Diary of a Calais volunteer — 4

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, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

Today will be the final ‘full’ update — tomorrow we’ll drop off the promised eggs on our way back through Dunkirk and I’ll post a final tally of everything we bought. But I can tell you as a sneak preview that right this minute there are 540 eggs sitting in our boot. I almost want someone to nick our car just to imagine the look on their faces when they find 18x30 packs of eggs in it. But I really hope it doesn’t happen because we didn’t buy any extra insurance.

I’ve been thinking about this update all day. It would be so easy and neat to wrap it up with a sense of achievement and throw something trite in about how much we’ve learnt and grown and perhaps use the word ‘journey’. But I can’t do that because, as much as I’m proud of what we’ve done and glad we came, and so, so moved that our friends have donated so much wonderful money, this here is the teensiest drop in the ocean.

To give you an example: today at the warehouse, we were in the wood department. Each day, three truckloads of refuse wood gets delivered to the warehouse, which is chopped up with axes and circular saws (yes, Jon and I both used sharp powertools today; no, we didn’t injure ourselves or anyone else), put into bags and then driven to camp.

As we were moving the bags into the back of the truck, a piece of wood fell out and Jon stopped to pick it up. Roland, an older South African guy, said ‘That’s another 10 minutes of warmth for someone.’ And, in the bitter cold like it was today, 10 minutes is better than no minutes. But it put into perspective that there were six people working all day long to bring hundreds of lumps of wood so that thousands of people can get an extra 10 minutes of warmth. And tomorrow, another six people will do the same thing.

Same in the clothes sorting: one more jumper, one more pair of jeans, one more pair of gloves sorted means that one more person has something warm to wear. But there are 50 new arrivals at camp each night. How do you keep up?

We went to the Jungle once again after finishing for the day, to Jungle Books — the camp library — where the refugees can come and practice their English or French. We arrived as one man was choosing a few books to take with him — he’d been offered asylum somewhere in the west of France. He wasn’t sure where it was.

We chatted for a long time to Naqib, who was funny and charming and full of energy and smiles despite having lived in the Jungle for the past eight months. Another guy from Sudan joined us, and we showed people where Australia is on the map (interestingly for me, most were hazy at best on Australia as a country — ‘do you speak English there?’), and talked about the weather patterns in our home countries, and Jon nearly had to drop his trousers to prove that he was a man.

The Sudanese guy (whose name we didn’t quite catch) was full of hilarious tall tales about how many girlfriends (or ‘habibis’) he had, and pulled out an unconvincing picture of his ‘wife’, and was offering to teach me Arabic in exchange for also being his habibi. He didn’t take no for an answer when Jon and I explained that we weren’t interested in bringing any other habibis into our relationship.

Talking to them was great — we laughed and we exchanged stories about our lives and our homes, but it was so sad to say goodbye, and gutwrenching to think that we’ll never find out what happens next for them. Difficult also is the fact that several were incredibly well educated — Naqib is a pharmacist, the Afghan man who got asylum is an architect, and there was someone else who had been studying medicine. There’s the half-joking archetype of the super qualified immigrant, but it really seemed to be the case.

All you can do is listen and say you’ll try to help and give out lots of hugs.

At least the issue of Jon’s gender was settled once and for all: when we were leaving, someone said ‘nice hair!’, so we asked if he thought Jon was a woman or a man, and not one, but two refugees agreed that, absolutely, he was a man, much to Jon’s relief.

As we left camp, about a dozen police vans seemed to be closing in on each corner of the camp, locking it down. It looked really sinister and, again, we were powerless. But we could get in our car and go and eat too much overpriced food at an American-style diner, so that’s what we did. And even though we had much better food in the Jungle, in a far more convivial atmosphere, the freedom to eat bad food wherever you want is priceless. I wish that freedom for every person in the Jungle.

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