Phoebe

Phoebe worked as a volunteer in the Calais refugee camp, also known as the jungle, for five weeks — from July to August 2016. Like many of the volunteers, she helped to give out donations to the refugees arriving in Calais.

“The people who would talk to me about trying to get across to England would always be the newcomers. When you ask them ‘how long have you been here?’, they say two weeks and you say ‘oh wow, you’re new!’ And they say, ‘New!? I’ve been here for two weeks’ because they think that they’re people going through Calais as a throughway point to get to the UK. They don’t realise that people have been here for months, for years. I would get questions from them: ‘how far are we to England? Where do the ferries go? Where’s the train? Could I just walk from town?’. You have to tell them the facts — that you can’t get on the train, and you can’t get on the ferry without the papers. There are people who try or who’ve succeeded just walking through the channel tunnel, which is just horrendously dangerous. It must still be going on. The actual camp is near the port and the channel tunnel is on the other side of town so I didn’t hear of many people trying the tunnel.

The way everyone tries to get through is in the back of a lorry . They open the sides of the cardboard boxes with a razor and then tape them back up again.

They were still putting up more fences when I was there the other day. You can sit there in the camp and watch the lorries going by to the port. You can see Dover from Calais, you can see Calais from Dover. On an unclear day you can’t always see it, but it’s about 38km away. Newcomers ask me about swimming. Those who have come across from Libya to Italy say that it’s usually the Italian coast guards that come and save them half way at the last bit. They spend 2 days on the water. I had one or two guys saying ‘what if I just swim halfway then call the English coastguards and they come and save me?’. But I say, well, it’s really cold and the waves are really big. But when they ask me how far it is and I say 38km, they say too much. Even having come all that way, that is still too much. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people who had tried to bribe a French fisherman…I mean if I had a boat, I would take them [laughs].

Once you’re across you’re across, but it’s so close and so far. And it’s impossible to know how many people cross. They’re constantly trying to do censuses to see how many people there are, if they are ill or have diseases, how old they are, the police brutality. I heard a handful of stories of people I’ve met, where their friend says ‘Oh you know this guy, he’s in England now’. But a handful. There’s about 500 new arrivals every week in Calais and people are there trying.

They’re out trying all night every night for months but then after a while they lose heart and stop bothering. The way that things functioned in the camps could be very frustrating. But everything is temporary and makeshift because the volunteers come and go so much. Getting something done, even with the donations — you get vans full of stuff from the UK and that’s wonderful, but it’s a huge operation getting the stuff from the back of a van or even from the donors (usually in the UK) to the people who need it. So many little steps that you don’t think about. You’ve got to sort it, you’ve got to size it, you’ve got to throw away the crap, you have to put it into types of clothes, you have to put it into boxes, find a way to distribute it fairly. And it just is such a process just for someone to get a t-shirt who needs a t-shirt.

We get a lot of clothes for women and children. People seem to find it so much easier to empathise with women and children. If there are two refugees and one of them is 15 and one of them is 32, alright, maybe send the 15 year old. But 90% of the population are men who need stuff and who suffer just as much as anybody else. It’s frustrating.

It’s the sustainability that’s also a massive problem. That’s one of the big problems that I saw from really early on. No one wants the camp to be sustainable. The refugees don’t want the camp to be sustainable because they don’t want to be there, they want to be in the UK or get to England now. The volunteers don’t want the camp to be sustainable because they want to help the refugees get elsewhere — somewhere that isn’t war torn, now. Obviously the authorities don’t want the place to be sustainable, but they’re slow to offer any alternative. The police are just generally violent and oppressive. No one wants the camp to be sustainable so we sort of go for sustainability in half measures. I think that either we have got to accept the jungle is a thing and give it some sustainability or we have got to get rid of the whole thing completely, because this half measured sustainability just means that there’s an attempt at toilets and hygiene but it’s always going to be a shithole. There’s an attempt at education and activities but they can’t be sustainable either because they’re run by volunteers that can only give a month at a time. It means that people can’t cook their own meals and they have to line up like prisoners to get a hot meal. It means that people can’t make a living when making a living is so important - there are restaurants and shops and stuff; if it was a sustainable thing then you could have community roles and you could have a living and there could be jobs. But no one wants it to be sustainable because no one wants it to be there. The whole thing is just a problem.

On the one hand I look at the place and I think it’s kind of awesome that this unlikely Afro-Asian nation settlement has just defiantly popped up because that’s the only option they’ve got. Ok, you won’t let us work, you won’t let us rent our own apartment, you won’t let us here, you won’t let us there, we can’t do anything because we haven’t got any papers and you won’t allow us citizenship of any form. So what do we do? We set up our own settlement and we live.

But if we moved the border, how would it work? Would we fence them in, rather than fence them out?

