Rosie Johnson and Lily Stephenson, SolidariTea, explain life in Serbia

Rosie Johnson, 22 from Wiveliscombe, and Lily Stephenson, from Plymouth, left at the end of February on a mission to show support to people living in challenging conditions in refugee camps.

They called themselves SolidariTea, serving cups of tea from a van, built by their friends Harriet and Conrad, to refugees in Serbia.

The pair had already spent four months at a refugee camp on Greek island Chios, until one stormy day left them feeling like they wanted to give more.

The tea truck in action.

The community in Wiveliscombe rallied around the girls to support their cause, raising around £10,000 for them to carry out their work.

Five months later, they’ve returned from their travels.

They served tea twice a day, at 10am and 3pm, and didn’t have a day off for the first 10 weeks they were there.

During their time on the tea truck, the pair met all kinds of people that had come to the barracks in an attempt to find safety, but they watched that safety get stripped away from the desperate refugees as their temporary home got destroyed.

Lily Stephenson packing the supplies.

Lily said: “We had no idea what the trip would be like.

“We thought we’d be making our way to Greece, serving tea along the way.

“But when we got to Serbia, we thought oh my god, we can’t leave. So we stayed in Serbia for five months.”

Rosie said: “We arrived in Belgrade on a sleeper train. We arrived and thought ‘what have we got ourselves into’.

“The one image that will stick in our minds when we arrived is driving past the barracks and seeing ‘HELP ME’ written in big red writing on the walls.

“There were derelict buildings everywhere and men wrapped in blankets.”

Some of the most concerning things they learnt were the stories of the children in the barracks that had made it there alone.

From children who were forced by their parents to be smugglers of drugs and people, to children that fled their countries after watching their family members be slaughtered by the Taliban. They saw children as young as ten all on their own, in need of some stability and comfort.

Lily said: “People were bored in the barracks, there was nothing to do for any stimulation.

“One of aims was to create a sense of community.

“Some of the boys were as young as ten, one their own, isolated, living in an adult word.

“We tried to give them some structure, routine, and a bit of positivity.”

A few months in, the barracks were destroyed, displacing around 1,000 men and children.

“We had heard rumours of an eviction for a while. The authorities wanted it out of view from the tourists,” Rosie added.

“Before the eviction, dangerous chemicals were sprayed across the barracks, they said it was to clean the area, but we thought it was to get people out before the eviction date.

“People had no information, they had no idea what to do, they feared that if they went to another camp then they would be evicted.”

Lily said: “There was a feeling of mass-panic in the days running up to the eviction, but we decided to just keep serving tea.

“We felt like the musicians playing music on the Titanic as it was sinking, we just kept going.

“We could feel that bad things were coming.

“The authorities stormed into the camps, waking people up aggressive with tent poles, pushing them out of the barracks before they had time to grab the few belongings they still had.”

They watched as their new friends were shipped off to unknown futures, and then the bulldozers came in to demolish the site.

After the upheaval, the pair wondered where to go next.

They’d lost track of some of their friends, and others were at one of the 16 refugee camps in Serbia.

They didn’t want to become part of the “oppressive” world of the refugee camps, so they answered a call for help from another volunteer group Aid Delivery Mission, and made their way to a town close to the Bulgaria border called Sid.

In Sid, SolidariTea expanded into serving breakfast to the groups of men and children hiding in the forests near to the border.

During their five weeks there they boiled 1,750 litres of water for tea, boiled 9,525 eggs, distributed 11,500 pieces of fruit, and gave out 150kg of sunflower seeds.

While they were there, they said they were constantly discouraged by the local police for feeding the refugees, but they didn’t let that phase them.

Lily said: “We had heard stories of groups being shut down by the police so we weren’t sure if we could be SolidariTea there.

“The authorities tried everything to try and stop us. On the day of the Manchester terror attack, one police officer asked me ‘aren’t you afraid of these refugees? These are the people that did the terror attacks’ and I replied ‘you don’t know anything do you? These people are try to escape the same thing’.

“We tried to appear like we weren’t afraid of the police, but we were. We were always looking over our shoulders.”

They got to know a new group of desperate people trying to get to safety. They learnt stories of ‘the game’, a term given to the attempt to cross the border.

The girls collected testimonies from the men that returned for their failed venture to cross the border, some coming back beaten, bitten by dogs, and shoeless.

They heard one horrific story from a young man named Mohamed, who planned to play ‘the game’ by jumping on the back of a speeding train with two of his friends, in the hopes it would get them across the border.

One of Mohamed’s friends fell off the train and was decapitated. Terrified, Mohamed himself fell off and lost a foot. The third managed to escape into the forest.

They asked 10-year-old Assad, who was attempting ‘the game’ every night, if he was afraid.

Rosie Johnson with a boy refugee.

Rosie said: “When I was 10, my mum wouldn’t even let me walk to school on my own, let alone get into a container to Italy.

“We asked him if he was scared, and he said he wasn’t, and that he had to try again.

“His childhood has been lost to this world of adults and border-crossings.”

The last night they distributed food was Eid, the end of Ramadan, before heading back to the UK.

But plans are already afoot to head to back out at some point to continue their mission of providing tea and support, after some rest and more valuable fundraising..

Lily added: “Coming back to England was personally hard. We’ve had to make some adjustments. We’ve realised how privileged we are to live in the UK.

“We aren’t sure if we should be happy to be back or sad they’re still there.

“It’s overwhelming to think of all those people still at the border, all with their own stories, that will probably never be heard.”