They’ve started building the wall.
Diggers are at work on the side of the N216, the motorway to the UK border. There’s already a metal fence, patrolled with flashing lights and uniforms; the 'Great Wall of Calais' will stretch beyond that, four metres high, for another kilometre. It’ll be done before the end of the year.
In the migrant camp — or Calais Jungle, as it's better known — there’s a sandy sprawl of a dune between the shacks, tents, caravans, tarp and highway. They call it No Man’s Land, because no man is allowed to live on it anymore. Hundreds of shelters were there, pulled into the dirt, in the wave of March demolitions that flattened the southern half of the camp. Now it’s the football and volleyball and cricket pitch at sunset; spectators perched on top of the dunes.
But it hasn’t stopped the arrivals. Since March, the number of camp residents have doubled, crammed into half the space. Back then, protestors sewed their lips together with thread, to demonstrate their marginalisation. Now, the French government says it will pull down what’s left in October, resettle all 10,000 people across the country. Some are happy to go; others still haven’t given up their dream of a British home.
In the Jungle Books Kids’ Café, above the rabble of voices and tinny mobile phone music, there’s a solid plastic poster of a London double decker bus on the wall; a good luck charm, an objective. In this makeshift youth centre, a makeshift family.
Raheemullah, 14, is dead now, hit by a car as he tried to reach family in the UK. The car didn’t stop.
Source: SBS
Weeks before, his friends had gathered round, showed me on a map where they go at night to pull felled tree trunks into the road, stopping lorries so they can try to climb in. Raheemullah fell out.
It happens, the children say, every few months. A girl died not so long ago, too. Sometimes they try to swim to the port, climb onto the car ferry. Sometimes they end up in prison.
Aid organisations say three unaccompanied children have died so far this year, trying to get to the UK, 35 kilometres away. Still, there are more than 1,000 in the camp.
WATCH: More than 600 unaccompanied children in Calais' jungle migrant camp
The Jungle is a sort of migratory purgatory, a community grasping at what threads of home they’re able to weave, floating in limbo.
There is a church with its own hand-painted murals - Ethiopian Orthodox. At morning mass, the sung prayers float through the vicious wind whip. At sunset, multiple calls to prayer from makeshift mosques meet and mingle in the dusk.
A crunchy gravel road of shops and restaurants has sprung up, offering Afghan food, Pakistani bread, haircuts.
At London Bread –a smiley face nestled into the first 'o' in London – baker Taha’s tandoor has come from Britain. It’s a taste of what could be, served hot and rolled in flattened flour packets. Cold, the bread turns to rubber.
At the back of the Welcome Café, there’s a surprise – a deck with a view, stretching onto the lake, where you can eat grilled eggplant, curried eggs, on the water. A clutch of men is fishing, long rods hanging. There are fish, I’m told, good on the barbecue.
Everyone is edgy, evasive. There have been recent arrests – police closing down restaurants, seizing everything inside. There’s been a rumour of another raid today; no one is cooking. Volunteers are lingering on the couches, chain smoking, hoping the tension will lift, for spicy chai.
There is a school under tarp and planks, a library of donated books. Several men are reciting multiplication tables in English. Another is leafing through a postgraduate textbook on inorganic chemistry.
Some British musicians have turned one of the classrooms into a recording studio, between French lessons. They’ve recorded an album, another one is on the way. People are knocking on the door, asking if they can try to perform. The answer is always yes.
Iraqi rapper Kasper has found the beat for his new song, he says. He bops his head as he plays it from YouTube. The light through the tarp turns his face blue as he sings.
It’s a rap about disillusionment, about peace. His liberal music is what forced him on the run in the first place.
I’d like to have you around for dinner, he says, after sound engineer Danny calls a wrap. Please come. I’ll cook.
On our last night in the Jungle, Kasper finds us outside the Syrian section, easy to find because there’s a toy scooter on the corrugated roof. We walk through South Sudan, emerge somewhere in the Middle East.
