Thursday 26 November 2015

Hope for Humanity by Justine Corrie via Facebook: November 26th 2015

Hope. That’s what I’m left with ultimately. Hope for humanity. Spending just a weekend out in the camp known as ‘The Jungle’ in Calais – I’m left with many, many mixed and contradictory feelings – but ultimately hope stands out. I can’t help but be reminded of Pandora’s box – a sense of all the evils of the world having been unleashed, the horrors unfolding around the world that many of the refugees are fleeing both from and into in – yet there, in the Jungle, behind the barbed wire fences, beneath the tarpaulin shelters, amongst the rubbish strewn mud and sand dunes there is still some hope- in the eyes of the people; in the smiles, in the laughter, in the meetings and connections – there is hope.
I was only there for 2 days, so I don’t feel qualified to write anything that resembles an accurate portrayal of life in the Jungle. I can only say a little about my own experience there and what I’m left with. I don’t want to claim any real knowledge or understanding of how it must be to live there, to exist in that reality every day, not knowing whether you will leave or not, not knowing if you will ever see your family again.
The 2 days I was there were also unseasonably warm. The sun was shining down on the camp and you could almost imagine you were at some festival in a foreign land: wood-smoke plumes drift upwards; guitars strum; aromatic cooking smells waft on the air; groups of young men play football; feral children run around making mischief; women sit around talking. Yet, there is no home to return to when the festival’s over: when the sun goes in and the biting cold wind blows and icy rain pummels the makeshift shelters, flooding the ground and everything lying in it’s wake creating the kind of mud that swallows entire tents up. You may have lost your shoes somewhere on your journey here too and be making do with an odd pair you’ve salvaged from the rubbish. You may well not have anywhere near enough bedding to keep you warm at night. It’s likely that you haven’t had enough to eat and are reliant of the food parcels that get delivered sporadically to the camp by volunteers like us. Add to that the possibility that you’re already traumatised by the hell you’ve left behind in the country that you once called home, it’s also highly likely you have a medical condition that needs attention.
So how does hope figure in all that? In the humanity, dignity and cooperation of the people living in those conditions. That despite the appalling-ness of that reality becoming your day-to-day existence - you can still smile. My eyes met so many other eyes in real contact, real connection. A thousand stories unraveling in each of those pairs of eyes that meet mine. The willingness of people to connect, to reach out and make contact, to tell their story –yes, but that they also that they want to hear my story too. They tell me why they are here, the journey they endured, about the loved-ones they left behind, or about the family they already have in the UK and the injuries they’ve sustained trying to board the train night-after-night trying to reach their family here. They take out their phones to show me the photos of their children, beaming with love and pride as parents do. Sometimes they have not seen their children for several years, nor heard news of them. Yet, they ask to know about my life – they tell me how they love “England people’ – they have very good hearts so many coming here to help”, they ask to see photos of my children and want to take a ‘selfies’ with me to take back.
There is hope in the coordinated efforts of teams of volunteers made up of a diverse demographic: students on gap years, retired older men and women, a group of Sikh men, young Muslim women, Buddhists, dreadlocked seasoned activists, mum’s, dads, company directors… and refugees themselves - you find a diverse cross section of society here pooling their skills, collaborating without any central organisation that holds them together.
The vast warehouse that takes delivery of much of our 4 van-loads of donations is a seething hub of activity: pallets of donations being moved by donated fork lift trucks, groups of young people in high vis jackets sorting through piles upon piles of boxes, vans being loaded to take to the camp for distribution. The little makeshift camp kitchen at the very back a little hub of meetings and coordination. One of our team decides the kitchen area needs some TLC and a sort-out (it does!) so she dives in to set up an efficient working kitchen complete with signposts for designated areas. This is how it works- you see something that needs doing and you just make it happen.
I’m happy we could bring pre-sorted, labeled donations – we unload the van, a large number of other volunteers jumping in to help us, and the boxes can be taken straight to the right places. We hand over the 100 food parcels we’ve made up to a group that are heading into the camp with a load more from other groups. Ours bring the total up to several thousand that will be distributed from their van.It’s decided that we will take our 250 clothing packs, several hundred jumpers/fleeces and 250 toiletry packs for direct distribution into the camp.
The most common way to distribute en-mass in the camp is the ‘one line’ system. All the refugees know how this works and quite often as soon as you are seen near your van you’ll be approached and asked ‘one line?’ Basically they form an orderly queue. Sometimes it’s a very long queue and they may be waiting for an hour or so. But it works to prevent chaos and ransacking of vehicles and tries to promote dignity and mutual respect for everyone involved. All of our distributions go really well in with this method and we are able to move about the camp and distribute within different areas. The camp is loosely arranged into areas that correlate to the main countries that the refugees come from. We start off in Eritrea, just near the beautiful church and later spend time in Afghanistan, Little Syria and Sudan. The one-line system relies on us working well together as a team and knowing our roles, often a refugee, once they’ve come to the front of the line and received their item, will want to help. So different people along the way join us, and our team grows to include a young man from Syria, a lovely Afghani man and a tall Sudanese guy. It’s interesting listening to them chat to one another, telling each other where they are from and a bit of their story.I’m struck by how much playfulness and laughter there is. So many smiles too.
