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Located along Patras' La Manikos Road, the smoke stained derelict shell of an abandoned cafe is now home to a group of twenty Afghan children, all desperate to make the difficult crossing to Italy from the nearby international port. Run by a twenty-three year old Panjshiri middleman, sun loungers and makeshift beds are hidden under old cookers and shelving displays to keep the young residents dry from the rain that drips in from the holes in the corrugated iron roof's too cold here in Greece in the winter. We wear two pairs of trousers and jumpers to sleep in and even under two blankets we still freeze in the nights. Burning palettes and wood salvaged from building sites, fires that smoulder in the remains of the kitchen are the only source of warmth when the boys from the old cafe are not out at the traffic lights on the edge of town waiting for the remote opportunity to board a truck that could be on its way across the Ionian Sea. “We thought that when we came to Greece it would be easy to leave but now we are in Patras we realise that it's much more difficult. Three weeks ago a few people here had twenty Euros or so in their pockets but now we are just collecting bread from the garbage. The police and the Greek people don't want us refugees here but all we can do is to hope that we can each find a way out".

Skipping across the flooded black and white chequered floor to avoid the puddles, teenage Afghan boys pick their way through a rubbish-strewn camp at an old beach club. Salvaged truck tarpaulins held down with stones, stretched over stick structures are hemmed inside the standing walls providing shelter from the strong winds that whip in from the sea. Located on the edge of the port town of Patras, the illegal settlement is home to more than forty teenage refugees presided over by their forty-three year old father figure Ali, a former journalist from Ghazni. "Everyday there are newcomers here but so many have left for Italy it's impossible to keep count. The new port us far from us now, almost one hour by foot, and the police are become much stricter with is Afghans these days. The police constantly harass us when we go out to buy something and when we sleep they raid the camp to try and deport us back to Athens. The people who are deciding to come to Europe- they aren't coming just for a visit, they are escaping instability but when they reach here they find their problems are worse. Everybody in this camp has a hope for their lives and it's only because of their aims that they endure these conditions. I would advise any boy or any Muslim not to come to this place". With his thoughts diverted by a group of teenage drug addicts camped outside the walls of the beach club who are making a noise, Ali hangs his head, "The young people are the wealth of Afghanistan and we are loosing them".

On the dirty floor of a tiny breezeblock shack hidden in the bushes behind a petrol station, eleven year old Rahul wakes up from an afternoon nap while some of the other boys continue to sleep around him under their blankets. Part of a cluster of tents and shelters on the edge of Patras that are known by the refugees as Pump Benzene Camp, Rahul is the youngest of a group of fifteen teenagers who have a reputation as drug dealers. The eldest of five siblings, the vulnerable, quietly spoken child has spent the past two month in Patras after leaving his home village of Jawgori in Ghazni province: "My father has a back problem so he is jobless. It was my own decision to come to Europe so my father sold his land for me when he decided it was time for me to leave. I was at school in Ghazni for four years but now I want to go to school in Sweden since my cousin has a son who is there. At home we don't have a channel to watch football and even though we don't have a TV in the camp, I watch the matches at a local cafe and once a week we have our own game. One day I would like to go to Barcelona and be a professional football player. I spoke to my family two weeks ago and my mum told me not to worry; she said that someday soon I will be far from here. My father told me to respect my elders and not to worry on my journey. I miss them both so much and especially my mother's cooking but what can I do? I forgot a lot of things about home already over these months. I haven't tried yet to get on a truck but it should be easier for me because I'm small. I watch the others at the traffic lights to see how they do it and I don't think it will be hard. For now the boys here help me with the things I need but slowly, slowly I am becoming a man".

"I started chain-smoking at fourteen because of the stress". Still in shorts for lack of any trousers, sixteen year old Zia stands puffing at a cigarette in the doorway of the shack on the edge of Patras where he has spent the past month. Waiting for a pot of daal to cook on an open fire outside, the eleven Afghan residents gather back at the flimsy collection of huts built of motorcycle packing boxes at the start of a chilly evening. Zia looks agitated. Three of the boys that he shares at the Benzene Pump Camp with have found casual work as painters but five months into his journey to Sweden, he is penniless, "I have no money to even buy clothes for the winter. If there is no money, there is no anything". Having run away from home four years ago, Zia has been working as a labourer in Iran since he was twelve years old before coming to Europe. He says that his family problems are too complicated to discuss and he has had no contact with his mother of father back in Ghazni since the day he left. Zia's mind is distant and his days on the edge of Greece are filled with longing to be elsewhere, somewhere safe. "I wake up at around five or six o'clock in the morning when the light comes. I walk over to a spring in the jungle behind the petrol station to collect water and then usually help to make the tea for breakfast. If the sun is out then I'll take a bath with cold water in the bushes and every two or three days we wash our clothes. I don't do much in the day. If I'm not waiting at the traffic light then I sit in the shelter playing cards. I collect wood for cooking and sometimes I make the food for us all- I cook eggs, rice or macaroni. We get bread distributed to us every Tuesday and Saturday by a local church group; otherwise my friends who are working lend us money to go to the supermarket. We don't have electricity so we spend our evenings out on the sreets trying to open the doors of the trucks that pass through Patras.