"I miss my life, he says quietly, almost to himself. It seems so far away"
He has IKEA fleece blankets pinned to the walls, filling the cracks; a reminder of the brutal winter just gone. He’s hung fairy lights in the shape of a heart. We sit in the slanted dusk, conserving the little hanging solar light for the later blackness, hand around a shisha pipe, apple-flavoured wisps filling his shack.
Dinner is laid out on an ironing board, with impeccable care: Chicken a la Kasper, a tomato-based pasta, a yoghurt soup laced with cucumber, warm dhal. Adele pipes from his phone.
Source: SBS
As we eat, he shows us iPhone pictures of happier times, as if it’ll help prove to himself that it was real: him in front of his new car. Him with his best friend on a dance floor. Him grinning in a sunny front garden. They’re from 18 months ago. Since then he’s lost count of the number of times he’s tried to cross. I look from the glowing image on the phone to where he sits in a corner. He’s aged a decade in the meantime.
I miss my life, he says quietly, almost to himself. It seems so far away.
The wind is up again, in front of the moon, as we skirt around a pond, an enormous dark puddle. It’s for laundry, Kasper says to our exchange of looks. They try to pump out and change the water once it goes black.
Kasper’s dinner has been a feast, a show of hospitality so he can momentarily forget. The guilt of not being able to finish everything he puts in front of us sits on top of my dinner.
Source: SBS
In the last couple of months, the word hunger has begun appearing on lips here. The lunch queues stretch into curls, down and around the Portaloos. Where there were 70, charities say, there are now 500.
Sustenance is also identity. On the shared condiments table, the spread is as diverse as the community – hummous, Ethiopian chili, South Sudanese spice.
Some of the more established residents have tried to grow things in the dirt of the old rubbish dump they’re living on: tomatoes, courgettes. But space is running out, new arrivals have nowhere to pitch their tents.
The French haven’t declared it an official refugee camp, so there’s no international body in charge. Everything is run by volunteers: the morning trash collection to alleviate the rat infestation, the hot food kitchens, the blue internet truck with its little hand-crafted satellite that comes by in the afternoons. It’s organised, squalid – a shock to Europe to have a slice of the developing world in its heart.
There aren’t enough tents any more – nor blankets, nor food. The donations that flooded in after the Aylan Kurdi photo have dissipated into donor fatigue.
The volunteers come from everywhere, but most are British – young, earnest, bedecked with friendship bracelets and headscarves. Many wouldn’t look out of place at a music festival. A great many are young women. The thousands of young migrant men, en route to their imagined futures, smile as they walk by, know them all by name.
WATCH: Charities warn over low supplies in Calais refugee camp
No one wants their faces photographed or filmed; word has gone round that it could affect future asylum applications. They’re also tired of being camera fodder. Nothing ever changes, they say. So why bother telling their stories? The volunteers are fiercely protective – of grown men as much as the children – young girls attempting to take on the role of protector, defender; forgetting the cameras are what brought them there in the first place.
The graffiti is everywhere: anti-government-anti-police scrawl on cement blocks, a Banksy Steve Jobs hiding in a “London Calling” sign. We’re all migrants, it’s meant to say. We should all remember to be human.
Source: SBS
Locals don’t want them there. In September, farmers and lorry drivers blockaded the highway in protest. The French government has promised it will all be torn down, dispersed.
Since they created it in April last year, this has been the focal point of France’s migrant crisis.
For some Europeans, it’s easier to dismiss; migrants over refugees. They’re so picky, they say – why don’t they choose to seek asylum in France? They’re so stubborn, they want to go to the UK. Beggars shouldn’t be choosers.
So I ask why. The exhaustion is palpable in breaths, voices. Most tell me they just want to go somewhere warm, dry, where they’re understood: in words, hearts, minds. The summer rain spatter turns the Calais sky gunmetal.
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