I've been trying to figure out how to start this and I keep coming back to the same thing: I was not prepared for how much I would learn in a single week. Not in a bad way. Just in a way where by Friday I sat down and thought, okay wow, that was a lot.
I arrived in Lesvos, Greece at the beginning of June. It's beautiful here in a way that genuinely catches you off guard, the light is different, the sea is this blue that doesn't look real, and the town of Mytilene is small enough that you start recognising faces within a few days. I'm living with my roommate Megi, who's from Luxembourg, and the apartment is nice and close to the office and honestly I've barely been in it because there's always something happening.
The first week was training. Which sounds like it would be the slower part. But it wasn't.
Getting up to speed
A large part of the legal assistant training focused on understanding ELIL itself and the role it plays within the asylum process on Lesvos. Before arriving, I knew ELIL (European Lawyers in Lesvos) provided legal aid to asylum seekers and refugees, but I didn't fully appreciate the scale or importance of that work. They work in different cities of Greece such as Lesvos, Samos, Athens and Thessaloniki.
ELIL offers free and independent legal assistance to people navigating the Greek and European asylum systems, particularly ahead of asylum interviews and other key stages of their cases. For many applicants, these interviews can have a significant impact on the outcome of their claim, which makes access to accurate legal information and preparation incredibly important. Throughout the training, I began to understand how much of the organisation's work centres on helping people make informed decisions, understand their rights, and navigate a system that can often feel overwhelming.
Much of this work takes place through the Protection Legal Aid Hub inside the Lesvos CCAP (Kara Tepes–Mavrovouni camp), where ELIL works alongside organisations such as RSA (Refugee Support Aegean) and HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). One thing that struck me early on was how collaborative the protection sector is. Legal support rarely exists in isolation; it often overlaps with psychosocial support, vulnerability assessments, housing concerns, and referrals to other specialised services. Understanding where ELIL fits within that wider network was one of the most valuable parts of my first week.
The timing of my arrival also mattered more than I realised. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum came into force on June 12, 2026, basically right as I was starting, and a big part of training was getting across what that actually means for people on the ground. The Pact overhauls how EU countries process asylum claims: accelerated timelines, stricter border procedures, real changes to how quickly cases move. Understanding it wasn't background reading. It was directly relevant to the people I'd be sitting across from the following week.
The interpretation training
This is the part of the week I keep thinking about most. I speak Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi, which is useful for applicants from South Asia such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and I knew that going in. What I didn't fully understand was how different interpretation in a legal context is from just knowing a language.
Six hours of training later, I understand it now. You have to be precise in a way that feels almost uncomfortable, because a softened word or a loose translation of a legal term in an asylum interview can actually affect an outcome. You also have to stay neutral without being cold, which is its own balancing act. And you have to manage your own emotions and reaction to what you're hearing while continuing to do the job accurately.
After the training I built a glossary, legal and refugee-context terminology in Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi. Words like "persecution," "subsidiary protection," "inadmissibility," "family reunification." Not all of them have clean equivalents, and working through that was genuinely interesting. Some concepts just don't translate word for word, and you have to figure out how to carry the meaning across without losing the precision.
The INTERSOS workshop
Mid-week, I attended a workshop run by INTERSOS Hellas on preventing human trafficking through integrated humanitarian assistance. I'd understood human trafficking as a serious global issue before, but I hadn't understood the speed at which it's evolving. One section of the workshop focused specifically on digital trafficking in Nigeria and how social media platforms are being used to recruit and deceive young people at a scale and pace that's genuinely difficult to track or counter.
What the workshop did well was connect trafficking to the broader protection system, how people who've been trafficked often present as regular asylum seekers and may not self-identify, which means the people doing the identifying need to know the signs. That felt relevant to everything I was learning that week.
The research report
Towards the end of the week I drafted a research report comparing refugee arrivals and reception conditions across Lesvos and Crete. The two islands have quite different profiles: the majority arriving in Lesvos are crossing from Turkey, while Crete's arrivals are majority via Libya (see the map below). Understanding the routes, the nationalities, and the recent policy context gave me a useful frame for the drop-ins I was about to start.
A weekend in Molivos
On the weekend I went to Molivos with a group of colleagues for a getaway (and also to celebrate my 21st birthday). It's a small village in the north of Lesvos with a Genoese castle and these cobbled streets that look like they were designed specifically for postcards. We had lunch at a restaurant on a terrace above the bay. I remember looking out at the water, Turkey visible on the horizon, eating zucchini flowers and Tzatziki with colleagues from Luxembourg, Iran, Syria, London, all of us somehow ending up on this island for the same reason. It was one of those moments where the conversation just flows for hours and you don't notice the time passing. Listening to everyone's stories of how they got here, what they'd done before, what brought them to this kind of work, that was its own kind of education. It reminded me that the reason people leave home for something uncertain is almost always the same: they want to do something that feels like it matters.
What I'm taking from Week 1
I feel like I absorbed a lot. The legal frameworks, the interpretation ethics, the trafficking workshop, the research, separately they're distinct things, together they start forming a picture of what protection actually looks like in practice. Not as a concept. As a system that people move through, with all the gaps and the pressure points that implies.
I went into this week wondering how I'd handle the emotional weight of the work. What I found is that having a task like something concrete to do, a role to play, actually helps. It gives you a place to put your focus. The harder part, I think, is the transition out of the day. I'm still figuring out how to carry what I hear without letting it sit too heavily. I'm also realising that working in a multilingual, multinational team is something I genuinely love. In the ELIL office we have people from across Europe and Asia and that mix, all oriented toward the same goal, makes for a really particular kind of atmosphere.