Welcome to the Jungle: Day 1
We walked through an open field in between houses in the suburbs of Calais laughing and joking. My Google GPS had said this was the way, we looked around thinking out loud that we wouldn’t want to walk through here in the dark on our way back. In the distance, above the trees we saw black smoke, a fire, we joked again that hopefully we weren’t walking into trouble.
We were.
We had just arrived that afternoon, about an hour and a half before with the bus. It took us about 3.5 hours from Paris to get to Calais in the north of Paris. My friend, Reem, is a journalist and weeks ago she told me she wanted to go to what is nicknamed “the Jungle,” the camp where the refugees live and invited me to come and volunteer. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy experience, but I really believe that sometimes in order to grow we need to do things that make us uncomfortable and we have to talk to people and practice compassion and empathy for others. We booked a bus ticket, a hotel for the night, and we registered to volunteer with La Vie Active, an NGO with a center in the camp.
The camp is situated outside of town. On one side, there is a highway and dirt, in font there is a road and more dirt, across from the camp there are homes and there is a forest, I never noticed what was behind it. The property is so extensive that it took us about 30 minutes to walk from the beginning of the road, Chemin des dunes, to the Jules Ferry Center where we volunteered and it’s surrounding roads and interior are muddy with the kind of dirt that cakes in the soles of your shoes. As we approached the front of the camp, the first thing we noticed was a huge amount of police presence. Upon further inspection, we could see the top of a yellow bulldozer and people running around while journalists snapped photos. I had heard they were going to demolish the tents/shanties that the refugees were living in, but I had also read that they were going to be forewarned and that they would be moving into storage crates. The truth is not as simple as that. The refugees who lived in the demolished tents/shanties were fighting back and throwing rocks and whatever they could grasp at the police while the police shot rubber bullets and threw tear gas into the crowd of people. We watched, contemplating what we should do as we were already late to report for duty, as the wind carried the tear gas in our direction. I tasted it first, it was repulsive. I recoiled trying to find clean air. My eyes involuntarily watered and burned and I covered my mouth with my scarf and coughed feeling the gas sting my tongue and throat. We decided to keep walking to try to get to the center.
We tried to ask some of the journalists for help as we had no idea what we should do and one of them told us that she had been trying to get in since the morning. “Great.” We thought, “we have come all this way to feel the effects of tear gas only to be turned away at the gate.” Luckily, that wasn’t the case for us and we got in by showing the police our inscription confirmation e-mail and IDs. As we walked, some people said hello to us in various languages and we asked a few people where they were from. Of course, we heard Syria a lot, but we also heard Iran, Afghanistan and Kuwait. One man stopped Reem to speak to her in Arabic, she later translated for me and told me that the man had told her about how he had lost four children in the sea. I saw the man tear up as he said this and this was only the first part of the day.
The man helped us get to the center and the other volunteers seemed genuinely glad to see us even though we were late. We explained the problem in getting there and they understood, “sometimes the situation is not so good here” one of the volunteers explained to us in French. We had registered to help distribute food. The refugees formed a line and they would get bread, a banana, some lentils with potatoes and meatballs or beef, if they wanted. Everything was halal. We were distributing Tunisian Harissa at first until another volunteer had to leave and I took over the lentils and potatoes. I hated being the gate keeper of food. They would ask for this part or that part and many couldn’t speak neither English nor French and it was difficult for me to understand. At one point, a refugee called me “karima” which means generous in arabic, but unfortunately, he meant it sarcastically because he was asking for something and I didn’t understand. It made me feel bad, well worse than I already felt. All the volunteers were great, they were happy to see everyone and you could tell that some of the refugees recognized their faces. The refugees could go in line as many times as they wanted and I found that to be weird, there was even food left over at the end of the shift. We only saw the men as the women and children are kept in a separate, secured part of the camp that is only accessible to by inputing a special code. It is also protected with security personnel. After our duties were over, we found someone who was taking some of the other volunteers to the train station and they had room in their car to take us back with them. We were really thankful and we decided to go and come back the next day to interview.
That night our eyes were red and burned, our skin irritated from the gas, our bodies exhausted. As we got into bed to settle in, the fire alarm went off shrieking high pitched blasts throughout the hotel. When we went out of our room we were told it was a prank and that we could return inside. The staff turned it off after some minutes and we lay in bed with our eyes closed, hoping to slip easily into sleep. I should have known that it would be impossible with the events of the day and the paper thin walls of our room. I lay there trying to ignore whatever conversation was happening in the next room, in addition to the one I was having in my own head.
