We spent four days helping out at a refugee camp in Calais

Isolated in St Andrews the world and its issues can seem very far removed, however, reading about a situation as close as Calais has drawn myself and many other students to the refugee camps to experience helping out first-hand.

With a range of media portrayals from being compared to a music festival to the reports of violence and complete lack of hygiene we found that even the French journalists were surprised at the gravity of the situation. With the French and English governments actively hindering aid groups it became increasingly clear that the current situation relies on ad hoc volunteers and the generosity of strangers.

Like me, many people, once having first read about the refugee crisis, are sucked into needing to learn more and do more to counter this horrific situation, so two other St Andrews students and I went from the fifth to the tenth of January to help out.

This is how the Volunteering in Calais Facebook group began. Returning from volunteering in Calais a group of Bristol based volunteers bought a nine-seater van and now help organise the logistics behind volunteering in Calais. This is what facilitated our trip to Calais. The Facebook page is full of people asking for and offering lifts from various UK locations and and helps to facilitate housing too, meaning it’s easy to organise a trip.

Group photo upon our return

What we did once in Calais

On our first day in Calais we were allocated jobs in the warehouse, either sorting donations for food and clothes distribution or working with the construction team preparing basic wooden structures to create elevated frames to keep the refugees out of the mud.

(With the work that we did being controversial a recent break-in to the construction warehouse leaves the team missing valuable tools and hindering their work providing stable shelters to those most in need. To help donate here).

Messages from the refugees hung up in the construction warehouse

The clothing warehouse was a tightly run operation separating the useful from the useless (the pink dress serving as a daily reminder of exactly what they do not need) creating kits with clothing, blankets and hygiene packs to try and cater for people’s basic needs.

Keeping it classy in Calais…

We found that men’s gloves, wellies, gas stoves and kettles were in short supply. As it costs around £20,000 to pay the smuggling fees families send the strongest member of the family first, resulting in the majority of the refugees here being young men or teens (although there are significant numbers of women and children too).

This also means that the current refugees are generally middle class, highly educated individuals who’s main reason for wanting to cross over to England is that they already have family in England and that they speak the language.

Calais has, by trial-and-error, established organised and efficient distribution methods with leaders from each area of the refugee camp helping to distribute the goods and keep track of needs within the camp. Being able to participate in distribution is rewarding as you are able to see your work from beginning to end, but it is also a challenge as you are constantly having to let people down not being able to provide more, constantly being asked for blankets and shoes and even half-jokingly being offered £4000 for a ride to England.

In need of wellies

The other camp

The Dunkirk camp has yet to become established, with authorities refusing to allow any construction or bedding material in, also lacking a designated warehouse to sort goods out. This means that while there are kindhearted people donating things daily, the children’s centre, for example, ended up with a massive surplus of apples but not much else.

Dunkirk – music festival or humanitarian crisis?

Refugees come to Dunkirk as, with increased security, Calais is no longer a secure route out of France. Additionally some migrate from Calais to Dunkirk in an effort to escape the regular riots and police brutality — beatings, tear gas and being chased onto the motorway are all features of life in ‘the jungle’ — only to see the conditions of Dunkirk and to turn back. Having to choose between dirt or danger is not something which falls under our Declaration of Human Rights and, as Medicins Sans Frontiers has declared, has created inhumane conditions for these thousands of people.

The edge of the camp

We delivered food packages to the peripheries of the camp to single men who are not provided for and who may have missed the food donation trucks.

We spent a day in the mud of Dunkirk here seeing the impressive efforts of volunteers and locals distributing hot and cold food and clothing when they could. Spending a lot of time in the small children’s centre we saw how the rampant chest infections, scarring journeys and ubiquitous hope to reach England was a part of every day life for every member of the camp, young or old.

Stuck inside tensions rise quickly and frequently among the kids

In the corner of this photo you can see a make-shift ball tube created by one of the volunteers before donations of books and toys came in.

What you can do

Even if you don’t have time to go to Calais and help out for yourself there is plenty you can do from home.

Donations can be directly given to this website or you can follow various Facebook groups who routinely post messages with lists of what is urgently needed — we found that men’s wellies, gloves, tinned food (not glass) such as chick peas and beans, gas stoves, gas and metal kettles are all things which are needed.

Additionally petitions, letters and other forms of government pressure to react to this situation is much needed as organisations such as the UNHCR have been trying for months to access the camps and send in aid — only to be hindered by the French and British governments.