One of our newest volunteers Jess has written a piece about her first week volunteering in one of the refugee camps. Its such an amazing piece of writing, we are honored she is letting us share it.
My First Week in ‘The Jungle’
After spending a week in the Dunkirk refugee camp distributing aid to hard to reach women and children with Kirsty I feel both physically and emotionally exhausted, so to even begin comprehending what living in such undignified, devastating conditions does to the camp’s residents’ physical and mental health is way beyond me. I’ve never experienced so much emotion compounded into such a short time – any reading and video watching I had done to prepare before going to Dunkirk flew straight out the window because the reality of the situation is not done a justice at all in the media. Not only was I unprepared for seeing the utterly heart breaking conditions such kind and generous people are forced to live in, I was totally unprepared for hearing the horrors that people in the camp had experienced in their home countries. People in the camp told me they ‘love the jungle’ and I was so taken aback by this, but the sad reality is that the jungle is preferable to what many of its residents are fleeing.
It’s a total betrayal that in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, politics is prioritised – in just the week I spent in the camp I met many mothers with young children and babies, pregnant women, people who desperately needed medical attention and weren’t receiving any and I can’t understand how this is allowed to continue in modern-day Europe! On the first day in the camp I met a young girl, maybe 12 or 13 years old, who had been having a nose bleed for over 8 hours and still hadn’t received any medical attention despite her mother desperately trying to find some help. How is this an acceptable situation? If a parent in the UK allowed their child to have a nose bleed for 8 + hours without seeking any medical advice, the authorities would deem this neglect, yet if it’s a refugee child, it’s the governments and people in positions to make changes that do the neglecting. It seems that there is a huge issue with a ‘them’ and ‘us’ outlook, people don’t hear the words ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’ and imagine all the individuals with their own stories to tell and the similarities they share with us – the love within a refugee family, the insecurities refugee women feel about their bodies, the cheeky antics a refugee child will get up to; instead there’s a dehumanising perception of ‘a bunch of migrants’ and it’s become too easy for people to look no deeper than this perception.
As if being subjected to ankle deep mud riddled with faeces due to inadequate facilities and having only nylon tents for shelter in the winter isn’t humiliating and degrading enough, the people in the camp are also subjected to constant intimidation by the CRS and Gendarmerie. Just whilst I was there the CRS took to wearing surgical masks and parking their vans on the path so that on leaving the camp, refugees and volunteers were forced to walk through yet more mud past a group of bullies (trying not to swear!) who felt that breathing in the air outside the camp was below them. At one point the CRS wouldn’t let us enter the camp with aid for women and children and later in the week they began searching us not only when we entered the camp but also when we left… we thought about maybe trying to take pallets and tents out of the camp just to see what their reactions would be! I was told that a member of the CRS called a young boy in the camp a ‘faggot’ for not fighting in his own country and that tents had been urinated on by the police. In what world is this kind of callous behaviour allowed to continue?! Human beings have been forced to leave their homes where they have grown up, where they have created memories for their children and established their own fruitful careers only to live in the mud in the freezing cold, only to be allowed seven minute showers before they are shouted at to get out by French authorities and only to rely on handouts of basic essentials from volunteers. What’s so crazy about the entire situation, and that I could never have prepared myself for, is how beautiful, filled with kindness and generosity, and hopeful people living in the camp are – Kirsty and I were constantly invited to eat and drink tea with people, the hospitality was more than I had ever known and one gentleman said he was ashamed that he could not show us how hospitable he was in his own home. These are the little, yet such crucial things that we don’t hear about in the media. Despite a reliance on charades and broken English to communicate, the people I spoke with in the camp genuinely wanted to get to know us, we would show each other pictures of our relatives, talk about education, music, our hobbies and when you take all of this on board you realise that too much time is spent looking at the differences between Western and Eastern cultures and actually it is very easy to find a common ground.
On my second night in Dunkirk a young refugee, came to stay in the farmhouse with us, at first he seemed quite nervous but after a bite to eat and something to drink he started to relax and enjoy the evening – he wrote our names in Kurdish and even sang for us, his voice was beautiful!! After spending such a lovely evening with him, it made it even more difficult to see him over the next few days looking drained and emotionally battered – at one point towards the end of the week we bumped into him and both Kirsty and I were at a loss for words, how can you reassure people that everything will be okay and things will get better when they have to sleep in flimsy tents in the wind and rain? We can almost certainly say that our Conservative government won’t be allowing significant numbers of refugees into the UK in the foreseeable future, but the hope of making it into the UK is what many people in the camp run on, it’s the most heart breaking situation.
