Diary of a Calais volunteer —2

Earlier this year, my boyfriend and I decided to spend five days volunteering at the refugee camp in Calais, driving via Dunkirk on the way to and from. To maximise our contribution, we did some fundraising among our family and friends via GoFundMe, and exceeded our target of 200 AUD nearly 10 times over. This meant that we could buy supplies on the ground according to need. These are my daily updates to our donors. Read Part 1 here.

Today we got something of a sense of the uphill battle the organisation has in keeping on top of things.

For instance: having been in the warehouse just two days, we could see the turnover for volunteers is enormous. There are long term volunteers who are responsible for inducting everyone and explaining procedure, and they have to do this every single day, mostly to an entirely new group. Having been on clothes sorting duty a mere two days made me one of the most experienced people in the section.

Another issue is that there’s a huge sense of futility because so much of what gets donated is useless to the refugees. Here are a few of the reasons why:

• People have just cleared their wardrobe: things are stained, holey, musty or broken, or are inappropriate (frilly blouses, t-shirts with sexy images on them, business attire… the list goes on)
• People are well-meaning but haven’t considered the practicality of their donations: for instance, there are many donations of big heavy wool overcoats — unwieldy, not waterproof, heavy. These go in the ‘vintage’ pile, for sale to hipsters and volunteers.
• We’re too big: lots of great stuff gets passed on because the refugees are typically very slight of build and don’t have much excess fat on them, and the donations are from people of more prosperous proportions.
• There’s a huge oversupply of stuff for women and children — who make up 10% of the refugees — and an undersupply of stuff for men. As a result, a lot of women’s stuff is simply surplus. Lots of people like the idea of donating toys — we found a bag of horrifying dolls that no child — let alone traumatised, homeless ones — should ever see.

On the plus side, we’ve both found out that we’re pretty good at this, and seem to give off an air of authority, because other volunteers were often asking us questions, which makes us feel pretty clever.

We’re also getting brownie points from the food distribution team by turning up each morning with another carload of stuff. Today, Jon found out that they’re in desperate need of UHT milk and kidney beans — the food organiser was surprised and really grateful when he said ‘we’ll bring you some tomorrow’ — ‘You’ll do that? That’d be AMAZING!’

So this afternoon we went back to our favourite supermarket, Leader Price (despite surely being their least favourite customers) and cleared them out of kidney beans. Like, they have no more kidney beans. Some people came looking for kidney beans after we loaded them all into our trolley and had to get a member of staff to pull some more down. After they took their two tins from the box, we took the rest of the box. We are the #kidneyqueens.

You can get a box of 30 eggs for 3.50 Euro at Leader Price, and currently our remaining budget stands at 174 Euro. Which, if my maths is correct, should buy us 1,620 eggs.

Um… I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat.

If you want to volunteer or donate, start with the Calais — People to People Solidarity Facebook Group to find out what’s needed.