Spending a freezing evening waiting along the Athens Road on the outskirts of Patras at the so called Italy Stop, a group of around twenty Afghan teenagers run after a truck making its way to the Venice bound midnight ferry. Hoping to open the lorry's back doors as it slows down for a red traffic light at an intersection, the boys are taking a very slim and dangerous chance as they bet their lives on a future in Western Europe. After Patras' new international port opened three months ago, the majority of trucks are now diverted around the town and with drivers wise to the attempts by the desperate migrants and refugees to stow themselves inside, only one or two a week will ever make it out of Greece from the Italy stop.

Hemmed in against the exterior wall of a derelict beach club, Asif, Ahmad, Hasam and Murtaza sit on blankets on the concrete floor of the shelter that they share with twenty boys at an illegal camp on the edge of Patras. Unable to afford to pay smugglers the exorbitant prices charged to get out of Greece, the group of Hazara teenagers from Ghazni and Mazar-i-Sharif who have all run our of funds are left squatting in miserable conditions in the port city. Their only hope now to continue their journeys into Western Europe is the slim and dangerous chance that they will find their own way out by stowing themselves aboard trucks headed to Italy. Hunched under his worldly possessions hanging from the low roof, seventeen year old Murtaza feels there is no other path in his life, "The reason I'm here is war. There is no way for me to work anymore in Afghanistan because of the instability. I'm a mechanic but the Taliban caught me on the road and kidnapped me for fifteen days; they said that I had been working with the trucks used by the Americans. They closed my eyes with a piece of cloth and took me to the mountains. They forced me to give them the telephone number of my parents and when they called them they demanded three Lak Afghanis by the next day or else your son will die. My father has no money so they gave him more days and eventually he had to sell his land. After two weeks a group with weapons took me back to my home on motorcycles. After they ate lunch, they gave me a final warning that if I was caught working with the NATO trucks for a second time they would kill me. After that there was no other way for me so my uncle paid a smuggler $4,500 to send me to Europe".

Bracing a fierce gale, eighteen year old Mohammad Isa heads out into the sea under stormy skies to wash his blanket that was blown away into the mud during the storms that have torn through Western Greece over the past days. Squatting in the shell of an abandoned beach club along the coast that is home to around seventy Afghan refugees, for Isa who left his home in Uruzgan province five months ago, Patras represents the first time in his life that he has seen the sea. Coming frequently to wash his clothes, Isa has invented his own version of a washing machine, weighting down his laundry with rocks and waiting for the motion of the waves to rinse away the dirt.

Sketched on a blue painted wall at the abandoned Pairaiki Patpaiki clothing factory in Patras, a drawing made in charcoal depicts former Afghan residents who have successfully stowed themselves inside trucks bound for Italy. Carefully detailing the driver, and the exact spots where Ali Hussain, Ahmad, Jawad and Ali are said to have hidden in the containers, the graffiti provides inspiration to more than one-hundred unaccompanied minors still stuck at the derelict industrial buildings on Greece's western shore.

Standing around a dirty, communal table, Najeeb dishes up an evening meal of beans and macaroni that he has nicknamed Patras Pilau, while twelve year old Ali chats with his sixteen year old friend Hassan out of the drizzling rain. Leaving his village of Qarabar ten weeks ago, Ali has now found himself in the port city of Patras squatting with eleven other boys from Ghazni province in miserable conditions at a collection of shacks known as Pump Benzene Camp. "The Taliban have always been in Ghazni but since 1995 everyday there is fighting. They kill the people and blow up the cars and I've even seen them shoot one man. It's hard to sleep at nights and I'm afraid. I'm constantly afraid of the war". At school for three years, Ali recently had to stop his studies due to the security situation, prompting him to flee Afghanistan, "All the schools in Qarabar are destroyed. The Taliban came to our area and told the people not to send their children to school or else we will kill you. They think that if you go to school, then you are on the side of the government; it's just not right though, if you don't have education then you will be illiterate. I really like school, especially science, physics and maths and if the security was better then I would have like to have studied economics. They day they blew up my school I thought then that my life was also in danger so I started to think about leaving my country. My mother just told me to go to any other place and make my life there. The Taliban destroyed my future". With a dream to go to London, Ali now realises that his difficult journey is much worse than the smugglers in Ghazni promised him and despite being surrounded by his group of new friends at the Pump Benzene Camp is still fearful, "I'm scared in Patras from the darkness and the cold. We only have three blankets to share between all of us and when I go out, the other boys have to lend me a jacket to wear. I miss my mother, father, sister".

