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Just returned from another month in Calais at the Maria Skobtsova House, Alex Holmes updates us on events over Christmas and the New Year.

St Pierre Park, Calais, the willow trees are gold in the early January sun. Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia, the ‘Three Graces’, daughters of Zeus, are the central feature of the park’s fountain and an immutable reminder of the gifts they were said to bestow: youth and laughter and elegance.

Fireside, in the Eritrean camp. The laughter is infectious. ‘Fessehaye’s Tigrinya is no good. Remember he didn’t know what alam dirho* means?’ Yusef’s smile lights up his whole face. ‘Now I have the egg, and he has the poop’. He’s video calling from his bed in a UK hotel having rowed across the Channel in November. 

‘Hotel like prison’ retaliates Fessehaye with a prolonged chuckle, ‘here we are free, with fresh air and a fire, good Eritrean friends and we can cook our own delicious food. Come back to Calais!’ 

‘Calais is dog’s life’, retorts the ever-grinning Fili, his hand freshly bandaged from a burn. I ask him how his hand is. ‘Fine’, he grins, ‘but in our tradition, if you burn yourself, you must use shinti.’ 

‘What is shinti?’

‘Pee-pee’. Laughter ripples around the fire. ‘And if you cut yourself, you must rub bun (coffee) into the cut and then cover it. Our village medicine is history, not science. It is good’. He turns his attention to his shoes. ‘I need softy’. He’s passed a packet of tissues and begins to meticulously wipe every trace of mud from his shoes.

The talk moves to the UK and the increasing difficulties of crossing the Channel to claim asylum. Hamed, the artist, smiles, but it is a wistful smile. ‘Life for the rich is good but not good if you are poor. If you have money, you can pay a smuggler to help you cross the sea and there are no CRS*. If no money, you try in a truck and there is always CRS’. Today he spoke to his girlfriend in Eritrea. He’s 21 and it’s been 4 years since he saw her. ‘She said ‘how is school?’ I tell her it is good. I cannot tell her about life here, the cold and the mud’. The stress of Calais has pushed Hamed to take up smoking.

A figure skips out of the dusk. It’s Hayat. ‘I skip like bambino’. He laughs. ‘In Libya, people were kind. They say I am bambino’. He tells me about life back home, the farm he grew up on. ‘It was a big farm, we had a large house, more than 450 cattle, many donkeys and camels, 36 dogs.’ But like everyone held in a smuggler’s detention centre in Libya, he was a commodity with a value. ‘My father had to sell 400 cattle to raise the money or smugglers kill me’. Hayat moves away from the fire to a secluded spot to dye his hair black. The diet and stress have partially turned his hair brown; it is undignified, and he is concerned about his appearance.

Negassi is taking photos of his new acquisitions, hair oil and a bar of ‘Beauty Cream’ soap. There’s a burst of laughter from the other side of the fire. It’s Aaron, Aaron whose broad smile lightens my every visit to the fireside. ‘Too late for you, Negassi, you are too old to become beautiful’. Negassi’s hair is very black, soft and straight. ‘My grandfather was British. He came to Eritrea in colonial days. I am going to UK to find him’. 

Night has fallen. Passing the line of tents that are pitched at the foot of the 4 metre high security wall, I notice one that is flattened. A figure is moving under the canvas. ‘Bruq leyti, goodnight’ I call. A face pops out. It’s Sami. ‘What happened to your tent Sami?’  ‘No problem’, he laughs, ‘I fix it tomorrow’.

One definite highlight was the bishop coming to say mass in the car park beside the larger of the 2 Eritrean camps on Christmas Eve despite the objections of the mayor of Calais

* alam dirho , the world is like a chicken (to some it gives eggs, to others poop!)
* CRS, the French riot police

Alex Holmes has just returned from a month in Calais supporting destitute asylum seekers there and has kindly written this update, giving us another glimpse into the realities of the situation for those seeking sanctuary at the border.

How can their shoes be so white in this mud-packed and puddled place?
‘Mister, bonbons, give us bonbons!’  Two little girls race towards me in their very white shoes. This time I’m prepared. Delving into my pocket, I give one a pink lollipop, one an orange. 

‘Mister, I want pink one, and pink one for my sister too’.

BMX, the larger of the two Eritrean encampments in Calais. The daily police evictions have finished and the community are moving their tents back into the apology of woodland that is their precarious base.

Alone, balancing his way along a concrete kerb, a boy of perhaps 12. He has hearing aids in both ears.

‘Kabey metsika’, where are you from, he asks me. The UK, I reply. He smiles, a warm, gentle smile. Later beside the fire, he comes up behind Saare and puts his arms round him. Saare takes first one of the boy’s hands, and then the other and gives each a kiss. The children here are much loved. 

Away from the fire, four young Eritreans sit at a round table drinking coffee. For once the air is still and they have lit a white candle. The flame is unwavering. Behind them on the wire fence hangs a framed tapestry depicting the church of Our Lady in Lourdes, and a pristine white sheet drying in the sun.

