Refugee Week: #simpleacts and beyond
Refugee Week | Stories from Calais | Call to action
This week is Refugee Week, the UK’s largest festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of people in the refugee community, and today is World Refugee Day. We’d like to take the opportunity to recognise the resilience of people facing extreme hardships whilst stuck at our border. People who don’t get a chance to contribute, existing at the periphery. People for whom creativity is their only outlet for deep trauma and pain. People who have been stuck in limbo in Calais for months upon end, subjected daily to state-sanctioned violence and human rights abuses, sleeping rough in muddy fields, tired, broken, hoping for a better tomorrow.
A child dances around in the rain, unaccompanied, alone, waving his waterproof poncho around, soaking. He tells us that French police are good, all they do is teargas you, your eyes stop hurting after 30 minutes. They’re not like the Bulgarian police, or Iran.
A young man phones to say that the CRS are urinating on his tent, as he speaks. He is inside. What kind of person does this to the shelter of a homeless man?
A boy wanders around with a thin stick, gently hitting volunteers and his friends with it around the legs. Ow! Ouch! We cry, pretending to be hurt. He laughs. My friend. In Libya, we get hit with sticks very hard, you know? Some people die. This is nothing.
Living in the UK doesn’t make anything easier. What if I wake up and I’m back in the woods, getting shaken awake by the police, with teargas? When he does sleep, nightmares come. Exhaustion like you wouldn’t believe. I think about killing myself, he laughs.
Children, toddlers, doodling on scraps of paper, guns and police and their friend Mawda, pens unburdening what they cannot yet comprehend, less creativity, more raw hurt, anger, confusion. Mawda, 2 years old, was shot dead by a Belgian police officer on 17th May 2018. It was Royal Wedding Week, so nobody paid attention. Maybe now that it’s Refugee Week they will.
At the Mexican-US border, children are being torn from their families, with politicians hurling and avoiding blame and reaching for their Bibles. Thousands of men, women and children have died in the mass grave of the Mediterranean Sea in the past few years, and we have become numb. Hundreds have died at borders across Europe, hit by trucks or cars who continue on their journey, or from the combination of harsh weather and limited shelter. Calais is no exception. Children and adults alike, dying at the roadside, and the world decides all too quickly that it was their own fault. A teenager loses his eye at the hands of the police. Another, paralysed from the neck down, caught up in somebody else’s brawl. In the UK, we see suicide and addiction and destitution as people grapple with a broken system rigged against them, alone and lost.
Together, we can do something about this.
The “refugee crisis” didn’t end with the demolition of the Jungle. Conditions are now far worse, and people are living this reality every single day. It is easy to feel helpless at the state of the world, but this is reality. Refugee Week asks for you to take notice and do your part with #simpleacts. Don’t just do something for the sake of social media. We have the power to change the conversation. Make your simple act count. Reach out to people in your community. Write to your MP. Speak to your colleagues, friends and family. There is an ever-growing network of fantastic solidarity groups all over the UK, with something to suit everyone.
Donate.
Volunteer.
Engage.
Write to your MP:
Donate to Refugee Info Bus:
Donate to Help Refugees (who are running desperately low on essential items):
Donation drop off points in the UK:
Volunteer:
How to help the current situation in the USA:
If you read us, if you like us, if you value our perspective, if you believe refugees have a right to quality, independent information on their rights and access to WIFI — — then become a supporter and help us to continue providing our essential services for as little as £5 a month.
