For more information and one way to help visit: www.care4calais.org/#coats4calais. Photo: Care 4 Calais.
‘Tent villages are moved every few days, which prevents children from attending school.’
Although other stories take the headlines, the situation for people seeking refuge in France continues unchanged. Anne M Jones reports on another visit.
Rose pink Calais sunrise.
Farewell hugs from friends
Volunteer happiness.
I composed this haiku as I departed Calais, feeling a surge of good feeling that scared me in its inappropriateness. The backdrop was the daily human struggle for refugees’ survival, which remains unchanged here. The warehouse continues to hand out 10,000 meals a week, plus piles of firewood. We in the sewing corner repair numerous items of essential clothes and sleeping bags. There is a safe, familiar glow of warm conviviality between volunteers, contrasting with the bleak environment outside, but our work is unsustainable.
Meanwhile, daily reports are made of growing numbers of desperate refugees being picked up while attempting to cross the Channel in dangerous conditions, doubtless tricked into parting with large sums of money to traffickers.
We spent New Year’s Eve dancing in a cheery bar with some very drunken French people – some very friendly, while others turned their backs to us, offering only hostile glances. Soon after midnight a gentle young man walked in and entertained us as his even gentler dog licked anyone who approached. He rescues abandoned dogs and treats them like children, with kindness and patience, until they become docile. He loves the English and the way they are here helping les migrants.
In Paris I linked up with ‘Utopia56’, which looks after new arrivals who are on the streets. The difference here is that many of them have been successful in obtaining the right to remain. But they have nowhere to live, for an indefinite future. Tent villages huddle in uncertain points in the streets, moved every few days, which prevents the children attending any school. With papers, though, someone who has migrated here can obtain a travel pass within the city, and access to free medical care
At night, Utopia56 takes families to places of warm shelter, sometimes a private home that has registered to offer accommodation for one night. This sounds well organised, except that the places are often not finalised until after 9pm.
On my first night I showed up at the ‘Rosa Parks’ area where I waited, and waited, while the temperature dropped to four degrees. Children ran around chasing one another, and friendly volunteers chatted – mostly ordinary Parisians who give up a night each week to do this work. I talked to a young accountant who told me that Emmanuel Macron, the president, is growing more unpopular by the day, shifting taxes and reducing public expenditure such that public services like hospitals are increasingly under strain. In the recent gilets jaune (yellow vest) protests the police went on strike and were immediately offered a pay rise, which, I was told, is an example of a leader who wishes to hold onto power by force if necessary.
By 9.15pm we were ready to set off. There was an interpreter, Mohammed, and a family of five: mother Nadja, husband Mohamed, and their children Mohamed (aged eight), Anna (seven), and Hudda (six). Nadja is expecting another child in three months. She is grateful for the medical care she has received, though it has occasionally meant being discharged back onto the streets in the early hours of the morning. With the children determinedly pulling all the family possessions in small wheeled cases, we proceeded down a dark incline to the tramway. After three stops we switched to the Métro line that snakes all over Paris to Censier in the south. Little Mohamed beside me took out his book, Aladdin in French, and concentrated avidly on it. Nadja told me ‘he reads it all the time, it is our only book, we had three but lost the others somewhere.’
Anna asked me my name again and again, amused that each of our names is so similar. Hudda cuddled to her mother, falling asleep in time to the rocking of the train. Mohamed, the father, explained to me about the bandage on his wrist, and his limp – an accident in the course of some work he had been fortunate to obtain, and then lose due to the accident. Compensation? A concept that Mohammed, the interpreter, told me goes unacknowledged too often.
When we arrived at our stop, the next challenge was to find the address, since my Google map was uncooperative. After asking passersby, and a further fifteen minute walk, we found it, a municipal care home where the concierge greeted us grumpily as he ushered in the very relieved family.
Interpreter Mohammed and I walked back to the Métro, running like kids down the long white-tiled tunnels because midnight was approaching. He insisted on breaking his own journey and accompanying me all the way to the door of my hostel near the Gare du Nord. I might have called it ‘seedy’ until I reflected upon what judgements are implied in the word ‘seedy’. In reality this is a place where men with unhappy expressions, mostly with migrant backgrounds, hang out looking around for a warm corner to sleep, or waiting for someone to buy the cigarettes that they offer furtively.