On a patch of wasteland beside the Silk Road petrol station in Patras, sixteen year old Ali makes his way at dusk from the tiny cardboard-built shack that he shares with eleven other unaccompanied minors from Afghanistan at a spot known by the refugees as Pump Benzene Camp. Four years after arriving in Greece, Ali is even more desperate then ever to make the dangerous onward journey to Western Europe, spending each afternoon and evening at the nearby traffic lights waiting for his chance to jump aboard a truck that will take him across the Ionian sea to Italy. "We were four friends from Ghazni when I first came here at twelve years old but they have all moved on and I'm still stuck. I can't count the number of times I've been on the trucks but I just keep getting caught. Now because of the new port it's even more difficult; there are cameras and four checkpoints whereas before there was only one. If I were aware of how I would end up then I would never have come to Greece. I'm the unlucky one".

Reflected in a piece of broken mirror glass, seventeen and eighteen year olds Ali, Ezat, Enoyat and Fareed sit play a game of cards in their tiny shelter pitched at an old beach club on Patras' seashore. Too cold and windy to venture outside to cook in the open, the air inside the tent is thick with the smell of gas as they a pot of daal bubbles on a small stove propped up in the corner. Fleeing their homes in Ghazni, the group that met on the long overland journey to Europe fear that war has stolen away their future, "In Afghanistan we are caught in the middle of a double problem; we have the Taliban on one side and NATO on the other and there seems to be no solution. The Americans are a powerful country and even though they try to make governance, thy have no strategy".

Crouching on the curb side, three thirteen year old residents from the nearby Pump Benzene Camp huddle together out in the cold night air as they sit waiting for trucks that maybe pass bound for the midnight ferry to Venice. Each afternoon and evening, up to one hundred young Afghans stand patiently at two traffic intersections known as the Italy Stops on the main highway at the entrance to the port city of Patras. Hoping to open the lorry's back doors as it slows down for a red light, the boys are taking a very slim and dangerous chance as they bet their lives on a future in Western Europe.

Seen through a rain covered window of an abandoned shop spray painted with the word "stop", a young Afghan refugee wrapped in a blanket makes his way along the main Athens road in Patras in fierce conditions. Situated beside one of just two traffic lights on the highway, the old shop known provides a perfect shelter for the groups of migrants and refugees to wait along the road each day looking to jump aboard trucks making their way to the international port.

Following a spell of sheering winds and rain, a group of Afghan teenagers clear up the debris after floods damaged their makeshift home at the wider end of a drainage tunnel running underneath the main Athens highway. Home to two groups of unaccompanied minors living at either end of the subterranean chamber, the the narrow, dark concrete passage situated on the edge of Patras is one of the most squalid of the transitory camps in the port city. Lined with old beds and wooden palettes that sit above the muddy, rubbish-strewn floor, life in the underground rat-infested chamber is a hard passage to bear for the children who have made it this far.

Wrapped in a shawl carried with him from Afghanistan, a resident of a camp situated in a drainage tunnel running under the main Athens highway heads out in driving rain to the nearby traffic lights. At one of only two intersections in Patras known as Italy Stop, each afternoon and evening large groups of Afghan teenagers spend hours standing on the roadside hoping to open the back doors of a lorry headed to the international port and on to Italy. Despite the wet conditions making their attempts to board the trucks even more perilous, few of the tunnel camp's residents are willing to take days off from betting their lives on a future in Western Europe.

Dipping chunks of bread into a communal pan, fourteen year old Javad from Baghlan huddles around a dirty table with a group of Hazara boys as they eat a weekly meal of mutton in a disused warehouse at the former Pairaiki Patpaiki clothing factory. Located across from Patras' new international ferry terminal, around three-hundred migrants and refugees from Afghanistan and the Maghreb are squatting in the ruined factory that is currently being demolished for redevelopment by the port authorities. With regular raid by police commandoes in the early hours of the morning, many of Pairaiki Patpaiki's residents have been deported back to Athens in an attempt to clear the city's illegal encampments. "Even if I just go out to the supermarket to buy something they hit me very hard without reason; the police don't even ask where I'm going or ask my age. They take us to the port commander's office and threaten us to get out of their country".

Strong winds blow through the pampas grasses surrounding a crudely built shelter just illuminated by the glow from the nearby Silk Road petrol station at night, at a spot known locally to Afghans as Pump Benzene Camp. One of four shacks hidden away behind the main Athens highway, the structure built of cardboard motorcycle boxes and plastic sheeting is home to a group of twelve Hazara boys aged between twelve and eighteen years old, living in miserable conditions as they attempt to make their way from Patras to Western Europe.

