“Every time you leave home, another road takes you into a world you were never in.” begins the poem For the Traveler by John O’Donohue, a favourite of Yoel’s that he’s handed to me to read as we sit by the fire. The poem ends “Return home more enriched…”
But where is home? What is home? Yoel decides that ‘home is where I can be myself’. Medhane says ‘Home is a place where you adapt to live…Here we have already adapted to the situation where we are. This is the world we live.’
‘Here’ is Calais, rebranded as ‘Ville Fleurie’, the town that blooms with razor wire, security walls, surveillance cameras, and armed police. Place of methodical camp dismantlement. Of near zero tolerance towards the exiled.
Natacha Bouchart, Mayor of Calais, has said ‘I refuse that Calais be exposed once again to pressure from migrants whose impact has been the focus of the news for these past weeks. Calais has suffered too much, her residents have suffered too much, for me to tolerate a situation that has profoundly affected us.’
‘This is the world we live…’ Away from the fire, a staccato of hammering. Aman is using a lump of rock to knock nails out of a piece of wooden pallet. Hanes is removing screws from some found timber. Project sport: they’re constructing a pair of wooden push-up handles. ‘Sport is good’ says Aman. A small rock flies by, aimed at a rat. More sport.
Further away, haircut completed, Henok is having his hair washed. He’s removed his jacket and shirt, and leans over while Senai pours water from a plastic flagon over his hair. Shampoo, more water, job nearly finished, when Henok darts away and grabs a mirror fragment to have look. He laughs. Henai laughs too. A little later beside the fire, Teodros rubs and massages Henok’s head. A sudden and brief metamorphosis; usually Henok says nothing, looks vacantly ahead and rubs his hands continually. The guys say he was beaten up in Germany. They lovingly care for him, make sure he eats, takes a shower.
Clothes festoon the nearby bushes, drying in the sun. The new security fence dissecting the path along which the guys’ tents are pitched is adorned with festive bunches of yellow flowered hawkweed. Tomorrow is a holy day, Kidus Yohannes, the Eritrean Orthodox New Year.
‘This is the world we live…It’s random,’ Isaias tells me. ‘Every two or three days the police take a few people into detention. They detained me and took my cross, the first time in my life someone has removed my cross. I cried and cried. The police sent an old woman to see me. She said “Don’t worry, they will return your cross to you”. After four hours they let me go. People are detained for 24 hours or 3 days. But they detained me for just four hours. God answered my prayers. My father taught me to pray. Always pray he said. Not just when things go wrong.’
‘Where is home?’ I ask him.
‘Home is now. Home is wherever I am. Even when I was in the detention centre, that was home. I am at home because God is inside me, always with me.’