One of the team roles is to walk up and down the line helping to keep order, although mostly this is done by the refugees themselves anyway – any queue jumpers and quickly dealt with collectively – a communal shout of ‘one line!’ So the team member walking the line is mostly thanking people for waiting patiently and mostly everyone is very relaxed and good-humoured and just wants to chat with you. Women and children will usually want to jump the queue and push in the front. We’ve been told that we should let them know it’s ‘one line’ for everyone- men, women ad children alike, but mostly the men encourage them forward anyway so we go along with that. We see a few chaotic scenes where people have turned up in their car/van not knowing the ‘one line’ system and chaos ensues. It’s horrible. It creates the kind of scene that the media will take photos of and use to spread an inaccurate and incomplete picture of what goes on. Bags get thrown out of vans that drive off quickly, bags full of random, unsorted, many wholly inappropriate useless items that no one here needs. It create a huge waste problem and there are piles of unwanted ‘donations’ strewn around the camp that could have gone to useful homes elsewhere. People don’t want to take what they don’t need – on our distributions things got handed back to us out of toiletry bags if they already had that item so it could be given to someone else, swaps happened amongst the refugees and much good humour trying some of the clothing on.
Having done a few successful distributions we feel like ‘old hands’ and we’re able to intercept two vans that arrived before they opened up and any chaos ensued. Another 600 food parcels in one and 1000 food bags in another with bottles of water and some blankets too – all distributed with ease and great help from some of the refugees who joined us.
Around the camp there is so much building happening: impressive structures created from pallets, large communal spaces, kitchens, medical centres, restaurants, shops and homes, as well as trust and hope being built.
We eat the best meal I have while in France in Afghanistan. We sit inside the Afghan kitchen eating delicious aromatic spiced rice and beans while talking to a French volunteer who’s been helping in the camp for one and half years.
A phone-call with one of our to try and meet up for a distribution goes like this:
“Where are you?”
“We’re in Sudan I think, where are you?”
“I’m in little Syria, just past the Women’s centre”
“Can you meet us in Afghanistan?”
“Where’s that?”
“ Keep going along the main drag till you see the shops and Afghan flag.”
“Is that before you get to Eritrea?”
There is a unique atmosphere of cooperation and collaboration I don’t feel I’ve seen before. There’s a huge reserve of skills among the refugees and slowly those skills are being able to be put to good use. Builders, engineers, medics, lawyers, and chefs: finding ways to use their skills in ways that can improve the daily existence of many.
Of course, not many people want to stay in the camp; it’s not a place to build a home. The ever-present CRS riot Police presence (the Armadillo’s – due to their riot gear look) machine-guns to their chest – adds to an environment of fear and intimidation. Rumours abound about the camp being shutdown and small areas are bulldozed: tents, belongings, essential papers and all on a fairly regular basis. This is no place to settle.
I met many who had applied for asylum status in France already but have a long wait with no support in the meantime. And many others who have friends & family in the UK, and desperately want to join them. The young Eritrean guy with a shy smile who softly spoke fluent English, he was an engineering graduate with a wife and child back home, “French is very difficult for me to learn, I have friends in England and I want to work there and build a life for my family.”
There are many other conversations, meetings, connections: Refugees and the volunteers who came here once and have returned time and time again, unable to stop returning, pulled by the absolute need to ‘do something’ in the face of our impotent, unwilling politicians. They return or stay even despite their own complicated lives.
I like the three-dimensional approach that Joanna Macy describes in her work around ‘the Great Turning’. To meet this crisis well we need:
Action-
Political Lobbying, legal work to support refugees rights and promote changes, as well as direct action – Volunteering, protest and campaigning. Work of this kind buys time. It saves lives and cultures – but it’s insufficient on it’s own.
Analysis and Structural Alternatives-
To create meaningful change to the current unworkable systems and structures, we need to fully understand the current and historic dynamics at play at a systemic level. This can include study groups and developing new ways to self-organise and collaborate.
Awareness- Structural alternatives cannot take root without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. As well as doing the work ‘out there’ we need to look at our own inner conflicts, consciousness and responses. It’s this third dimension that can support us and save us from succumbing to panic or paralysis. The realisations we find here can help us to resist the temptation to stick our heads in the sand or turn on each other, as scapegoats on whom to vent our fear and rage.
Let's do this.
Yes, I am left with hope. Hope for the ones that have made it this far in their perilous journey: hope for compassion and care and support and community. And hope that arises from witnessing the courage and willingness of the many that are already making a stand and doing something. Hope in the midst of the smiles and shining eyes and laughter that not only survive, but also thrive among the refugees.
Hope for the thousands upon thousands of others that are currently stranded beyond these borders on the far side of desperate conditions – even a glimmer of hope there, that there will be enough of a call to action in people’s hearts and we can meet this humanitarian crisis and it’s immensity of suffering.

