Help WAVE set up our shower container!

In December, Sea Punks donated a shower container  to WAVE, complete with five fully-functioning shower cubicles, sinks and lockers for personal belongings. Facilities like this will make a massive difference to our community and enable us to provide for their basic human needs with dignity and respect.

 

As most people who have followed the work of WAVE know, we seek to support the most vulnerable individuals who fall through the gaps of other services in the region - namely the undocumented population of people-on-the-move. Due to increasingly difficult barriers in accessing asylum procedures in Greece, they are left without papers and unable to access most other services. Furthermore, many of those attending WAVE are a part of the transit community, travelling along the so-called 'Balkan Route' to seek protection in Europe. As a result, many of the people who come to us as new arrivals have walked more than 20 days from the Turkish land border; by the time they arrive, they are exhausted with blistered feet, destroyed shoes and little more than the clothes on their back. Our first step is to offer them a shower, a change of clothes, a cup of tea, a hot meal and a smile. In this way, we do our best to address all their basic needs and restore a sense of dignity and self-assurance.

 

As it stands, our 'shower system' consists of simple buckets of warm water in our toilet cubicles; as grateful as people are for the opportunity to wash and change into new clothes, this system doesn't match the level of services we want to provide. This is where the shower container comes in. We have been struggling to find a solution to plumb in and run the container as we operate primarily out of a wasteland on the city's outskirts. Finally, we have found a solution with a local eco-company that specialises in renewable energy sources. One generous donor has already covered the costs of purchasing and implementing the solar panels that will be used to generate energy to heat the water for the showers. With this fundraiser, we seek to cover plumbing the shower into a nearby building to dispose of the waste-water generated sustainably, and the operational costs of increased water usage for the first three months. The total cost of plumbing installation will be 1,400EUR, and as soon as we have this covered, we can move forward with the operations and have the container up and running in the space of a week. Any extra money raised will go towards increased water costs.

 

Please consider donating to help us set up this incredibly important service for our community - even a little makes a big difference!