News of Calais

A letter to me from my sister, Anne:

CALAIS COMMENTARY

First, the less bad news. The refugee camp , ‘The Jungle’ on sand dunes beside a smelly chemical plant a few miles northwesterly of Calais, is teeming with volunteers. Volunteers from France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, the USA, Poland, and England. And probably other countries, but these were the ones I met during my week there.
France is noticably represented by Medicins Sans Frontiers, running clinics, advice centres, and organising the mammoth task of rubbish clearing, including the portaloos. The Belgians have set up a kitchen, staffed by refugees, and the English are everywhere, organizing kitchens, and distribution of clothing and setting up wooden self-build shacks especially important in the hostile weather. Calaid, are well-organised with rotas for distributing food, clothes, gas bottles and other necessities, and for work in the kitchens. Then there is ‘the Dome’ , an arts and theatre centre, which doubtless you will have seen on TV news. Performances of theatre, music and dance are organized there daily, with workshops offered to refugees who are interested.
Nearby the Dome is the Womens Centre, organizing a variety of events, and with a quiet place for talking, run by a Dutch girl and an Afghan who, importantly, speaks both English and Pushtu. Not far away is the ‘Jungle Box’ for children’s books and creative play. There are at least three schools, organized by different national groups, and the two churches, one Protestant the other, Orthodox, set up a year ago by Soloman, from Ethiopia, a year ago. There are services there every morning.
The volunteers wear cheerful smiles and show great bonhomie, and goodwill to all. Some have been there for over four months, like Sophie and Karim and their children, who came from Newcastle for three days in September to provide the most important necessity of all- food. On arrival, they were so moved by the situation that they remained. Four months later they were returning briefly to England so that their eldest daughter could resume her college course, but they were due to return a week later. As I peeled a mountain of potatoes, Sophie told me how she had felt compelled to go to the Jungle, feeling that providing spicy Eastern-type food she would be offering comforting home memories. She and Karim are Muslim and she feels that different religions come together in requiring each of us to help humankind with basic necessities like food . Then there is the Ashram kitchen, also offering similar food and ginger chai, hot and aromatic to ward off the cold and infections. Similarly the Belgian kitchen, tucked in a less accessible corner of the city, run by refugees who communicate in a mixture if Italian, French and Arabic. There, the always smiling Saladdin, the chef from Syria, said me when I was due to depart, “See you in London soon, Inshallah.” One of his helpers, Mohammed, had fled from Egypt via Libya and Italy, with is twelve year old son, and are now stranded.
Everywhere, the good natured atmosphere is infectious; one volunteer said to me “here it’s a bit like a festival…in a a bad kind of way”.
Another enthused romantically “It’s amazing to see all these people getting on well together when they were hating each other’s guts back in the part of the world they’ve all come from, like Eritrea and Sudan. It’s anarchy in the purest form.”
Shops have sprung up selling various groceries, and cafes, such as ‘Kabul restaurant’. Everyday, I enjoyed a hot cup of hot sweet chai , cosy and friendly behind the tarpaulins.
Graffiti bears witness to the complexity of feelings and dashed hopes-
‘England we love you’
‘Veni, Vidi, Vici’…with the ‘vici’ crossed out.
The very long walk from the bus stop to the camp is a quiet preparation for
the bad news. Bird song , curlew-like, hopefully greeted the dawn, as a stream of vans full of police passed me on their way to take up their positions at the entrance to the camp.
You will already have seen on TV news and newspaper reports that conditions are horrible, grim, and unsustainable. Mud and rubbish everywhere, an icy wind blowing from the sea, and portaloos dealt with once a week. A few standpipes for washing and collecting water. Rats creep around. Tents are crammed close to each other, though some are gradually being replaced by the shacks and a few caravans. However, the shacks contain no ventilation. Many families are used to sitting round a fire at night. During the summer two hundred tents were destroyed when a fire lit outside caught a tent. The increasing cold weather will doubtless tempt oil stoves inside (fortunately, so far, there are none available). The good relationships rhapsodied about by the volunteer above are less good at night- this same volunteer told me of being held at knife point at 3 a.m. on new year’s eve, and being relieved of laptop and phone. Another told me of her caravan being broken into. Similarly, Karim explained the necessity for a metal wall enclosing Sophie’s
Kitchen because people had been breaking in to steal food.
I talked with people who had fled from Syria, Aghanistan, Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan- the latter to a lesser extent for they speak almost no English. All have similar stories, of journeys across seas, and lands such as Libya and Italy, all their savings given to traffickers in exchange for a dream that had led them to this desolate blind alley. Some have suffered the theft of vital documents by the same traffickers who promised to help them, often beguiling them with fantastic tales. One victim believed a story that Paris is sprayed with perfume every morning .
The younger refugees cling to the dream of England, and London in particular, as the promised land. I spoke to a few of these young men and attempted to explain how much harder is the reality, and that taking offers of asylum elsewhere in Europe might serve them better- but the dream would not be shifted.
In a recent Guardian article, Jonathan Freedland praised the people ‘who have traded comfortable lives for working in the mud and squalor of the Jungle…simply because they were moved by the sight of their fellow human beings in distress’
( Guardian 26.12.15). Simply being moved to ‘do something’ was the reason volunteers gave for being there; some of those who have been there several months look crazed with exhaustion. My week there was less than a drop in the ocean, but I was able to use both my professional services as a mental health worker and my life skills, peeling over 80 kg of potatoes and washing up. As a lone diminuitive woman over seventy I was welcomed with curiosity and good humour, an honorary grandmother, and I shall return, in time after I have weighed up whether the expense might not be better used as a donation to MSF or Calaid because the paradox of voluntary work is that in fact it is expensive.
A dear friend asked me whether it had been worthwhile. For myself, yes, in facing down my own fears, which turned out to be unnecessary. But, in global terms, many contradictions spring to mind. Reflecting now from the comfort of my home the overwhelming memories from that ‘maze of confusion’ (G.K. Chesterton) are of the courage shown in the face of such an uncertain future by the refugees who have fled tyranny, and who are now facing obscene privations. Many have professional qualifications and want to lead their own lives, and who feel humiliated by constant hand-outs. And of the heroic efforts of many volunteers, building, supporting, cooking and cleaning. And the hope that good will ultimately emerge from a mess. that cannot be sustained, and , like any frustrating situation, will implode at some point. All the factors make this a huge crisis that has to call for an international intervention.
Anne M Jones.
1318 words.