Wednesday 25 November 2015

And What A Jungle It is! - by Savannah Simons: November 25th 2015

I’ve just returned from 4 days in Calais at the Refugee camp dubbed “The Jungle”. And a jungle it is. 

Destroyed tents, soaked clothes and shit-stained everything. Standing, dripping, in a queue for over 2 hours in the torrential rain and gale force winds for a jumper, only to return to a flooded tent, with nowhere to dry anything, wet, freezing to death, was the everyday reality. 

The evenings consisted of another run and jump attempt onto the back of a train, fall off or get caught, pepper sprayed and beaten by the police before being locked up for up to 20 days in order to be “taught a lesson”. Some told me it was worth it. Others didn't. A Syrian Social Anthropologist who had been in the camp for 4 months said to me "at least here, I have a chance of survival". Return home and be killed was his alternative.
In the Jungle I was greeted with smiles and warmth. “How are you?” I was asked, “where are you from?", "would you like some tea?", people offering to share what little they had. The spirit of these individuals, in such disgusting circumstances was unbelievable.
During distribution I found myself apologising to everyone for the weather. For the UK and French government. For our inaction. For the fact that we sit at home and go "that's awful!" and then do nothing. "How the hell is this happening", "this makes no sense", "I don't understand", I found myself repeating over and over again. How have we come this far in civilization, how are we this technologically advanced, for people to still be denied food, water and shelter. The fact that this is happening right in front of us, not in some far away land we are told is "inaccessible"/ "not our problem" and still do nothing, when we are all able to, is inexcusable.
We are lucky enough to be born in a peaceful and prosperous country. Not everyone has such luck.
Your political orientation is irrelevant. Your views on border control and immigration policy are irrelevant. Nobody should be living like this Anywhere, and most certainly not in a country as wealthy and as capable as France. Anyone and everyone can do something.
Calaid, the organisation we volunteered with is doing everything it can and is volunteer-run. We spent days sorting clothes, shoes and supplies in the Warehouse, and building and distributing in the Jungle. The piles and piles of unsorted clothes and shoes; and undistributed food and supplies is frustrating: their are simply not enough volunteers or vans. The governments/ the UN are doing NOTHING whatsoever, so it really is down to us. Even volunteering for 1 day can make a huge difference. Its not for someone else to do, its for all of us to do.

