Diary of a Calais Volunteer — 3

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 and Part 2 here.

After finishing our day’s work at the warehouse (during which we learnt that 60 kilos of yellow split peas or kidney beans feed 2000 people), we had the privilege of visiting the Jungle itself — the main migrant camp at Calais. As you might expect, it’s difficult to describe — but for reasons you might not have expected.

For instance, there’s a high street. With shops. And restaurants. Some people have been there for months and months, and there’s a little community and an economy going, which makes perfect sense. I can’t show you any pictures because we’re requested to not just bowl into camp and start taking photos of people and their houses, so you’ll have to rely on my powers of narration. Sorry.

But I have to back up — before you get to the high street, you have to walk through what used to be the southern part of the camp that was recently bulldozed. It’s a huge space where thousands of people used to live, and it’s now dust and rubble and garbag. You park by the road, where a lone police van is stationed (they often run searches, apparently — tools and stones are forbidden since they could be used as weapons). According to one of the long-term volunteers, a court ruled that peoples’ houses couldn’t be demolished if anyone was in the house, so French police (50 riot vans full) tear gassed the area to get the residents out. With no-one in the tents, the police moved in.

The main street isn’t made of tents, but nicely made chipboard huts with doors and walls and roofs, covered with tarpaulin. We were with some volunteers who’d been a few times already, and so we were greeted by loads of people as we walked past and had our hands shaken many times. We were invited in for tea by a Kuwaiti man named Hassan, who is deaf and dumb, but this didn’t stop him from offering us copious amounts of tea, bread, cake and milk, and expressing his deep confusion about whether or not Jon was a man, and whether or not we were related (there was some aid from his friend Ahmed, who has learnt some sign language over the last 7 months of knowing Hassan).

It’s a very humbling experience to sit in the hut of someone who has literally almost nothing and who can’t speak or hear, to be made feel so welcome and also to have a big laugh at how confusing Jon’s long hair is, how much he looks like a woman and also how much he looks like me.

Next, we went to a very popular restaurant, The Three Idiots. This place was incredible. It’s a really large hut lined with bright blue tarp and decorated in the most festive way, with balloons taped to the ceiling, an assortment of stuffed tigers, birthday banners, artwork and photos — basically, anything sparkly or colourful. The titular Idiots were the best hosts I’ve ever met, working the room, being incredibly attentive to detail and providing some brilliant Afghani food — without running water. One of them, Cherry, even serenaded Jon in Pashto (or possibly Urdu — unclear), because the word ‘jon’ appeared in the song. He told each of us that we were very smart and very beautiful — it’s entirely possible that he too thought ‘Jon-jon-jon’ was a lady.

I’m working on a new theory that these people aren’t being allowed into the country because they’d put other restaurants out of business. So much for the old myth of asylum seekers wanting to be benefits scroungers — they’ve built businesses out of sticky tape and dirt. Some of them are too proud to even take handouts from the donations team — I can’t imagine them accepting — or expecting — money from any government.

There a music gig going on — stage, sound system and all. We arrived just before the crowds rolled in, and after we’d finished eating, I got chatting to Mahdi, a 17-year-old Somali. After he’d expressed his astonishment that, at 27, I’m not married and don’t have children (‘WHAT?! But you’re so OLD!!!!’); that, yes, Jon is a man and, no, we’re not related (‘I thought you were twins!!!’); that I don’t have any religion (‘But you must have a religion! You’re going to die one day!!!’), he made a brilliant crack about Somali pirates getting loads of chicks (‘They have heaps of money!’), and then told us how he came to be here.

He arrived in camp three days ago: ‘Did you hear on the news last week about the big boat that sank? 400 people drowned. I was on it. I swam for two and a half hours. Only 16 of us survived. I swallowed so much sea water that I vomited for three days. My family thought I was dead and they had a funeral — they saw my name in the news. My dream is to go to the UK. I’ve studied English. I don’t speak French or Dutch. I might try Finland though, or one of those countries. But I will get to the UK.’

There’s a very particular embarrassment in explaining to an asylum seeker that you’re from the place they want to go, or, in my case, that you used to live there, are now freely in Europe and from somewhere else entirely. Freedom of movement is something that people with passports like ours take far, far too much for granted.

There was a lot of colour and joy in The Three Idiots, but I also felt an undercurrent of sadness. This is purgatory. There’s a semblance of normal life in running a business and having a music gig, but all those young men are just biding their time. At 17, Mahdi is full of energy and optimism, but there are thousands of others just like him. It just seems like such a waste when they should be doing all the normal, stupid, fun things kids in their teens and early 20s do — not literally risking their lives to get to a country whose government doesn’t want them.

But they’re doing their best to maintain their pride, hope and dignity, and the charities who work with them are doing a great job of facilitating that. It was actually really great to see what they were wearing after days of sorting clothing and deciding what kinds of things they would and wouldn’t like based on reports. Their fashion sense is pretty awesome, and most of them would completely blend in on any London street. I also feel it would be remiss of me not to mention that there are a lot of banging hotties among the refugees.

Tomorrow’s our last full day here, and we’ll be heading back to the Jungle after working. There’s a conversation class called Jungle Books where the residents can practise their English, so I’m sure we’ll have a lot more stories after that.

We’re exhausted in all the ways you can get exhausted, and it would be easy to let this crisis become your whole world, because it’s so overwhelming. We’re both reluctant and relieved to be leaving soon.

If we have any leftover funds when we leave(in the event, for instance, that we relieve Calais of all its eggs but still don’t meet our egg budget) we’ll of course make sure they get into the right hands.

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