Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. There is something like 2,000 islands in the

Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey, and almost all of them belong to Greece,

even the ones close to the Turkey shoreline.

The Greek island of Lesbos, for instance, is only six miles from Turkey,

across an open channel of dark blue, almost black water.

You can stand on the beach on Lesbos and look across the water and see the green hills of Turkey, not so far away,

not so different from the green hills of Lesbos. There is no border under the blue sky, clouds like continents passing by.

But over there, on the shore and Turkey, people, refugees from war-torn countries, are being loaded into rubber rafts by men with guns, smugglers.

While over here on the beach in Greece, there are volunteer aid workers waiting for the refugees with open arms,

warm clothes, and emergency medical care.

Over there, the people are praying, God save us. They've sold everything back home in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia,

their homes, their cars, borrowed money from families and friends to pay smugglers thousands of dollars to guide them across the deserts and through the mountains

crossing borders illegally sleeping in forests always hiding from police and soldiers to get to the Turkish coast where they each pay

another thousand dollars to get in an overloaded rubber boat they steer themselves

across an open sea. So far this year, 700,000 people have made the

trip. That's 700 million dollars on the

black market

Turkish authorities turn their backs.

Over here, the volunteer aid workers

come from Athens and America

and around Northern Europe, a team of young Spanish lifeguards on sedews in the water,

Danish dudes in wetsuits, Christians from Holland with space blankets, Jews from Pennsylvania, New York, Greek and from

...