I've Returned Safely After Three Days at 'The Jungle' in Calais. By Jape: November 25th 2015


The situation there is staggering. I expected to be taking part in an effective and well mobilised charity operation helping to ensure that vulnerable people were receiving vital aid in their hour of need. I had pictured teams of volunteers professionally funded and coordinated. That is not even close to what is actually happening there. Arriving at the main and only distribution warehouse on day one you learn that it is an otherwise disused and partially derelict building, occupied by no more than around 35 or so volunteers (including the group of 15 I travelled with that day). Among these is a sort of 'hardcore' of maybe seven or eight people (they wear orange fluorescent jackets, the rest of us wear yellow) who on their own untrained initiative do their best to organise the operation. Most of these people came for a day or two some months ago and upon realising how desperate things are they have simply dropped everything else in their lives and moved in. ALL the volunteers who have experienced going 'on site' at the jungle and seen it with their own eyes immediately vow to themselves to make further plans to return to Calais doing a few days or weeks in the future as and when they can.

The warehouse contains six or seven bays of sorted items in boxes on shelves and a pile of unsorted donations roughly the size of a small bungalow. There are two people working on this pile today. I will later learn that a vast quantity of "aid" in this pile is in fact non useful and non usable items, which will be sold to 'cash for clothes' at a price of one Euro per Kilo. First, though, everything in the huge pile will have to be sorted through by hand, then further sorted into individual boxes - medium t shirts, large t shirts, children's clothes, scarves, gloves, the many different types and sizes of shoe that exist, hygiene products, tents, the list goes on.

I spend my first morning making up what they call 'Lucky bags' - a thin black bin liner tied at the top containing two t shirts, a jumper, socks, gloves and a hat. Sometimes they include underwear or scarves too but often not since, like today, these items are in very short supply. Four of us really going for it make up around 300-400 bags over the course of a morning - during distribution at the camp these will disappear within just a few minutes.

I didn't do the distributions but I later witnessed them whilst I was doing other things at the camp. There were many more people in the queue than there were bags; it was raining and freezing cold so people were shivering; sometimes a queue will break down and chaos ensues; sometimes the distribution has to be abandoned to avoid people getting hurt. I only made two brief trips to The Jungle on day one to drop off wood and a rickety gazebo and spent the rest of the day doing jobs at the warehouse.

Day two involved getting to know the camp itself in much more detail. When you work at The Jungle you are one of perhaps a dozen (more on weekend days) from the warehouse in a camp containing approximately 6500 refugees (estimates range on how many new ones arrive per day, between 100 and 150 perhaps). There is nobody else on site except the odd car coming to donate things. 12 untrained volunteers on a site of over 6500 people.

I stand with three of my friends near the wooden shack distribution center - all of us are trying to work out just where to even begin or what to do. The fluorescent jackets make us stand out from a mile away. We are approached by refugees constantly and relentlessly with questions we have no answers to. There is deep wet mud and litter all around us and large pools of murky brown water. People have no tents, most have only the wet clothes they stand in, no blankets, nowhere to sleep, some of them are wearing flip flops, some have missing limbs, there are men, women, families, parentless children, everybody is sick.

An Iraqi man tells me he arrived yesterday and has been out all night in the cold. He is desperate for a tent and begs for information about where to find one. I point in a gesture of pure guess work at at the distribution shack in front of us where there are a crowd of people climbing over each other to get to the tiny window where items are handed through periodically. He tells me "I didn't come here to fight, I can't fight like that". I can't help him -he quietly walks away.

I soon learn from walking around that tents in the Jungle generally have a very short life. The wind sweeps in over the sand dunes, the rain keeps falling, economy tents like you or I might abandon at a music festival are over crowded and invariably soon broken or flooded. Tent pegs are unusable in the sand, rock and litter. Instead the edges of tents have to be buried. Everywhere you dig reveals layer upon layer of rubbish and untold filth. A tarpaulin stretched over the top of each tent is essential even to make it last 48 hours. There are not enough bits of tarpaulin - there are virtually no tools.

We try our best to distribute tents from the warehouse one at a time so as not to cause a panic, everybody is desperate for a shack made from scrap wood instead. Around ten percent of the refugees get them eventually, either building them themselves or with help from the volunteers. There isn't enough scrap wood for most, let alone the hammer or nails to build anything. The rest keep trying to find more tents that aren't broken or flooded yet.
We spend our time at the camp digging, making up sand bags, rushing around trying to save tents in the wind and rain, trying to erect more. We try to fill them with only the very most 'deserving' and desperate people. BUT everybody is deserving and desperate;nobody has anything. Each tent takes us forever put up. It seems at any given point like maybe about a quarter of the people there don't have one.

