Abdullah sat alone on a bench in Athens' Victoria Square. The 61-year-old refugee from the Afghan city of Kunduz traveled from Iran to Turkey by foot through mountainous terrain. Now in Europe, his fate hangs in the balance as he waits in Greece for an opportunity to head farther west.

The borders are shut and I don't know what to do , I honestly don't, Abdullah told HuffPost Greece at the end of February. I don't know where we are going to put the children to sleep. We have spent all that we had, but we need to continue our journey. We just have to.

Abdullah is one of 1 million migrants and refugees who arrived on Greece's shores since the start of 2015. Many of them use Greece as their entry point into the European Union, amounting to arrivals of around 2,000 people on average per day.

Around 130,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Europe in the first two months of this year -- that's almost equivalent to the total number of arrivals in the first half of 2015 and is about the same amount as all seaborne arrivals in 2014.

But several Balkan countries, including Macedonia and Serbia, sealed their borders several weeks ago, leaving around 43,000 migrants and refugees stuck in Greece.

The border restrictions place enormous pressure on the country as it figures out how to deal with extraordinary numbers of people with nowhere to go.

Some aid organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have teamed up with the Greek government to get the situation under control on the island of Lesbos. "Altogether, there are about 6,000 places to shelter people," Boris Chesirkov, the UNHCR spokesperson on the island, told The WorldPost.

While a spokesperson for the International Rescue Committee in Greece said Lesbos has "very good facilities," the numbers are still staggering.

"So far, in just two months, 70,000 people have already landed on Lesbos," Chesirkov said. "And with the good weather, it's only going to increase."

Although there is no reigning sense of panic on Lesbos, "obviously there is confusion," he added. "There are questions being raised by people on the island [as relates to] movement, like people being able to buy tickets for the ferry."

Large ships, one with the capacity to house 2,000 people, have even been set up on the island's shores as emergency shelter "if there is a need," he noted.

This level of coordination on Lesbos is fairly recent. For months, Greece's government faced criticism from aid organization and other EU members for leaving so much of the relief efforts to volunteers . And even now, though the government's presence is felt on the island, volunteers and aid organizations still take on the brunt of the work.