David and Archie's week in the Calais jungle.

Hello. My good friend Archie and I have spent this week in the Calais jungle and I'm going to write about it. There are lots of journalists going in and out of Calais and Dunkerque and it’s easy to find articles about the camps online, better researched and better written than this, in case you want to know more. I’m not a journalist; Archie and I are English teachers and we went over to volunteer for a few days to see what we could learn and how we could help. I just want to write a little something about our short but wonderful time in Calais with the residents of the jungle and with all the other volunteers, both short-term and long-term, who are doing excellent things in difficult circumstances.

Archie called me a couple of weeks ago to say he was going to head to Calais and asked if I'd like to join him. We wanted to be of use and so we played a couple of gigs leading up to the trip with our political pop band Commie Faggots, encouraging friends to bring along donations to take over. People were very generous and gave us tents, sleeping bags, nice warm clothes, food (e.g. cooking oil, tinned chick peas and the like) and we put a hat around for cash donations. Together with online contributions we raised £400, with which we visited several budget supermarkets (having established this as the most efficient way we could use the money donated) and bought up around 250kg of rice, 100 litres of cooking oil, 100kg of sugar and lots of other bulk items (UHT milk, tinned food, tomato puree, salt, pasta etc).

We rented a 5-metre-long white van and headed down to my home town of Hastings for a show with Captain Hotknives at the Fountain (great evening!) and then took the van down to Dover and across to Calais. We spent the first night at an ‘airbnb’ accommodation with a lovely local couple, Didier and Isabelle, who looked after us very well and sympathised with our cause. The existence of the jungle has not been easy for Calais residents, but they were very patient, understanding and encouraging. They took us for a drive to the sea front where we had some amazing Tunisian doughnuts (highly recommended) and a mini tour of Calais by night.

On Monday morning we went to a local budget supermarket to spend the last of the donated money and then, after getting very lost in Calais, finally found the warehouse. We unloaded all of the gratefully received donations and got to working with the hundred-odd volunteers, sorting donated clothes. There is a veritable mountain of assorted apparel to work through, so we joined a team and sorted men’s from women’s, tops from trousers, large from medium and small, into big plastic tubs, which were then emptied by other teams boxing them up over yonder. 

On Tuesday we had our morning meeting in the car park, with some group exercise, updates on the jungle situation, and words of inspiration for the day, before breaking into teams: construction, translators, medics, kitchen workers, drivers – an army of volunteers, to coin a phrase. Archie and I spent the day making up kits ready for distribution. We were on a sort of assembly line preparing small, medium and large men’s kits: Grab a bin-liner, fill it with: 1 pair pants (or long-johns), 2 pairs socks, T-shirt, long-sleeve top, thick jumper, hat, scarf, gloves and a pre-prepared hygiene kit (including toothpaste, a flannel and so on). When we ran out of gloves, they got an extra pair of socks. They were often football socks and scarves and some very strange hats, so there’ll be some slightly incongruous looking folks walking about the jungle but they’ll be warm at least.

There is the sense of camaraderie you’d expect in such a venture – everyone helping everyone. Being half-term, there were a fair few teachers around, such as Francesca, the Spanish teacher from Mallorca trying to make it through her PGCE observations next week, and even some youngsters there, like 14-year-old Harry, discussing his GCSE options between cutting up and making labels for the kits. We had great fun working together to the Disney soundtracks playing on the stereo, hunting for bin-liners or gloves and trying not to step on each other. The clothes are distributed from various points, including a pair of great geodesic domes that would make Bucky Fuller proud. They'll distribute shoes one day, clothes kits another and so on. Thursday was coats, and a good thing too in all that snow!

We headed into the so-called ‘jungle’ for the conversation class at 5pm, held in ‘Jungle Books’ – a little library and meeting space where people can come for meetings, lessons or conversation sessions. I spent the first 45 minutes or so with 3 young men from Darfur. They spoke English quite well and we talked about music and what life is like in Sudan and in England. They introduced me to some Darfuri music before heading off for something to eat. I then chatted to a group of Afghan men, who told me about their journey through Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Germany and France, often brutalised by security forces along the way. Mustafa had only just started learning English, but the others were doing quite well. Most of them speak 3, 4 or 5 languages already, so they learn pretty quickly. I asked them why they had left Afghanistan and the answer was as you might expect – the Taliban, Daesh – a lot of lunatics running round blowing things up and killing people. Seemed like a good reason to leave. In any case they were a lively and positive bunch, keen to chat and improve English skills and teach me some Pashto - Manana! (Thank you)

