Volunteers aiding those who come ashore
Aphrodite Vati Mariola owns a hotel in Molyvos, Greece, with her parents. Efi Latsoudi works for a local non-governmental organization. They are two of the many volunteers 60 Minutes encountered while filming this week's story on the human wave of men, women and children arriving in Greece from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Anderson Cooper interviews Mariola in the previously unseen clip above. She explains that once a rubber boat hits the shore of Lesbos, it's not long before the arrivals walk to the entrance of her hotel in need of food, dry clothing and transportation. Rather than view them as a nuisance, she sees an opportunity to help.
"We try to gather them in that location and tell them to wait," she says. "And then I see how many people there are. And I try to call for a bus to come pick them up." The bus takes them to a small camp roughly 40 miles away. "We give them water. We give them snacks if they need it."
"Who's paying for that?" Cooper asks.
"Our hotel," she says. "We have been doing this personally."
Cooper asks Mariola if the flood of desperate people is hurting her business. "We have had guests who have cancelled," she admits. "But we have had guests who have come to help us. The majority of guests were by our side."
Activist Efi Latsoudi volunteers for another job in Lesbos - the grim task of helping to bury the dead who wash ashore. "I assisted like 20, 30 burials," she tells Cooper. "I don't count."
She walks with Cooper through the graves. "When you see a marker that says 'unknown,' what do you think?" he asks her.
"I think there's a family back somewhere that is looking for a person that never had a clue what happened to him," she says. "And all their life they are living with this loss."
Latsoudi takes pleasure in the sight of children who survive the journey and end up playing on the beach. But it's no match for the anger she feels over the countless people who have drowned or gone missing.
"Some people dead, some people in the sea, some people really traumatized," she says. "It's too much, for them and for us here."