Whilst I'm working I am approached non stop by people pleading with me to help them too. They are begging in foreign languages. I have no idea what they are asking me for. I constantly reassure them I will try to get to them soon but they often don't understand what I am saying. I will not get to any of them them soon, if at all.
Simultaneously, there are refugees rushing to help me work. They insist that I give them the shovel and let them dig. They bring us packets of biscuits, bottled water, cigarettes for the smokers; they will not take no for an answer. Everybody wants to help everybody else before themselves. Everybody wants us to accept their gifts for our trouble. Some of the refugees choose to miss rare meal hand-outs in favour of helping us work.

The camp has designated areas, Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, Eritrea, but everybody mixes. The cold and wet are invited into strangers' tents though they are over crowded already. People take turns where there are dry places to sleep. I work hurriedly in the rain with a man called Mohammed to dig drainage gulleys so that the growing pools of stagnant water don't run into the group of tents he is living amongst. Every job you do there is an emergency. Mohammed is funny and charming, we laugh together constantly. When I tell him my name is James he says 'James Bond!' and i shush him jokingly. I learn fast that human bonding has little to do with speaking the same language. I bump into Mohammed several times while I'm at The Jungle. He greets me with a warm smile each time. Mohammed is just one of several friends I made among the refugees. Many of them showed me photos of family holidays on their camera phones, pictures of their children, pictures of themselves in smart clothes, pictures of home in better times, I feel like they are trying to show me that they were just normal people like me, but it's already obvious.

Day three brings a storm; it is windier and wetter than ever. I volunteer to work in the kitchen marquee after chatting to another volunteer who was going there. Watery porridge is served up with a mug of Chai. There is a guitar with a string missing and the call goes out for anyone who can play to keep morale up while the food is being served and eaten. I churn out the same ten or twelve songs that seem plausible with my sore throat on repeat and I'm treated like a celebrity for it by the refugees.

There is a newly arrived Syrian man with two boys of around fifteen or sixteen in the food tent. They are all smartly dressed and clean. The man has been granted asylum in the UK, but it is for him alone. I watch as he tightens the scarves of the boys and seemingly gives them a sort of 'You be careful, I'll come back for you soon' type pep talk. The boys look cold and frightened; I know full well by now that they are right to be.

I spend the afternoon outside again rushing around trying to save tents. People thank you for a square inch of gaffer tape as if you have given them your life savings. Conditions are the worst I have seen so far, the wind is unbelievable and there is debris flying everywhere. Tarpaulins and tents are ripped from the ground by the dozen whilst people continue to arrive. As darkness falls, we leave the camp as we had been advised to do each evening, but we all feel an overwhelming sense that we haven't done enough.

I'm going to go out there again and do more when I can arrange it - to not do so seems inconceivable. They really badly need more volunteers and more money to make any kind of dent at all. Right now despite the best efforts of all the amazing people involved I'm afraid that there is woefully inadequate help for these people - they are literally dying only 200 miles away from Norwich. Whatever, your political opinions are I'm asking you to please get involved and not stand by letting this happen. We can make a difference but we NEED numbers. They need builders, plumbers, wood workers, medical people, people who can put up ordinary tents, people who can use a shovel, people who can sort clothes at the warehouse. They need absolutely anybody they can get to help in any way they can. This is an absolutely horrendous emergency that is not going away any time soon. I don't think I know a single person who wouldn't be rushing to help if they truly realised how bad things are. I'm asking you in the strongest possible terms to please realise it now.

Monday 23 November 2015

A GPs Journey to the Calais Jungle Where The suffering is Beyond Belief. By Morven Telling - via Facebook: November 23rd 2105

I have just returned from volunteering at the Calais and Dunkurk refugee camps as a doctor. The suffering is beyond belief. I have never encountered anything like this before, utterly appalling conditions and so little medical aid. 