We were struck by how healthy they all looked. They are not malnourished or sickly at all. This, it seems, is thanks to the work of the volunteers, using donations and running the Ashram Kitchen and Calais kitchen. They are getting good, nutritious food every day – through the kindness and generosity of the people of France, the UK and other European countries. It was good to see them looking so well. They have been through some extraordinarily stressful and frightening experiences, of which more later, but they seem mentally healthy, as well as physically – we were laughing and joking together, having a good time. This is quite incredible to me, all things considered, but it’s a glimmer of hope. They’ve survived the worst and still have it together. Of course, these were the ones that come along to the conversation class, the ones who are positive and optimistic and healthy – how others in the camp are, it’s difficult for me to say, I certainly saw some men with some very severe injuries but I don’t know how they acquired them.

We met another man, a Bedouin from Kuwait. He was alone and evidently quite lonely. He spoke very little English but was keen to learn and spend time with us. He told us he had been run over by police back in Kuwait and it had left him blind in one eye with, not to put too fine a point on it, a facial disfigurement that perhaps contributed to his isolation. We spent time with him and managed to teach him some useful phrases (as well as improving my Arabic a little) and it was hard when he walked us back to the van at the end of the evening, indicating that he would quite like to come back with us please, with us then having to explain why that wasn’t possible. He has family all over the world (such is the nature of a Bedouin, I suppose) but he was desperate just to get to England to see his brother in Manchester – he couldn’t stop talking about Manchester. I hope he makes it.

I’ll take a moment aside from the narrative for a moment, if I may, to talk about someone else I met in the weeks before all this. I was temping in an office for a few weeks, partly to pay for the trip. I was working with a man in his 60s with radically different ideas about the world to my own and it was a fascinating experience. To give you an idea, he wondered if the world might not be a better place now if the UK had supported Hitler in the 1930s – 40s, and whether the world wouldn’t be a worse place if the African slave trade had never happened. You can make of that what you will, but that’s what I was up against, and I suspect he is far from alone in his rather , as I perceive it, extreme views. In any case we spent three weeks wrestling on all manner of difficult subjects and it was stimulating and useful to have such arguments with someone I wouldn't normally come into contact with. It was a positive experience as far as that goes, if difficult to listen to sometimes. One issue that naturally came up in the course of this peculiar exchange was the refugee crisis and the Calais jungle. He said he thought that it was ‘the best place for them’ (it’s really not, believe me) and that they were just trying get here to take advantage of our benefits system.

If you, like my erstwhile colleague, think that this might be the case, and I know a lot of people who think it is, naturally I would encourage you to pop over to Calais (it’s really not far) and meet these ‘scroungers’ for yourself. But if you’re prepared to take my word for it – they are definitely not that. Neither are they a ‘bunch of terrorists’. Far from it! In the first place, they know very little about the UK except that it’s a safe and welcoming place, which is what they’ve been told by the traffickers (who are surely among the real villains of the piece) and reinforced by the fact that the only British and Irish people they've met have been friendly and welcoming volunteers. No matter how many lovely and welcoming French people they meet, the French authorities and the local fascists have already made their mark. I hope they’re not too disappointed when they get to the UK.

They don’t have ‘benefits’ in Darfur or Afghanistan, and they have never so much as heard of such things. They don’t know what ‘benefits’ are and I think they’ll be shocked when they find out. In any case, they are definitely not trying to get here for that – they want to work, be safe and secure and, one day, if there could only be peace in their countries, return home to their families. Much as they’re excited about a new life in the UK, they’re very home sick and would rather be with their families than here if things could only be a different. The brain-drains resulting from genocide and fascism in some of these places is surely compounding the problems and they all know it and want to rebuild their countries. As to being ‘terrorists’ – these guys have risked everything, many of them dying on the way in horrible circumstances, in order to escape terrorism. They really don’t want to hurt anyone.

Don’t believe me? Go and see for yourself. I’ve never felt safer anywhere. Wandering off alone in the dark in search of a toilet, climbing through tents and detritus and dodging rats, the only faces I met in the dark were helpful strangers giving me directions to the loo. I felt safer in the jungle than I do in London (and I feel very safe in London by the by).

