was working with vulnerable 16 to 25-year-olds in the UK and was due to start work in a children’s home. She came for a week in October and decided not to return—she stayed and set up the Youth Centre along with Johnny and Ben T., who had both done Masters in Humanitarian Aid and wanted to put what they had learned in class, into practice. Sarah was teaching English abroad and working on migration and human rights issues with a law firm and various charities in Britain. She had planned to work for UNHCR in Ecuador before deciding that Calais was more important. She started off volunteering in the warehouse before teaching and organising in Jungle Books and helping to establish the legal centre. Rowan arrived with some second-hand computers for Jungle Books in the Autumn. He meant to stay for a few days, but ended up remaining for months, helping with any projects that needed him.
Almost all the longer-term volunteers I talk to have similar stories: a short spontaneous trip planned out of anger or disgust at their own government’s response. The short visit morphs into a longer stay, as needs become apparent, jobs and career plans are abandoned, savings are used up, and yet, there is a growing commitment to staying until the situation is resolved in some way or another.
The volunteers live in caravans on site, stay at the youth hostel, share rented accommodation in town, or bike out to the caravan park. Some of the longer-term ones receive a small stipend to help with daily expenses from Help Refugees (the new name for Help Calais, which has also morphed into a bigger, more professional fund-raising organisation).
– The big difference between us and the professionals is that everyone is here simply because they want to help the refugees and make sure they are OK-—it’s not a job—Ben tells me. No one is here because it’s where they have been told to go, or because it’s part of their career as a professional humanitarian.
Ben acknowledges that they are not always efficient.
– There is a revolving door of volunteers coming and going. New people arrive and say this is how you should do it, but if it’s a poor idea and they don’t command respect, within two weeks they burn out and are gone. The good thing is you cannot blag your way into doing stuff because you will be found out immediately. For example, you can turn up with a van and announce you want to reorganise distribution, but if you cannot get people to work with you, you will have nothing to do.
– What you are saying is that the good projects endure because they attract the good workers?
– Exactly. It’s the work, not the qualifications, that matter. Look at Liz, she has taken on twelve psychologically disturbed young Afghans and actually does some good. When six children were sent into the French Care system, four immediately ran away. The French child protection expert told us that if they wanted to run away, that was their choice!
One could argue that professional humanitarians are better able to rapidly assess needs, work efficiently, and avoid duplication and danger. But, having watched the Pakistani Army and UNHCR argue over the best kind of heating stove to use in camps for the displaced after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, while those displaced took matters into their own hands, and lit open fires that burnt down tents, I am not sure this is true. Nor do the big NGOs have the flexibility to respond to the rapidly changing political situation.
L’Auberge Migrant now sends out 2500 hot meals to both Calais and Dunkirk every day. They also distribute raw ingredients to a further 1200 people, enabling them to cook for themselves. Their ability to do all this depends on the material and financial donations from all over Europe, as well as the manpower provided by a variably skilled, constantly changing, volunteer workforce.
In response to the threatened eviction, Ben, working with a team of volunteers and refugees, has engaged in the building and distribution of 1700 shelters to rehouse people in the northern half of the camp. Tents are no longer being given out from the back of a pink caravan, or people driving up with shelter material and building at random.
– It’s taken us a while to learn on the job. We’ve been through seven different designs. The simple wooden frame is made up in the warehouse and taken to the camp with pallets and plastic, where volunteer building crews and refugees construct it together.
This continues to be another extraordinary aspect of the Jungle: the absence of the rigid boundaries between the helper and the helped. Some of the most impressive volunteers are refugees themselves, like Bahirun and Alpha. Yesterday, I met Nahida, a professor of pedagogy from Afghanistan, who teaches women and children in a small dome-like structure opposite the Caravan where she lives with her four children.
– They built this dome for me—Nahida told me. I translate and I teach in the evenings and two afternoons. All the Sudanese people call me ‘Mama,’ they respect me, and we find words in common.
Nahida trained teachers at Kabul University. Her marriage to a foreigner made her children stateless and the Taliban threatened her. Separated from her husband, she fled Afghanistan in search of a nationality for her children, giving up a good job and home and paying 40,000 dollars to people smugglers. The five of them had travelled by foot, horseback, boat, car and bus through Pakistan, Iran and the Balkans.
– Why England?
– My brother is there, and twenty family members.
– I have tried the truck twice. Mary was crying, ‘Don’t take your children, something could happen.’ You know, I grew up in a war, I lived in a war and grew old in a war. Sometimes I want to go back to Afghanistan. Muslim people believe it’s up to God, but I know this Afghanistan is a football, the Russians come, the Americans come, the Taliban come, Daesh comes… There is a boy who comes to me who has seen the Taliban execute someone in his family with an axe, he cannot sleep.
She looks at me in angry despair, and I think of my conversation with Tawab last year.
– All I want is for my children to have a nationality. How long can my children stay here without education? They are really intelligent. So how long?
I don’t have an answer, but I tell her that the Jungle is lucky to have her help.
In Haiti, after the 2010 Earthquake, while the dispossessed clustered in makeshift camps on roundabouts and in garbage-filled canyons— not dissimilar to this one—the UN administered the aid effort from a compound at the airport that was closed to all but those with international NGO accreditation. Even local charities were entirely absent from the coordination meetings that were supposedly going to rebuild the lives of the devastated Haitians. That failure to empower local people to restore their own lives may have contributed to the homelessness and impoverishment that continues six years later. Here in Calais, I have not heard the word ‘beneficiary’ used once. Coordination meetings are open to all. Besides establishing and running restaurants, schools and libraries, refugees volunteer in the warehouse, work in the clean-up squads, translate for each other and the volunteers, organise, and assist in the distribution points across the camp.
Coordination with the French has improved since last year. There is now a weekly coordination meeting led by ACTED, a French NGO contracted by the French government to provide water and clear the rubbish. The main topic today is the three people who have disappeared and the apparent reluctance of the French police to investigate. The woman from ACTED explains that in order to address the issue, the police need statements from those who actually knew the missing persons. Bahirun makes another passionate, angry speech about how many times they have been to the police to make reports.
– This is not about tickets or distributions, it’s about missing people, they should come to us. Why do we have to go there?
An older Afghan in a Pashtun hat starts speaking.
– We came from Afghanistan and Syria because it is dangerous. But it is dangerous here. Europe is dangerous. It is dangerous to go to the City, even the volunteers are scared. Why does no one care?
– Look—says a volunteer—let’s get the right group together, people who can do the identifying with translators, with transport. It is tedious, but we have