right for all, without any discrimination and limitation, the NGO supports such initiatives with a full schedule of lessons and activities indoors and outdoors on a weekly basis.

"We try to take the children out of the structures, to visit playgrounds, to meet and socialize with other children, to interact through paintings and everyday lessons of Greek, English, Arabic, so that they learn their own language, to help them integrate into the societies where they will relocate and will be their new home," Ioannou added.

In the classroom of Samira, one can see eager children who want to learn, to participate and play. "Children love it and they really need it... They are very enthusiastic to learn new things, new languages, math, Arabic," Karavela said.

As Karavela pointed out, it was not always easy for them, as some of them have not attended school or have been out of education for more than two years. But also, they have suffered a lot through their troubled journey from the war country they came from.

"They have difficulties in expressing their feelings. They have a lot of anger and depression and they haven't learnt how to express their emotions in a creative way," she highlighted.

Liana Markaki who is responsible for the creational activities tried to attract their attention by choosing different materials and themes each time.

"I try to find new intriguing things, like the materials we use. They like to draw all together in big papers, or play with clay. The other day that it was raining, we asked them to draw the rain," she said.

But what did Liana see through their paintings? "You can see darkness, all children draw houses, but they are black, they paint faces and hearts, but black prevails," she stressed.

"If you don't see their paintings, you cannot imagine what they have been through, they can be like all the others," she added.

For Markaki, who had to leave her job due to layoffs in debt-laden Greece and started as a volunteer in Lesvos in 2015, there was no return. As she confessed, she does not want to find another job, she is fulfilled with her new role.

"When you enter the room every morning, more than 10 children run to you and beg you to start the lesson. It is really touching," Liana said, extremely moved.

As soon as the lesson finished, Salina had a little surprise for them, a huge bag with new pencil cases in pink, red and blue. For Samira and her friends, there was only one color to pick and that was pink. Endit