Viva Brighton Issue #38 April 2016

calais crisis
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Cal-aid
How to help the refugees
I spent Mother’s Day at the
refugee camp in Calais – my
children, who are 12 and 15,
didn’t protest my absence.
They’d seen the photos
from previous trips. “Just
go,” they said. I left them in
our warm cosy home with
a fridge full of food, hot
water on tap, a bedroom
each, sofas and laptops and
cushions and heating. All
the normal stuff of home.
Each visit to the refugee camp and the warehouse
that supports it can leave you feeling
very odd - coursing with simultaneous feelings
of elation and despair. Elation at the ingenuity,
dedication and resourcefulness of everybody
there, the visible love, the co-operation, the
eternal sunshine of the human spirit in even the
darkest places; and despair that such a place exists
at all, in our rich continent. A continent that
prides itself on human rights.
Despair that children younger than my own are
in the camp alone, unaccompanied, cared for
by a volunteer called Liz Clegg, who protects
them as best she can because no government
will. Despair that there are people living under
paper-thin canvas in bitter cold (it snowed that
weekend), who are always hungry (despite the
approximately 2,000 hot meals served every day
by the Calais Kitchens, cooked by volunteers
from the food donated by you - there is never
enough).
And huge despair at the latest decision by the
Calais local authority to backtrack on an earlier
decision to allow people to
stay on this unpopulated
ex-rubbish tip for as long as
they needed. Nobody wants
to be in the Jungle, but for
thousands fleeing home
towns that had become
lethally hellish, it’s home
for now.
Except since early March, it
isn’t. The 1,200 basic shelters
made by a team of 200
builders and carpenters over
the winter months are now being systematically
destroyed by men in hi-viz jackets from the
Calais prefecture, whose destruction is guarded
by the CRS - the French riot police - as families
and individuals are forced out, with nowhere
to go. Many are simply setting up freezing cold
camp nearby, in scrubland, with no water, no
sanitation, nothing.
As a journalist, I feel utter despair at how the
mainstream media has been reporting - or not
reporting - all of this. Apart from perhaps the
Guardian, every other major news source -
including the supposedly impartial BBC and the
Independent - has been either wilfully erroneous,
economical with the truth, or in the case of the
right-wing press, simply making things up.
So how can there possibly be any feelings of elation?
When you are offered gracious hospitality
by a refugee who has nothing; when someone
destitute cracks a joke, in the midst of their grimness.
And back home, how our innate humanity
can be sparked to light in times of crisis.
Here are some examples. A fundraiser at the
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