White. Milky porridge white. A charred black pan sits precariously on the fire in the firepit. Rahwa gently stirs the contents. The rain has stopped, but the wind is strong, the smoke from the fire frenzied. There’s no escape from stinging eyes. Rahwa pours the now ready porridge into disposable cups and small bowls. The bowls are taken over to where a group of women and children sit on a felled tree trunk. Around the fire, we are given the filled cups. The porridge is sweet, thick and so hot it blisters the roof of my mouth.  Beside me Aman. Seduced by the sight of the porridge, he gives up on what he’s been trying to eat, some cold rice from the previous day, and strides off to jettison it on the food dump. The large flock of juvenile gulls that scour the waste food, takes to flight, a wing-cloud that momentarily deadens the afternoon light. ‘The birds are beautiful’, says Awet looking up from his porridge. ‘All animals are beautiful; they are from God’. I raise an eyebrow at the rats that scurry across the packed earth ground. ‘Yes rats are beautiful too’ he insists, ‘but you must not take food into your tent or they will make holes and come inside’. ‘Tu-um’, delicious, says Aman who has returned and is tucking eagerly into his porridge.

White in the darkness. The stadium camp. The sun has set, another day is ending. A barn owl, ghostly white in the mix of spotlight and night, sits atop the security fence seemingly unconcerned by the group of diners around the nearby fire. A sudden swoop and it disappears into the undergrowth. At ground level a chaotic warp and weft of rats are in constant motion in their search for food. Two hungry coots emerge from the foetid drainage channel and peck at some discarded grains of rice. Tonight, the full moon is pale orange; it’s a ‘hunter’s moon’.

Hamid and Yusef emerge from the darkness into the glow of the fire, their faces creased in pain. They’ve been pepper sprayed by the CRS. Handed small cartons of milk, they let the contents dribble down over their closed stinging eyes. The pain lessens, and they come and sit at the fireside. As the milk dries, their faces become a blotch of dark skin and white. And gradually they begin to smile.

The Home Office is moving forward with legislation breaking international laws. Vulnerable refugees in danger at sea and at our borders in northern France continue to face cruelty and mistreatment.  Even those airlifted to the UK from Kabul under “Operation Warm Welcome” face long delays in poor conditions. In this Care 4 Calais blog a volunteer gives their experience of a camp clearance in Dunkirk, 23^rd-24^th September 2021. images: Thomas Gilbert / Roots (www.charitableroots.com)

On Thursday evening I got a panicked text from a friend in Dunkirk. Hundreds of riot police were descending on the large camp there, they said, accompanied by dozens of vans filled with CRS police and gendarmerie. Behind them were refuse trucks for the tents and belongings to be thrown in. And behind the trucks were land cleaners and diggers. 

This patch of scrub land had been home to a growing number of refugees, mainly from the persecuted Kurdish regions of the Middle East. It was turning into a bustling community, which is the very thing that terrifies the French authorities. So it was only a matter of time before it was cleared. 

“Cleared”. 

Such a small, bland word for wrecking someone’s home.

This time the camp was completely, brutally razed to the ground. Every tent, every tarpaulin, every makeshift shelter torn down, every blanket taken. The 800 people who had been living there were all roughly bussed off to either other regions of France, or to another local field well away from the water points. And any food or possession not in someone’s hands was scraped up and chucked into the trucks for landfill.

My friend said the remaining refugees urgently needed help in the form of blankets, sleeping bags, and tents and tarps. We began sorting hundreds of blankets, and the next morning we filled both our vans with them and drove up to Dunkirk. 

It was eerily quiet as we arrived. There was no hum of hundreds of voices going about their daily life; no more noise of women cooking; no more excited chatter of children. The sweet smells of woodsmoke and food were gone. All that remained was raw, bare, still fields. Yesterday home to 800 people; today, nothing. 

After we parked the vans, though, people began to appear. They had known we would come. People always stay in their area – they either run and hide from the police, or they mildly go with the buses, then return as soon as they can. 

In the autumn afternoon sunlight, the dejection on people’s faces was unbearable, as it always is after clearances. People put on a brave front, and their resilience was incredible, but it broke your heart to think what they were going through.

People guilty of nothing but trying to stay alive had had their few possessions broken and stolen. Important papers had been lost. Young parents suddenly had no food or nappies for their babies.

For some people this must been disturbingly similar to experiences that drove them from their homelands int the first place.

Even in these dire circumstances the people waited until we were ready and then stood in line to receive a blanket. And as always we had much needed tea, coffee and a listening ear with us. 

In the days since, we and other organisations have been working hard to make sure they’re warm and fed. It’s crucial that we do what we can to help them find food and shelter, because the weather is due to change for the worse; winter is approaching, and everyone knows it. 

What do the authorities hope to gain by all this? 

They say they need to make the area tidy, but strangely this fastidiousness doesn’t make them want to provide toilets or rubbish facilities.

Everyone knows the camp will gradually reform, here or elsewhere. There’s no conclusion to it; just an endless cycle of cruelty and spite. The point? There isn’t one. 

But the next time someone tells you refugees crossing the Channel should stay in France because it’s a “safe country, show them these pictures. 

Show everyone. 

Because there was nothing “safe” about what just happened in Dunkirk, just a few miles off the British coast.

Care 4 Calais continue their work in northern France with vulnerable displaced people. Visit https://care4calais.org/ to learn more and find ways to get involved.

A recent Human Rights Watch report ‘Enforced Misery – The Degrading Treatment of Migrant Children and Adults in Northern France’ reports on the current situation. It can be found here