“Dobra Paprika,” Katerina laughs, adding a diced vegetable to the huge pot. A volunteer’s slip of the tongue, while trying to pronounce the Polish name of our foundation, created a lot of new jokes and playful ideas in the daily market of humor.
“We have to laugh. If we lost our sense of humor, none of us could bear the situations around us.”

In the Home for All kitchen, joy in the small daily things mixes with the intense heat of over 40-degree temperatures, amplified by the stoves to a level known only from steam saunas. In recent weeks, cooking meals for the camp residents has begun to push even seasoned cooks to their limits.

“Today we’ll make even more meals, and nothing will stop us. A small, poor village in the south of the island is celebrating its patron saint. We want to visit the poorest with a warm meal—feed, comfort, and embrace them.”

Vegetables gathered by James and Onur just after sunrise will reach impoverished Greeks near the village of Vrisa, which a few years ago collapsed like a house of cards in a strong earthquake. Residents are still trying to rebuild their walls and piece their lives back together.

Katerina and Nikos see everyone’s needs. On a daily basis, they support camp residents, but when disaster strikes, they engage them to feed poor Greeks, hand water and nourishing meals to firefighters battling fires. They’ve been doing this for years because the gene of goodness in them is not limited to helping refugees. They teach the same to newcomers who arrived on the island, fleeing poverty and war in their countries. Every day at Home for All is a lesson in humanity, absorbed through the skin—a lesson many of us still need to learn.