MYTILENE, 3 November 2015 (IRIN) – Currently on leave from the UN emergency aid coordination body OCHA, Greek humanitarian worker Fotini Rantsiou has spent the last three months as a volunteer on the island of Lesvos. As the death toll mounts in the Eastern Mediterranean, with stormy seas claiming the lives of at least 70 refugees in the last week of October, many of them children, the EU’s slow and fragmented response to the refugee crisis is looking increasingly ineffectual.

Months of summits and action plans have still not provided refugees with an alternative to putting their children in flimsy boats and handing over large sums of money to smugglers.

In a speech on Friday, following a series of fatal shipwrecks in the Aegean, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told his parliament he felt “shamed as a member of this European leadership, both for the inability of Europe in dealing with this human drama, and for the level of debate at a senior level, where one is passing the buck to the other.”

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