What Nobody Tells You About Calais
A personal reflection on volunteering in Calais: “All I did…was be lucky enough to be born into a European family — which is to say that I have done nothing.”
January 2018, the day before I arrived in Calais, a 16 year old boy sustained life-changing injuries at the hands of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS), the general reserve of the French National Police. He was shot in the face with a rubber bullet whilst trying to retrieve his belongings. This was during yet another police clearance of the makeshift camps that have replaced the ‘Jungle’ after its eviction in October 2016.
The young boy lost his eye, was at risk of losing the vision in his second eye due to the spreading infection, had his nose pushed inside his skull and had multiple skull fractures.
This attack took place ten days after French president Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Calais in which he ‘defended the security forces from accusations of brutality made by some activists, but vowed to punish officers involved in violence against migrants’.
The attack on the 25 was not covered heavily by the press and there was no punishment issued against the CRS. Calais was not back in the news until the violent clashes that took place on 1 February.
On my sixth day in Calais (my fifth day at the warehouse), two fights, the first of which involved a shooting, broke out between Eritrean refugees and Afghan smugglers, resulting in twenty two people being sent to hospital, four of which were in critical condition. The volunteers who were out on distribution that day saw the group of men running with sticks and metal rods in their hands, stopped the distribution and evacuated. I was not out on distribution then, and had in fact not yet been on a distribution at that point. Still, I, and the other volunteers back at the warehouse, were receiving messages from loved ones around the world asking if we were safe. When the violence taking place was doing so within the refugee community, the story was international news in a matter of hours.
And then, just as quickly as the news had spread, it had disappeared, and Calais received no further large-scale international attention for the remainder of my time there. But I did begin going on distributions just two days later, and I did witness the very use of excessive force by the police that Macron claimed charity organisations had lied about.
I accompanied a fellow volunteer on a hospital run one morning, so I arrived at the site of the Jungle earlier than I normally would for a distribution. When we pulled up to the site, we saw more CRS vehicles and officers than usual. As we were looking for the young man we were going to take to visit his friend in the hospital, I stood directly in front of a line of CRS officers blocking off the entrance to the area. Others dressed in hazmat suits, were taking away tents, and even cardboard boxes, that had been used for shelter from the northern French winter.
We eventually found A. and got in the car to make our way to the hospital. I had started to get to know a few of the guys, but hadn’t spoken to A. before. Not knowing what else to say, I asked him how he was doing. A.’s response wasn’t the usual ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ that I would often get from the guys. Instead, he didn’t bother with putting on a smile for me and simply stated that he was ‘so cold’. I remembered the pain I felt from the cold during my first two distributions in particular, and how much my hand hurt that very morning when I took it out of my glove just long enough to record footage of the clearance on my phone.
I’m not sure if it was A.’s answer alone or a combination of events, but it was on this drive to the hospital that I was hit the hardest by the realisation of the state we were in and just how out of my depth I was in terms of my uselessness.
The experience of walking into the hospital with A. and then into the actual room where his friend was being treated is one I still haven’t really processed. I stood in the room, not knowing what business I had being there, but the patient still smiled at me and thanked me for coming. He asked if the hospital had WiFi he could connect to, which it didn’t. The doctors were running tests, but weren’t able to tell him exactly what the problem was, and he wasn’t able to get in contact with anyone. My French colleague tried speaking with several members of the hospital staff, and after waiting around until he could speak with the doctor, we found out it was likely that the patient had Tuberculosis.
I saw A. the next time I went out on distribution, and every time I went out on distribution after that, he would bring his food up to the van so that we could have lunch together.
On a shoe distribution, (these distributions are particularly long and difficult as we do not have enough items to give to everyone) we brought a speaker for the guys to play their music on. Right away the guys were dancing in two circles. I was standing at the door of the van, facing the larger circle and the street, so I was able to see when a group of CRS officers began approaching.
The way they were walking towards the circle of dancers indicated to me that I should start recording; and sure enough, before I knew it, an officer had one of the guys by the collar, pushing him backwards and yelling in his face.
As I focused the camera on him, the CRS officer next to me sprayed some of the guys with tear gas. I wasn’t even sprayed directly, but tears still ran from my eyes and the itching in my throat still caused me to cough. The sounds of guys yelling, choking and spitting can be heard in the background of the footage. The catalyst for this reaction from the police?
Apparently, whilst everyone was dancing, one young man showed the CRS his middle finger.
I am back in London, where I am experiencing snowfall for the first time in over three years. The Siberian cold front sweeping across Europe has caused ‘widespread travel disruption’. On a less sarcastic note, the Severe Weather Emergency Provision (SWEP), which offers guidance to support local authorities in preventing the deaths of people sleeping rough during winter (Homeless Link, homeless.org.uk), has been activated. The current weather in Calais, as I am writing this at 9 AM GMT, 10 AM CET on Thursday, 1 March, is -4 degrees Celsius, 24.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
I got a ride back to London with a fellow volunteer. We were stopped for further questioning at the border because he had an American passport, but no proof of his return date. My EU passport was returned to me as the border patrol disappointedly admitted that she ‘couldn’t do anything about [me]’.
Included in the long list of questions we were asked was how we knew each other, which eventually led to the discovery that we had been volunteering in Calais. The border patrol immediately turned to her coworker and asked if our car had been thoroughly searched. It had in fact been searched, by officers with large guns. So had every other car we saw crossing before us. All this to prevent the chance of a human being, somehow deemed ‘illegal’, crossing a fabricated line.
I am not from the UK, but have been allowed to choose to call London my home. This choice may (or may not, Theresa May doesn’t even know) be taken away from me come 11 PM on Friday, 29 March 2019. All I did to deserve to live in London was be lucky enough (or unlucky enough after next year) to be born into a European family — which is to say that I have done nothing.
My parents escaped from a home they did not feel safe in, and were granted asylum in a nearby country before resettling on another continent. I hesitate to include this point because my family’s history is not the only reason I can recognise the arbitrariness of border enforcement and just how wrong the police’s treatment of displaced people of Calais is. However, I chose to include it in case it offers a different perspective on who a ‘migrant’ may be (if simply saying that they are human is not enough).