My cousin - a psychiatric doctor - recently visited the camp at Calais and found out that there is very little medical provision for the refugees there and none at all at the Dunkirk camp. This means that there are over 7000 men, women and children who have little or no access to medical care. Most of them are exhausted, malnourished and many have a wide range of medical problems. Some are severely ill or injured. All are deeply traumatised by the life they have fled from, the horror of their journey and the desperate conditions they now survive in.
Over the next few days I could not stop thinking about this and so I decided to join my cousin and her family on their trip to the Calais camp.
We travelled on the Eurotunnel on Saturday morning and on arrival at Calais, drove past fence after enormous, barbed wire fence to the huge, bustling warehouse where all the donations are sorted. There my cousin and I, along with another doctor and four final year medical students assembled a make-shift set of medical kits from shelves packed with a completely random selection of supplies.
We packed everything into large rucksacks and drove to the camp at Dunkirk. Sleeting rain, driving winds. I put on thermals, waterproofs, wellies, a high visibility vest and walked into the camp.

I looked around in despair - so many tents, where to begin? A volunteer from Lancaster asked me to go to the tents with babies and young children first. So I crawled inside filthy damp tents to examine a tiny coughing baby, a sobbing 3 year-old little girl who had been crying in pain for 2 days, a 15 month old with profuse diarrhea, a young mother with toothache, a man with abdominal pain lying huddled under grubby blankets. As I went around the camp, sliding in the mud, trying to protect my medical kit from the rain, I was stopped wherever I went by people asking me to examine their throats, teeth, eyes or chests. So we stood there, in the mud and the rain and I did my best to assess and treat. Called out to passers by to help with translating. Handed out paracetamol, ibuprofen, rehydration sachets, strepsils, dressings applied to wounds and whatever else could be done. Smiles and thanks from everyone despite their desperate conditions.
A sea of mud, ankle deep, hundreds of tents being buffeted by the strong winds - many destroyed and lying in the foul smelling mud. Grim faced men, crying toddlers, everything wet, sodden, caked in mud. Tents hunkered down between trees, desperate people looking for shelter from the howling wind and freezing rain.

Overnight a devastating fire in the jungle, severe burns, a badly injured man had to be carried by other refugees to an ambulance outside the camp. Many tents destroyed, 250 people including several families with small children and babies rendered completely homeless in the pouring rain.
We worked in the Calais camp today - The Jungle. Tents and mud as far as the eye could see, overflowing portable toilets, burst water pipes creating muddy lakes, cooking smells mixed with the stench of waste and sewage.
We went to the camp medical center - four small caravans stocked with very limited medical supplies. Surrounding these caravans was ankle deep water, mud and waste that the fast-growing queue of refugees had to stand in and wait to be seen.

I could not do enough. 
Over the next hours my skills and experience were stretched to their limits. Trying to assess and treat so many ill people with such limited facilities. No antibiotics, no effective medication to treat the serious infections and illnesses that we saw, no translator other than fellow refugees who spoke broken English, no access to running water. It was the hardest, most challenging experience of my life. Leaving the camp to catch our train was almost harder still; we just could not get to the end of the ever growing queue of sick people desperate to see a doctor.

Friday 6 November 2015

MAB CONVOY TO CALAIS - OCTOBER 2015: November 6th 2015:

“What compels me to fight this society is, of course, outrage over injustice, a love of freedom, and a feeling of responsibility for perpetuating and enlarging the human spirit - its beauty, creativity, and latent capacity to improve the world. I do not care to come to terms with an irrational society that corrodes all that is valuable in humanity, that eats away at all that is beautiful and noble in the human experience.” - Murray Bookchin Our first venture to Calais was done with the aims of delivering instruments that had been donated from people all over the UK and of being a fact-finding mission to see how best we could provide support to the music and musicians in the Jungle camp.

We successfully delivered many musical instruments, including a piano to the school run by Alpha; an accordion to a musician from Kuwait; several violins given to violinists from Iran and some left in the Library; lots of children’s instruments given to children in the families field; two djembe, an electro-acoustic guitar and a small amp given to Sudanese musicians; guitars, drums and ukes were left with the library and the Good Chance Calais.


On most mornings we went to the One Spirit Ashram Kitchen, which does an amazing job of feeding people. We would bring instruments and play until musicians who lived in the camp stepped in and treated everyone to some amazing performances of Iranian, Kurdish and Iraqi music. Here we made friendships with many musicians and heard how censorship and oppression of culture had been defining factors for many in leaving their homelands.