Mid-week in the camp Kirsty and I were distributing candles, everyone absolutely loved that we had candles! We heard a couple of bangs but thought nothing of it seeing as exploding gas bottles are a normal occurrence in the camp, and so we continued giving out aid when a young man ran past us holding his face and throat totally covered in blood. Even then Kirsty and I didn’t realise what had happened, I suppose because of how foreign a concept gun fights are to us in the UK, but when we next turned around everyone was either running or on the floor whilst shots were being fired. We could hear bullets whistling past us and hitting objects not more than 3m away but we just stood there in total shock until a group of men living in the camp grabbed us, pulled us behind shelter and formed a semi-circle around us to keep us out of harm’s way. They were absolutely amazing, to keep us calm they told us ‘not to worry, they shoot up at the sky for the birds’, we were panicking and these remarkable men were just cool and collected. Gav ran down shouting Kirsty’s name, the look on his face and sound in his voice when he couldn’t see us was one I can’t push out of my mind, he looked terrified. After the shots seemed to stop for a while Gav told us to leave the camp, and stood outside the camp just fifteen minutes or so later, a cycling proficiency test rode past - it was the most surreal thing! Something about the entire situation that I’m still struggling to process is just
how calm the refugees were about the shooting, multiple women just shrugged their shoulders at us as if to say ‘this is it, this is what we live with’, and the only panicking man I spoke to wasn’t panicking because of the gun fight, he was panicking because he worried we wouldn’t come back as a result of it, he felt he had to tell us he wasn’t a terrorist and it’s terrorists he wants to escape from. It’s just the most upsetting thing to hear someone feeling like they have to explain to you that they are not a terrorist.
During the shooting, Gav ran down to MSF with the young man who had been shot in the face and told the Gendarmerie that there was a shooting and to come and help! Instead of diffusing the situation, the Gendarmerie went and stood behind their vans at the entrance of the camp and did nothing until an hour later when they stopped letting anyone into the camp and twenty or so riot vans turned up. It turns out that through the night the Gendarmerie stormed through people’s tents, including families’ tents, looking for firearms – people’s tents were ripped open and broken and multiple refugees told us that they had to source new blankets, quilts, sleeping bags etc. the next day because the Gendarmerie had traipsed their muddy boots all over people’s belongings. It’s important to point out that of the people shot and stabbed in the camp that evening, not one was involved in the fighting, they were refugees in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The night of the shooting we had a young family come and stay with us, they were terrified because the shooters had actually come into their tent to hide just as they had finished cooking dinner. The young family left their uneaten food and when they explained to Gav, who was in the camp making sure everyone was okay, what had happened, Gav offered for them to come and stay with us for the night. I feel blessed to have met such a lovely family, despite the language barrier we managed to laugh over games of cards, play hide and seek with the two young children and even teach each other some Kurdish and English. The daughter who was only 7 taught me colours in Kurdish and drew some beautiful pictures for all of us – she was such a gentle, well-mannered child, as was her younger brother and knowing that you had to send these beautiful young babies back to the camp was so devastating. Because of how close to the shooters in the camp they were, they were too scared to continue living in their tent and asked if they could be moved nearer to the police. It’s so awful that this wonderful young family were put in a position where living next to the police who constantly go out of their way to intimidate refugees was a preferable situation! Over the next two days Jez, who we were staying with, moved the family into a bender at the front of the camp where, despite living in the most awful mud, the family seemed happier.
Whilst I saw some of the most horrific sights I’ve ever seen in my life in the camp, I also saw so much spirit and heart in both refugees and volunteers. Seeing the friendships that have formed between
volunteers and refugees, people’s eagerness to help one another and the generosity that is so widespread in the camp has been such a beautiful experience. Kirsty and I were always offered the opportunity to sit down, drink tea and share food with people we’d never even spoken to and I think that’s one thing that made it so difficult to leave – knowing that you’re leaving some of the most generous, beautiful people you’ve ever met in the most appalling conditions.
Jess Tasney.
03/02/2016
No comments:
Post a Comment