On Wednesday we went to the warehouse again, and this time spent the morning chopping wood for distribution to the camp fires. It was absolutely freezing and the wood was in less than great shape, but together with a carpenter from Alsace, we made a lot of kindling and bagged up a lot of fuel. At about 11am we headed into the jungle and found the school. There is a kids building and another for adults with a sort of makeshift playground between the two. The building for adults is about the size you’d expect a classroom to be, with a couple of blackboards and a huge stack of paper, pens, books and other resources that have been donated. There are tables and chairs and even a wall of desktop computers powered by a noisy petrol generator outside and a bunch of solar panels. We found some students and got to work.

I want to tell you about B, because he is the person who affected me most in all this. I spent an hour or so with B, a young nurse from Eritrea. His English was very good already, but he was still keen to improve, so I did a lesson on emphasising comparative structures and then ‘extreme adjectives’, which we both enjoyed very much. He wants to study more when (if) he gets to the UK and work as a nurse or even as a doctor one day. He was articulate, bright, warm and good-humoured – he loves reading and writing and the theatre and we agreed we’d go to the Globe together one day for a bit of Shakespeare.

B is keen to write down all his experiences, but in the meantime, I asked him if he’d mind my writing down what he told me about his journey, and he said it was fine, so here goes:

Where to begin? A lot of the conversations and lessons I had with the people there involved talking about family. We would show each other photos of our families and learn some vocab on that subject. B teared up when I asked him to tell me about his family.

‘How many brothers and sisters do you have?’

‘They’re all gone,’ – moving quickly away from me to conceal the emotion.

I couldn’t help instantly thinking about my own family and what it would mean to have to say that about them. Words fail, but I teared up automatically at the utterance and do so again now writing it.

I don’t know how it feels for you reading it second-hand from me, cold and distant from it, but hearing it first hand from him was appalling: a huge hit of emotion – sympathy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, horror, devastation, delivered unexpectedly in 4 short words and a gesture. ‘They’re all gone!’

But I was there to teach English so, seeing he didn’t want to say anything more about that, I moved the conversation on. We got to his wife and one-year-old son back in South Sudan.

‘Is she pretty?’

‘Pretty? She’s absolutely stunning!’

‘And will you be happy when you’re all together in England?’

‘Happy? I’ll be absolutely ecstatic!’

Extreme adjectives – check.

He then volunteered to tell me about his journey to Calais. Here’s the condensed version:

‘I moved to South Sudan, where my wife and son are now. Things got really bad there and I decided I had to try to find somewhere safe for my family. I went to Khartoum for a few weeks and then on to Chad. After Chad we had to cross the Sahara. It was terrible. There is no food; no water. Daesh is everywhere. Lots of people died. If they find you, they shoot you. 300 of us went to cross together but most people died in the desert. We arrived in Libya and I was arrested and put in prison with 2 friends. I’m not a criminal, but I was in prison for 2 months. Some people were there for 10 months. There are no windows, no water or food. It was so hot. I was so stressed. People tried to escape, but you have to run really fast. If they catch you, they kill you. I escaped under a car. I crossed the Mediterranean and made it to Italy. Then I was finally safe. I suppose it was about 6 months altogether.’

Bill has been in the jungle for about 3 months now. We didn’t meet anyone who had been there more than about 5 months, though I daresay there are longer-term residents who just don’t come to classes. I was grateful for his story and he was grateful for the lesson. I very much hope we meet again in London sometime soon. The UK has a lot of amazing nurses, both British and migrant, and we all know how good a job they do and that we need more of them – more good nurses like Bill. I just hope there’s still an NHS for him to work for when he gets here…

Our class was interrupted by a volunteer coming round to give information about the impending eviction. The French authorities plan to bulldoze the southern half of the jungle (the half with the schools, churches, mosques, clinics, restaurants, jungle books - a semblance of civilisation and normality!) next week, leaving only the northern half of a few over-crowded and underdeveloped basic shelters and little else besides. They are giving out the eviction notice today, Friday. There is no information for the residents; no indication of where they might go; Just an eviction notice.

There is a big police presence around the camp, but they just sit there, bored witless and uninvolved. We didn’t speak to them at any time. Their presence is supposed to offer what? Security for the refugees? The stories of brutality and violence on the part of the local National Front and the police are horrifying, though I saw no direct evidence of it myself. The fact is, the police are there in substantial force, and when eviction time comes, well, I’m glad I won’t be there.