Do you know about the containers? It’s sort of in the middle of the camp now. One of these half measure solutions - it’s the half measures that are the problem man, the half measures that the French government offer. Stacked shipping containers. They look like bright white hostels on the inside, they have electricity and showers and toilets which they only have to share between 1000 people which compared to the rest of the camp is nothing. Still not enough. They’ve got fencing around the block because security is a big issue too. But it’s really weird because they’ve got french security guards there. To get in, they have to give their fingerprints, which would totally jeopardise their asylum claim in the UK. If there’s any record of you having entered the UK from another European country, they will send you back to that country. If you get found by the police in France or England you get sent back to that country. You hear of people going forwards and backwards — and it should say something in itself that people go forwards and backwards. I met a guy who had been from Afghanistan to France three times. He can’t live in Afghanistan. Conscription or death. He was the one who had been waiting for asylum in France for 8 or 9 months.

It’s not to think that they haven’t got any money either. A lot of the guys have or had money. One of the ways to get into England is to have a shit load of money. People would tell me that their friend got into the UK for £10,000. And £10,000 to a Pakistani is a shitload of money. I’ve never had £10,000.

You hear people saying ‘back in Sudan I had three cars, I went to university’,

Or ‘back in Afghanistan I had a beautiful wife, we spend loads of our money on our wedding’.

For them it’s no big deal to spend a thousand dollars getting from Libya to Italy, but what about the people who didn’t have access to a thousand dollars? They’re the people who I worry about. The people who are still sat at home are probably the people who can’t leave. They’re the people who don’t have the means - that’s the reason there’s no many men out there too. If you’ve got a family of 8, you send a young man to set up and send money home so that they can come too. They’re still not economic tourists, whether you’ve got the means or not - you just run away. It’s about running away from death. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or if you’re a man or a woman, you’re just running. If you have a bit more money or if you’re more able bodied and it’s gonna be easier, but in the end you just do what you have to.

Also, if this was 100 years ago, maybe you wouldn’t know how to get to England. The internet isn’t just for the privileged few any more. England is dreamland to the refugees - all the media is in English and so it seems the obvious choice. It has a role more than ever. So many people are making the journey towards the same aim, all doing the same journey. The knowledge that they have is the knowledge that people have between them and it’s all made out to be so easy. People thought that about Europe - that Europe would be easy, human rights, libertarian, enough to eat. Then they find out that it’s not like that in Europe, they assume that the UK is where it must be.

I think that a healthy amount of cynicism is good for you. I think that you have to be critical or cynical, or else you’re just blinding yourself with your own unrealistic optimism. You get people who come down for 1 day, 3 days, 5 days who just want to have fun and have an experience, get to know the other volunteers and get drunk. They’re at the warehouse the next day like ‘Oh my god I’m so hungover’ and you’re like, well why are you here then? You’re fucking useless, you can’t help today because you’re hungover — great. Or they go into the camps with their cameras and the people are so sick of having their photos taken and it’s actually really harmful. I guess that social media is important for raising awareness of the situation that they’re in, to an extent. Maybe if you’re a journalist you can argue that it’s for wider awareness, but I think that a lot of people just want to go in and post a picture of the beans and the rice that they’ve just eaten. You see people going to Calais to volunteer and you see them wanting to do things like stay in the jungle or just spend the evening there hanging out with people. Are you doing that entirely as a personal challenge or are you doing it just to boast to your friends about it? You should be there to do something. It’s ok to be there to try and learn something - to try and comprehend the situation and to try and learn from people and to help people that need help, but when it’s just with this spirit of now when I go home I can tell my friends that I hung out with some Sudanese guys, there’s something quite disgusting about that. It’s better to hold back and consider before you weigh in on things because you can do damage despite your intentions. Look after yourself, because you’ve got to look after yourself before you look after other people — that’s what I would say about resilience.

The thing at the end that kept me going was taking myself away from people. You’re sharing a flat with loads of people, you’re in a warehouse with loads of people, you go to camp and they all want to talk to you. Eventually you have to take yourself away from people. Eventually you just have to be by yourself. Towards the end I started every evening going to the beach and I would sit in my pants and look at the sunset for a bit. And that’s what I needed, to read or write. You needed to take yourself out. You see long term volunteers that really need a break - they have this complex that if they go away, everything is going to crumble. And in a way it’s arrogance. You see people that really need a break but they find it really difficult to take a break. And you see in the mounting frustration and exhaustion and there’s constantly feeling of ‘Am I actually helping?’ even though all you’re trying to do is help.

I realised just the other day that it was the first time that I had had a job where getting up early in the morning and getting there was something that I didn’t even think about. Like, you know, I’ve had other jobs where you wake up at 7 and you think ‘Do I really have to go this morning?’ Do they really need me? Maybe I’ll just miss this bus and get in a bit late I could just say that my train broke down or something.

But here I didn’t even think about it, you just get up and go because there’s constantly so much to do and also the continuity is so precious so if you went away for a week and came back or went away for a long weekend - you just don’t even think about it - you want to be there all the time, to keep everything rolling. It’s the little things that you can sort out in a second or a little time which give you the feeling of something being done. If a man asks you if he can get a white t shirt or a volleyball or some razors and then you can go in and get them the next day, he’s so happy to get his white t shirt or his razors — they’re the little things that you can see in one second done. But, then again, it doesn’t affect the bigger picture at all.”

Recorded as an interview with Alice Bryant on 2nd September, 2016

For more information on the #WarriorPoets project, please visit: http://bit.ly/2e1lADO