LITMIR.BIZ

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be deescalated.

      Bahirun has spent five years in Europe. He actually got asylum in Italy (after waiting three years), but there was no work. Then he spent a number of years in Norway until they told him there were no problems in Afghanistan, and he should go back.

      – I would love to go back. All I want to do is help my people. It’s impossible at the moment. And this is your fault. You made the problems in my country, not me. Look around you—here are Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, we all get on, but in Afghanistan, there are more than forty two countries with their guns, making things worse.

      He came to Calais in July to try and get to the UK to find work. He was in the hospital for three weeks because of a beating. But now, he has stopped trying to cross the Channel and puts his energy into helping his fellow countrymen.

      – At the Voice of Refugees meeting last week, I was discussing ‘how not to die.’ It’s essential they know that if you walk to the tunnel for three hours and your clothes are wet and you are tired, you will go under a train and you will die. If people really want to help, they should provide a bus so that at least people are warm and dry before they make the attempt!

      – I doubt the French would allow it—bussing refugees to the tunnel…

      – Then people will go on dying. Bahirun is not completely happy with volunteers. Some are only here for themselves. We know who needs clothes and shoes.

      – I think that is why they plan to have people like you distribute.

      Bahirun tells me he has a plan of his own, to open a more expensive restaurant with good food, where volunteers will eat, especially the ‘weekend warriors.’ And he will encourage them to buy attractive cards marked up in a particular way. Then he will ask them to visit different areas of the camp and see who really needs help. They should give the card to a vulnerable person who can then return to the restaurant for a free meal. Bahirun has worked out a neat system of assessing needs and providing food to the most vulnerable, while using the time and energy of random volunteers. Brilliant.

      I leave Bahirun and go look for Samira and her father, as I promised a visit. But their neighbour says they did not come back from the train yesterday. Perhaps they have made it? Or taken another route? Or got hurt or detained? I don’t want to think about that. I go and visit Liz at the red and orange Women and Children’s Centre. Three teenage Afghan boys have come in and she is sorting out some stuff for them. One of them has cut his hand and lost his shoes trying to climb the Tunnel fence last night. We clean him up and find him shoes. One of them wants a bicycle, and Liz promises to try and find one in the warehouse.

      – It’s not about the product—she explains. I don’t mind if it’s a bicycle or a woolly hat. If I can use the donations to encourage them to come and spend some time here, that’s less time with the Hashish smokers and other unsavoury types.

      Liz has created one of the most comfortable spaces in the Camp. While we are sitting there, a tearful Sudanese woman comes in. Liz puts the kettle on the small gas ring. Last night, it was a heavily pregnant Kurdish woman, just days away from giving birth. Her husband had already paid $7000 to a lorry driver to take her to the UK, and then discovered it was a scam and the lorry was going South.

      – Liz saved us as well—Susan, a volunteer, tells me. She explains that she was working as a hotel manager.

      – I had guests screaming at me that they did not get a good night’s sleep because the beds were lumpy. I had to do something more useful.

      When the migrant crisis hit the news in August, she started an NGO called Drive to Humanity, and drove to Calais with Tifa and two others, and a van full of donations.

      – Except we hadn’t a clue how to distribute stuff or what to do. We decided we might as well start collecting rubbish with bin bags. We were all fighting amongst ourselves and crying. Then Liz came over and gave us a hug and asked if we wanted to help her. They have been helping her ever since.

       The Jungle, Thursday 22 October

      When I walk into the Camp in the morning, someone asks me to go and see a sick four-year-old who arrived last night. They are a Kurdish family camped inside the Ashram restaurant. In fact, the four-year-old is running around munching biscuits with no evidence of fever or distress, so I prescribe porridge.

      A team have come from Brighton who plan to bring a school bus across. They ask me to introduce them to some children who might benefit from such a project, so I take them to meet Abdul and Hassan, who now live in a caravan with another boy in the family area. Abdul is as friendly as always, if a bit dopey. He explains politely why school is not for him:

      – I have to get to England. I spend all night trying. It takes many hours to walk there, many hours to try and reach a train, and if I fail, many hours to walk back. In the day I have to sleep, so I have no time for school.

      I leave them to their assessment and head across the camp. The Jungle has changed dramatically in the last four days. The information centre is now a roofed and plastic-covered solid structure. MSF have cobbled the muddiest roads and cleaned some of the toilets. There is a whole batch of new caravans and new structures. Outside the Dome, a truck is distributing long thin pieces of wood, and a large number of refugees of all ethnicities are engaged in building simple shelters. Inside the Dome, another music session is going on. An Afghan sings and drums with astonishing beauty, while another plays guitar. Meanwhile, Sudanese boys sit clapping as one of them walks across shyly, picks up another drum, and joins in. Once again, I am struck by our capacity in extremis to both cooperate and create beauty. Why not build on these virtues?

      On my way back across the camp I meet another young Kurd who asks me to stop and chat. I think one of the most useful things volunteers do is just hang out and listen wherever and whenever. He wants me to see the broken tent in which he lives. I look at the wet soggy tunnel and tell him I am sure we can find something better, but he tells me not to worry about it, as he is out every night trying to get on a train. The words pour out.

      – I was a history student in Mosul until ISIS came. Then I went to Turkey, but I was not a refugee so everything costs money. So, I worked illegally in a factory, but you earn nothing. So, I took a boat. If you agree to be captain it’s free, although of course you risk a seven-year jail sentence— but we made it to Greece. Then Macedonia, then Hungary—they put us on a bus for Austria, and the Austrians are lovely people, wonderful! They gave us money and food and put us on a bus for Germany, where we were in a Camp for three days. But I don’t speak any German, and in England there is work…

      If governments wanted a selection process for identifying the most resilient and able candidates for entry into their countries, one possible way might be to ask refugees to find their own way across either Eurasia and the Middle East, or Sub-Saharan Africa, risk drowning in the Mediterranean, and then place them in a toxic waste dump on minimal hand-outs, before offering further life threatening challenges in the form of avoiding electrocution while jumping onto trains, or freezing or suffocating in the back of a lorry. Indeed, I am amazed these journeys have not yet been franchised as some kind of reality TV show in which the public votes for whom they want to come in.

      As you see, I don’t use the word migrant. In my five days here I have not met anyone who is not fleeing a war we started or failed to stop, a genocide we have failed to end, or human rights abuses to which we have turned a blind eye. Yet, what shines through is intelligence, courage, concern for one another, and a deep admiration for Britain. I would welcome any of the people I have met—Riyad, Raul, Bahirun, Abdul or Hassan—as my neighbours.

      The Jungle confronts us all with a very simple question: will we share the resources of this one world equitably, or will those of us with more firepower build ever higher fences to protect ourselves from those ‘marauding swarms’ trying to escape the poverty, violence and injustice that we are complicit in creating?

      There are consequences to locking ourselves in a fortress. While I was sitting in Bahirun’s

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