I hope the volunteers and human rights lawyers in the area can stop it going ahead. If it doesn’t go ahead – it will be because of their efforts and they should be applauded and supported. If it does go ahead, well, I don’t know what to tell you!

After our morning with the Eritreans, Archie and I went off to find lunch. We headed up ‘Queen Elizabeth II Street’ and into the amazing ‘Hamid Karzai Rastorant’ for an Afghan feast. We were served several dishes including spinach and chick peas, kidney beans, a sort of ratatouille, rice, pakora and delicious naan. I couldn’t believe we were being served such an amazing feast in the ‘jungle’. There are little corner shops and shisha bars and other restaurants (including the so-named ‘3-Star Hotel’). Don’t get carried away, they are nailed together bits of scrap materials, very makeshift, but the volunteers and residents have done an amazing job making something out of nothing.

After lunch we took a turn around the camp and, after briefly interrupting a rather zealous American preacher lecturing around 30 Darfuri youngsters in a hidden corner of the camp, we managed to find the other school on site – L’ecole des arts et metiers. We went in and found a solitary but enterprising young Ethiopian making shoes next to the school piano. We had a chat with him for a bit – he was selling his shoes to make enough money to get over the channel. Nice chap, but completely fluent in English, so we set off back to the first school to find someone more desirous of our services. We ran into the Afghan guys we’d seen the previous night and spent the afternoon with them learning about Afghan geography, as well as Kurdish geography with an Iraqi Kurd we bumped into. The classrooms were full so we had our class outside. It was freezing cold but we made the best of it and did some good teaching and learning. 

At 5pm we went back to Jungle Books for another conversation class with a packed room full of Europeans and jungle residents, then went back to our hostel for the night. Yesterday morning we went straight into the camp at 9am for a last look around. It had snowed quite heavily and there were very few people about so I took some pictures and videos with my phone. We ran into B and his friends again.

‘Are you cold, Billiam?’

‘Cold? I’m absolutely freezing!’

Good student! We chatted for a bit, gave them our hats and gloves and a bag of satsumas and had a big hug goodbye. We had a quick cup of tea in another Afghan joint, stopped by the Ethiopian church to hear the beautiful music emanating from within, then headed back to the ferry and home. There’s an awful lot to process. It has been an amazing experience and I strongly encourage others to do the same. You’ll get a lot out of it, and I think it means a lot to the residents of the jungle to see some solidarity shown.

Being so harmonious and peaceful a place, the Jungle is a wonderful and magical place for people like Archie and me to visit for a couple of days, and apparently a much safer place for young Afghan, Syrian, Kurdish or Darfuri men and women to live than their war-torn, terrorised, ethnically cleansed home countries. Nevertheless, the jungle should not exist. I don’t mean it should be bulldozed in the middle of a snowstorm. I mean that I can’t find a good reason why the 5000 or 7000 or even 10 000 young men, women and children living in this dirty, cold, fenced in, police-monitored ‘jungle’ shouldn’t be welcomed into the United Kingdom with open arms.

I live in London; a city of 10 000 000 human beings. 7000 refugees (for that is what they are, among other things: seekers of refuge, safety and security and a life worth living) could be absorbed in a heartbeat and the only ones who’d notice are the residents of Calais. And that’s not to mention Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and all the hundreds of towns and cities across the UK where an extra nurse, or another kebab shop, or an engineer here and there, could be of so much more use than a lot of frightened and exhausted young men concentrated and sitting idle in the frozen jungle.

Scroungers? Terrorists? Please, don’t believe this hateful tabloid pish. Don’t believe me either – go and see for yourself.

If you want to go and volunteer or donate cash to the cause, they’re desperate for builders, medics, lawyers, translators, teachers and anyone who can spare a few days or even just a couple of hours to peel potatoes or sort clothes and make a contribution. You can find out much more and get involved through the following websites:    

http://www.helprefugees.org.uk/

https://www.facebook.com/laubergedesmigrantsinternational/?fref=ts

Thanks again to everyone who donated food, clothes and cash for us to take. We’ll let you know next time we’re going.

David Shewry

19/02/2016

Listen here: to hear Commie Faggots' Welcome Here, written and produced by Commie Faggots front man Archie Shuttlebrace of the above photos.