Calais — Day 4

I seem to always start my blog on the evening of the day before. So here I go again. At the end of day three we all made our way to “The Family Pub” — a busy, warm, inviting pub in the town centre to celebrate Niall’s birthday. Niall is one of the first people I met in the warehouse and he is quite a character. Irish/ French, with a Robin Hood style black hat topped with a sparkly sequinned scarf, Niall is the warehouse Inigo Montoya :)

The food was decent, the atmosphere fun and they really pulled out all the stops delivering Niall an incredible birthday cake, complete with fireworks (too big to simply call them sparklers) and the whole pub halted to sing him happy birthday and celebrate. It was something to remember. I personally will remember that a bottle of nice wine here even in the pub is only 4 euros 50. Amazing. Sitting around a table with such a diverse bunch of people, with experience from aid and refugee settings around the world, various development organisations, etc is an incredible experience, and they are a hilarious bunch of people too. My face hurt from smiling, and that is exactly what is needed in this place where we see so much misery. I continue to be inspired and impressed.

On the morning of day 4 I went to the “unofficial” women’s centre in the camp with Liz and a team of about 10 girls for the Monday “shopping day”. This is a day where women have already been given a ticket for a certain timeslot (I think every 30 minutes) and they can come in groups of around 15–20 at a time to “shop” for their own clothes from the boxes of items we deliver. I was warned it would be chaos, generally, and particularly this morning because of the fire that had burned through the Eritrean section of the camp.

On the way to the centre, I sat up front in Liz’s huge UK Military truck surrounded by, and balancing on fire extinguishers. Liz lives in the camp, has done for several months. She survives on donations to fuel and service her truck and food from various sources. She knows just about everyone and they certainly all know her. She is a pint sized pocket rocket, a no-nonsense tough-as-nails woman with a big heart and lion’s courage. I peppered her with questions the entire way, wanting to understand more about the women and children in the camp. Though our conversation with interrupted and fragmented because all the refugees wanted to speak to her through the window on the way in to camp, I learned so much from her in a short space of time.

I asked Liz how many unaccompanied minors she estimates there might be in the camp. She struggled to estimate it, which is understandable given how fast this place has grown and continues to grow. She said in the hundreds, possibly even up to 1,000 refugees under the age of 18. I asked her how many are quite young, and how young. She said she knows of children in The Jungle who are unaccompanied as young as 8 years old, but it is too hard to estimate how many there are.

I further quizzed Liz about how these minors end up in Calais. She told me, in most cases, their fathers have been killed and they have been sold a dream from a very young age that the UK is the place where dreams can be realised and a good life can be achieved. The lure of this dream is so strong that they will not consider any other destination than the UK, and they are trafficked by smugglers who reinforce these beliefs. Though there are children’s centres in France that will care for unaccompanied minors, they will not consider going there, and if someone tries to take them there, they will run. So, though the conditions are not fit for any human being, let alone children, at least if they are in the camp, Liz and her team can make sure they are ok, and provide for their basic needs.

Liz told me the story of one 9 year old boy who fled his country with his mother. Whilst they were on the run, his mother was hit by a car right in front of him and killed. This young boy is still desperately traumatised and alone in the camp.

Liz also told me that people who have family in the UK have the right to claim asylum there under the Dublin 3 agreement. But there are a lack of facilities made available for this processing and so people who technically have the legal right to enter the UK are not able to. Clearly this situation is immoral and unacceptable.

We also got talking about the fire, and I asked about the injured people. She told me that people with major burns had to be carried screaming to the bridge (one exit point of the camp) because the ambulances wont come in to the camp to help. The people who were taken to hospital were treated (France is required to provide medical treatment under international law) but they were sent back to the camp and told to report again to the hospital the following day. One has to wonder why on earth they were not simply kept in overnight with pain relief, etc. The risk of infection is so unbelievably high in these conditions. It seems the same mentality is applied here as in the Australian context: provide as little as possible and make life as difficult as possible as a deterrent to others.

Yet I digress; back to the women’s centre…the van was unloaded by way of a human chain passing boxes through to a large tent heated by a cooking stove. The volunteers went inside to unpack and prepare for the women. Other boxes were loaded in to a caravan, these boxes contained shoes. Next to the women’s centre is some play equipment that has been built — like a kids jungle gym with swings, ropes and climbing areas. It is a “safe” space where kids can play while their mothers “shop”.

The women began to arrive and one volunteer Adia, who speaks Farsi was on the door, checking tickets, coordinating the line. Managing those without tickets and generally ensuring that everything was orderly and calm. Many Eritrean women were quite distressed about losing everything in the fire and Adia did a stellar job of helping them without upsetting the line up and keeping to the system. I hadn’t seen inside at this point and didn’t understand the process. My opportunities for helping on this occasion were pretty limited given that I was the “new kid on the block” and so I stationed myself outside the shoe caravan and helped coordinate the line there. I had to check that women lining up at the caravan had indeed been inside the main “shop” first and then had come to us for shoes.

For the most part, everything ran smoothly. There was some pushing in, and people trying their luck, trying to take too much stock, etc but generally, given the desperation, it was well handled. While the women waited in line we offered them things to eat like dates and fruit. One boy came to the centre with no parents. He was a shy but sweet boy, maybe 9 years old and we helped him with some shoes. All I wanted to do was to wrap him up in a big hug and make everything ok and I couldn’t. Mothers came with their children, beautiful children, beautiful women — they could have been any of us, just like us, just like my friends at home with their children and here they were in the cold, in the mud, in this filthy, hopeless place, trying to claw back some normality selecting their own shampoo, second hand clothes or shoes. If I think on that too much I tear up — it is both inspiring and heartbreaking all at the same time.

After around 2.5 hours of standing at the shoe caravan I was frozen and hungry. I ate an orange and one of the girls agreed to swap with me. I went inside the women’s tent for the first time and saw the set up. Some order in the layout of the boxes we had delivered but utter chaos as everything had been churned through as women looked to find something suitable from each box. They filled garbage bags with underwear, hats, scarves, gloves, all sorts of clothes, toiletries. Bags split, plastic tubs were taken and volunteers tried to be generous and at the same time limit each person to ensure we didn’t run out too early. It was organised chaos, as almost everything is here, be it the warehouse, the camp, the distribution points.

Finally the next delivery arrived and a few short minutes of manic activity ensued as it was all unloaded before the next lot of women with tickets arrived. This shop runs all day in 30 minute intervals — it is intense, exhausting and so very important. Liz asked if anyone needed to go back to the warehouse. I stuck my hand up. Despite it being an excellent experience being there, I felt I could achieve more in the warehouse. I had seen shoes run out and the disappointment and stress it causes, and I had understood what kind of shoes they wanted. I went back to the warehouse and stuck my hand up for sorting the shoe section. I worked with the existing system and improved it and recruited Niall and a couple of other people to help me.

I spent all afternoon sorting shoes, trying to find women’s shoes as more and more deliveries rolled in from random people passing through Calais with cars, vans and lorries. Every delivery was met with equal measure of gratefulness and total frustration. We would open one bag to find excellent trainers and hiking boots, and open the next to find ridiculous summer high heels and sequinned kids ballet flats. Well meaning people either don’t think, or don’t understand the conditions here. For every box of useful shoes we collected, there were around 3 that were immediately binned. This happens in every section of the warehouse and this is why it is such a slow moving beast.

I left exhausted, picked up “dinner” (a salad and croissant) from the Lidl supermarket and headed back to the hostel determined to get on top of the shoe situation tomorrow.