The following night I found my way to the rendezvous easily, having worked out the transport. There, from the family tent, was Nadja, waving at me to come over and sit. ‘Last night was wonderful, soft beds, a warm bath, nice meal, and we didn’t have to rush out in the morning,’ she told me smiling broadly. Anna’s face emerged from the tent and she grinned at me, then Hudda appeared and smiled shyly. Eight-year-old Mohamed was behind them re-reading Aladdin. I asked if he would like me to read it to them, seeing myself in the role of all those children’s TV presenters who had so delighted my children at the same ages. Mohamed nodded eagerly, and there, among the soft clean duvets inside the tent, I read and dramatised Abu and Jafar and Aladdin and Jasmine as best I could. They all listened, engrossed, and Nadja joined in laughing at the fun. Their father Mohamed stayed elsewhere because he was feeling very low that day. Then it was the family’s turn to be dispatched, so I offered to go with them again, together with Mareck, a forty-something serious Frenchman. This night involved two long bus journeys, the first across the northern periphery of Paris, to Porte d’Asnières, then a change of bus to Levallois. At the change, Mareck took us a long way down the boulevard to the bus stop, the children following with gathering slowness, then jumping on the waiting bus with huge sighs. Mareck fortunately checked the destination. ‘You need the other side of the road,’ he was told. So back we all trudged, Nadja joking at Mareck’s incompetence, and the children stoically dragging the cases. Mareck explained to me that he had only ever done this work once, and did not know the north west corner of the suburbs. Finally we arrived.
This time the haven was the home of a young man who greeted the family with great warmth, and asked, with intense kindness: ‘Have you eaten?’ The children, pale and tired, shook their heads. ‘I will cook a meal for you,’ he responded, adding, with a nod towards the nearby mop and bucket, ‘Sorry, I haven’t quite finished cleaning’. It was clear he had carefully prepared the room, with couches and airbeds ready.
Mareck accompanied me back, telling me he works for a Parisian consumers’ association. He has two children, aged seven and eight, and we compared notes on our own experiences of trudging around streets with tired children, any time, least of all late at night. We agreed that the grumbles and resistance would have made the task infinitely more difficult. Yet these children were calmly accepting this life of nightly change. Despite the obvious privations they are destined to be strong and resilient people.
When we finally arrived back, Mareck burst out laughing at the hostel’s gaudiness, a shroud of cigarette smoke and loud rock music pounding into the street. On the third night, temperatures dropped to two degrees. At the rendezvous there were no tents and a barrier around the area. There was no sign of Nadja and her family. A young mother was arguing with the organiser, pleading to be allocated a hotel. Another mother looked harassed as the baby she was pushing back and forth in his buggy would not stop crying. I offered to push him up and down for her and she called her daughter over to translate. The girl is Marie, aged six, and she followed me as I walked up and down, attempting to soothe the baby, who was about a year old. He was inconsolable and the mother came up saying she would see if he was hungry. She sat on a small concrete seat to breastfeed, while Marie sat on a seat behind. I noticed Marie falling asleep, so I stood beside her to prevent her waking with a sudden start if sleep overcame her balance. The baby quietened, Marie went deeply into sleep against my arm, and we waited. A young man appeared, evidently the father, and hovered for a moment, then wandered back to where he had been standing with other men. The temperature dropped lower. Two other families were dispatched. The father returned and called Marie over to help him and the mother to place the sleeping baby back in his buggy. He looked peaceful by now, well wrapped in three blankets. The family was told there would be still more waiting and are sent off to the nearby burger bar. Another volunteer appears. It is past 9pm. I am not needed tonight.
This snapshot of the lives of a few refugees is repeated, give or take some details, for many thousands of refugees, all over the world. Refugee numbers are expected to increase in coming years but, say Alexander Betts and Paul Collier in their book Refuge: Transforming a broken refugee system, such systems as do exist are ‘broken’. These writers expose the negligent response from international powers, and suggest some alternative ways of considering constructive alternatives. For one thing: ‘…most likely, the person who is now a refugee previously had a home and a means of earning a living, and was part of a community. If we are able to do so, we should aim to restore those basic features of normal life.’
At present, we volunteers in the UK have to continue to meet basic needs for food and warmth while keeping the wider issues on the radar of the politicians.
Refuge: transforming a broken refugee system is available now from Penguin.
For more information and one way to help visit: www.care4calais.org/#coats4calais.