We also spent a lot of time in the Good Chance Theatre, where we found a project that shares our ideas about culture and creativity; it is an amazing space to have in a situation like that of Calais. It provides a truly unified space, which is accessed by people from all the cultural backgrounds represented in the camp. It is welcoming, inclusive and built not on sand, but on solidarity. On our final afternoon, the Good Chance hosted MAB and the musicians we had met throughout the week for a gig and it was a truly joyous event. We are hoping very much to collaborate further with the Good Chance so watch this space. It was our decision very early on not to visually document MAB’s time in Calais. Instead we made field recordings of the music we encountered and interviewed musicians we met, to create an aural record of the importance music has to people during migration. To hear our field recordings visit: https://soundcloud.com/user-640137335


Without doubt the trip achieved many things and we saw that music comforts, empowers and unifies people even in the horrendous situations faced by all those who live in the jungle. We will continue our work and plan to return in December, this time

Monday 2 November 2015

My Take on Calais by James Cartwright via Calais Action Carlisle FB group:2nd November 2015

Found it pretty difficult to write up our visit to Calais. I've tried to take the emotion out of it and just present a sort of report on what went on. It was a shocking, rewarding, infuriating, inspiring experience. I've probably forgotten as much as I've remembered, but here goes:

How did we help?

 • Delivered a donated caravan for “Caravans for Calais” so that a family of 8 could move the women and children out of timber/plastic shack the size of a family-tent and under a hard roof.

• Handed over a donated bicycle to a brilliant long-term volunteer who had a resident lined up to receive it.

• Brought blankets for the “new arrivals” store, so that people have at leas something to help them keep warm on their first night in Calais.

• Picked up litter (in a camp with one toilet per 600 residents, this is a more challenging job than you might think. Credit to Jess and Alex for diving into this task!), and help organise the Medecins Sans Frontieres rubbish-collection points with a team from North Wales.

• Helped sort donations in the warehouse

• Helped transfer goods from the old warehouse, and tidy it up before it was handed back to the landlord.

• Helped distribute shoes to residents in the camp.

• Spent a day using tarpaulins to repair/reinforce tents and communal cooking-areas, aided by two volunteers from France and Denmark.

• Listened to refugees’ stories of where they came from, what they’ve been through and their hopes for the future.

• Helped seek out families and individuals who struggle to get to the official distribution-queues by fetching them the basic items they need just tosurvive in the camp.

What did we see?

• Heartbreaking living conditions – People ridiculously grateful to trade their flip-flops for a pair of second-hand shoes, or to have a bit of plastic sheeting pegged over the leaking festival-tent thatis their only home.

• Gorgeous children, tragically hardened by all they have seen and experienced on a journey no-one of any age should have to make.

• Deliberate ignorance – Imagine a community of 6000 people in the UK where unaccompanied children as young as 12 were left to fend for themselves for food and shelter, without any interest from the authorities. The authorities can’t NOT know about life in the camp (they only need ask the riot police who march around the place all day with their cellophane-wrapped boots, rubber suits and tear-gas launchers - reminiscent of something from a low-budget sci-fi film).

• Pain – Residents nursing terrible injuries from their attempts to complete their journeys (often trying to return to their families who already live in the UK. We met Dads who haven’t seen their own children for years due to the cold, arbitrary nature of immigration laws. A whole different kind of pain) who are too afraid to go to hospital out of fear of the French authorites.

• Shock – walking through the camp with a French volunteer (a social worker who helps troubled teens, so not easily shocked!) who simply could not believe that she was still in France.

• Hope – undimmed by the desperate situation they are in.

• Generosity – while fixing tents, a group of Iraqi Kurds made us cups of tea and later insisted on feeding us as they prepared a communal meal for a bout 20 of them. There was never even a hint of wanting anything in return other than company.

• Love – Well over a hundred volunteers giving their time, energy and attention to help however they can, be it sorting shoes, seeking out people in need to provide them with what they need, building timber shelters, cooking for a thousand people, living on site so that night-time arrivals to the camp have a contact who can find them shelter, a blanket and a tin of rice-pudding to see them through their first night. An incredible effort that simply should not be needed.

• Friendship – So many unforgettable new friends, both volunteers and residents of the camp.