The Hellenic Rescue Team and Efi Latsoudi, the human rights activist behind ‘PIKPA village’ on Lesvos, have jointly been awarded UNHCR’s Nansen Refugee Award for their humanitarian efforts in Greece.

Since the beginning of 2012, Efi Latsoudi has been helping vulnerable asylum seekers, including children, pregnant women and people with disabilities, to find temporary shelter at the PIKPA village. “I think it’s a very simple human thing we have to do, and if we do it things can be very different,” she says. “Solidarity saved lives here. But solidarity is not enough. There should be political decisions so that we won’t experience this again.”

The Hellenic Rescue Team currently consists of 2,500 volunteers, who have been rescuing people from the Aegean Sea and Greek mountains. “We have to be united in periods of crisis, as we did with our other Greek volunteers and the rest of the world who came here to assist us. The planet will have difficult situations in the future, so we have to be together in order to assist in saving lives.”

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