Carefully peeling back a strip of communal sticking plaster, thirteen year old Najibullah helps his new friends in Patras as they sit bandaging up their injuries after a lunch of bread and beans. While most of the group of twelve unaccompanied Afghan minors have hurt themselves while attempting to run at and jump onto container lorries bound for Italy, others have deep cuts in their feet sustained from nails and glass buried in the remains of their former shelter that was destroyed a week ago. Burned to the ground by the police while the boys were out playing football, the group lost all their possessions, clothes and blankets in the furnace forcing them to sleep out under a bridge in plummeting temperatures during a spell of bad weather. Now back at the camp located behind the Silk Road petrol station on the outskirts of Patras, the destitute teenagers have rebuilt a single, tiny shelter. Utilising flimsy cardboard motorcycle boxes for the walls, they are currently taking a break from their attempts to leave Greece; limping through the charred landscape, they are camouflaging the exterior of the hut with branches and pampas grass for fear of being raided by the authorities.

Lying on top of his sleeping bag under the low ceiling of an elongated tent constructed of wooden poles, steel reinforcements and a truck tarpaulin, fifteen year old Arif rests out of the cold winds blowing in from the seashore. Pitched within the walls of a derelict beach club that has long since lost its roof, around seventy Afghan boys currently sleep around the old dance floor at the illegal encampment. Arriving in the port city of Patras just fifteen days ago, Arif has spent the past four years on the road trying to make it to Europe, spending long stints labouring in Iran, "The situation in Afghanistan was not good so that's why I left. All this time though I was unaware about the land of Greece. Now that I know what things are like here, maybe it was better that I stayed at home".

Across the road from the old international port, a shop located in downtown Patras that has closed down advertises tickets to Italy in the now dirty front window. Despite increased security measures at the new ferry terminal, with up to five sailings a day to Bari, Ancona and Venice, Patras remains a magnet for migrants and refugees attempting to travel illegally on from Greece to Western Europe.

Behind a line of damp blankets and laundered clothes, fourteen year old Javad stands amid a group of other Hazara boys from the old cafe as they sit in a daze on a collection sun loungers and broken chairs amid puddles of water. Leaving his home in Ghazni nine months ago, Javad has become stuck on his long journey to Sweden, having spent nearly seven months now squatting in the dirty, derelict building on Patras' La Manikos Road. Wearing all the clothes they own, the boys are all now cold and wet as rain continues to drip in from the leaking corrugated roof following the winter storms that have set in on Greece's western seaboard. Reliant on collecting wooden palettes and building materials that can be burnt as their only source of warmth, the long days at the old cafe are a miserable step for Javad and his transitory companions desperate to escape from Afghanistan.

Under a structure of scaffolding and salvaged partition walls, a teenage Afghan boy crouches down outside a shelter pitched under a bend in the highway on the main Athens to Patras road. Part of a collection of ramshackle huts located in the meadows behind the Silk Road petrol station, the spot known locally as Pump Benzene Camp is home to four groups of young Hazaras living in squalid conditions as they transit through Greece's main western port city.

Squatting down as a truck approaches the inspection gates of Patras' international ferry terminal, a plain clothed officer from the Hellenic coastguard shines a high-powered torch under the chassis. Having just opened in August 2011, high security measures at the new port mean that every vehicle is now searched for people hiding amongst the cargo in containers and in sophisticated secret compartments that can even contain lights, food and ventilation. Police estimate that an average of three people a day manage to smuggle themselves aboard the ships, the majority of which are from Afghanistan. Truck drivers and security officials tell grizzly stories of finding people dead inside the lorries before they have even left the shores of Greece; some so desperate that they jumped inside cargos of chemicals. With up to five ships sailing each day to Italy, Patras remains one of the most popular clandestine routes for those attempting to reach Western Europe with or without the help of smugglers.

Fiddling with his mobile phone, seventeen year old Murtaza sits with his head in his hand under a shelter hemmed into the exterior walls of a derelict beach club on the edge of Patras. Rucksacks and shopping bags hang from a roof covered with a salvaged truck tarpaulin that provides shelter to twenty other Afghan teenagers squatting at the illegal camp while in transit to Western Europe. Staring blankly, Murtaza feels there is no other path in his life, ÒThe reason I'm here is war. There is no way for me to work anymore in Afghanistan because of the instability. I'm a mechanic but the Taliban caught me on the road and kidnapped me for fifteen days; they said that I had been working with the trucks used by the Americans. They closed my eyes with a piece of cloth and took me to the mountains. They forced me to give them the telephone number of my parents and when they called them they demanded three Lak Afghanis by the next day or else your son will die. My father has no money so they gave him more days and eventually he had to sell his land. After two weeks a group with weapons took me back to my home on motorcycles. After they ate lunch, they gave me a final warning that if I was caught working with the NATO trucks for a second time they would kill me. After that there was no other way for me so my uncle paid a smuggler $4,500 to send me to Europe