Volunteering in Calais’ Refugee Camps: A Week in “The Jungle”

Photo courtesy: Conor Walsh

To many people the refugee crisis will be a familiar term. For the last decade or so, British politics has been dominated by issues of migration: newspapers have featured frequent onslaughts of anti-immigrant rhetoric, while parties, like UKIP, have changed the political landscape in ways previously unimaginable. Brexit was a pivotal moment in British politics. It captured decades-old grievances and redefined Britain’s place on the global stage. Overnight we went from being a nation that championed cultural diversity to one that discriminated in favour of national homogeneity.

Even today, eight years on from the referendum, politicians are still vainly promising to cut migration targets, whilst also deterring hopeless refugees from seeking sanctuary in the UK.

For a long time I have been fascinated by Britain’s apathy towards the global refugee crisis. When Germany opened its doors to one million Syrian refugees in 2015, Britain resettled a mere 23,000 over a six-year period. To me, this contrast has always seemed ludicrous. Granted, Britain’s response to the war in Ukraine has been considerably more charitable. But still, I find it difficult to call it exemplary in the context of our European neighbours.

Like most people living in Britain, I’ve read countless migrant-hating headlines over the years and have been witness to numerous dismissive comments about camps in Calais—people calling clusters of tents “jungles” in an arrogant supposition that the refugees living there are closer to apes than our own flesh and blood.

I was tired of listening to endless hostile rhetoric and people complaining about a situation they knew nothing about.

So in July 2022 I travelled to Calais, to the very camps that had plagued the news for years, in the hope that I might learn more about the refugees living there, and maybe do a small bit of good along the way.

Arriving in Calais, I was surprised to find a bustling town that was closer to provincial French stereotypes than the image of chaos I had been told to expect. I had signed up to volunteer with a British charity, Refugee Community Kitchen (RCK), which operates in the local area.

RCK is staffed solely by volunteers—some of the most wonderful, selfless people I have had the pleasure of meeting—and provides hot, nutritious meals to refugees all around Calais, Dunkirk, and the surrounding areas. They also have a British outreach programme which operates in both London and Edinburgh. 

It’s a big job: the charity served 14,418 meals in August and over 10,000 meals while I was there in July. These numbers reflect the scale of the crisis and the challenge that charities, like RCK, face.

Working in the kitchen was hard work. At industrial scale and lightning pace, a large group of us worked tirelessly to chop, prepare, and cook high-quality meals. Never before have I sliced so many vegetables, nor seen rice in such large portions: in the month of August the kitchen consumed a whopping 2000 kilograms of onions and a further 600 kilograms of carrots. Making tea for seven hundred-odd people can only be described as surreal. But all of these tasks are taken in the stride of RCK’s countless volunteers—most of whom, like me, are only there for a handful of days or weeks at a time.

A true embodiment of the phrase “many hands make light work,” RCK is a prime example of humanity operating at its best. Working alongside a diverse mix of individuals—from young souls like myself to those with a little more life experience—there was never a dull moment. But banter and good times aside, the take-home experience from my time in Calais comes not from the kitchen, but the time I spent in the camps on distribution.

Hurtling down the motorway in our white, British-regged van I felt a strange sense of nervous euphoria. It’s hard to articulate, but I felt excitement at the prospect of committing a selfless good deed, whilst also feeling guilty, as if I was breaking social convention.

We were on our way to a camp just outside Dunkirk. This camp is one of the more violent camps in the area—it is held tightly in the hands of people smugglers. In the past week or so there had been several shots of gunfire heard. The risk level was high and rightly so; the night following our distribution the camp erupted into a violent battle between rival gangs. We parked our van facing the exit and had memorised a whole host of code words to use in emergency situations.

As we got out of the van we were surrounded by what I can only describe as hordes of people. It was overwhelming at first. But I soon realised that the many men surrounding us weren’t there to demand food, but to help us set up tables, take out the water canisters, and to organise their fellow refugees into a line. I was embarrassed by my initial presumption.

We had parked up alongside a long, mud-paved country lane. In a past life, this lane was nothing more than an access route to a farmer’s field. Today, however, it is home to numerous vans and tents—all belonging to charities who have come to provide aid, food, and advice for the multitude of refugees living in the surrounding fields and forests: the Red Cross, Care 4 Calais, Calais Lights, and numerous others.

There was a hub for those refugees wanting to charge their phones; a trailer providing shower facilities; a tent for those looking for advice or to track down family who had gone missing or lived further afield; and a pick-up point for resources like tents, sleeping bags, and gas stoves. 

In northern France, especially around Dunkirk, resources like tents and sleeping bags are in high demand. This isn’t because of an ever-increasing influx of refugees, but because every thirty-six hours the local police force runs operations where they scout the ground—confiscating all tents, resources, and personal effects that lie in their way. The idea is to continuously move the refugees so that they don’t settle and set up permanent camps, much like “the jungles” of years ago. Unless you or your family are standing with your objects, you can consider them as good as gone. The emotional turmoil this creates is disgusting. I can think of few other words to describe it.

Within a matter of twenty minutes we had distributed the majority of our seven hundred food parcels, mainly to the young men who formed the queues, but also to countless women and children. The camp can be a dangerous place if you’re young, especially when you're an unaccompanied minor. In order to minimise this danger we operated a policy of women and children first—they were able to come straight to the front of the queue and weren’t subjected to the same two food parcels per person limit that the men were.

Everyone I spoke to was so thankful; I had so many questions that I wished to ask them, like where they had come from, why they were here, and why they wished to travel to the UK. In wanting to respect their privacy, however, I was taught to only reflect the questions that they asked of us. This way no refugee would feel as if they were being interrogated or spied upon—after all, we want them to feel safe and to maintain what little dignity that they have left.

In western society we have such a habit of applying labels to people—this person’s good at sports, this person hates spinach, this person can balance a coconut on their head. Or perhaps more serious ones surrounding race, religion, and ethnicity. But looking around, I couldn’t attach a single label to anyone. As far as my eye could see, I was simply surrounded by human beings. Human beings who, in the most part, had travelled many thousands of miles from their home—fleeing conflict, violence, or death. I do admit, however, that there are some “refugees” who aren’t genuine and who travel solely for economic purposes. But even still, from my experience at least, these individuals seem few and far in number; it seems ludicrous that we should fail to show compassion towards those who need it simply because of such a minority.

Calais was an awakening experience for me. What to many refugees was simply another day of queuing, waiting, and starving, was to me a surreal, sobering moment. I felt so lucky that it was just a moment for me—that I could just walk away. The same couldn’t be said for the many hundreds of people that I left behind.

To think that anyone could be subjected to such brutal conditions and extreme apathy from the people of Britain and France is something that keeps me up at night—it haunts me in my sleep.

I challenge anyone who presumes these refugees to be criminals or thieves forming some kind of “invasion” at our borders to meet the people they speak so passionately about. Because if you look them in the eye—if you realise who they actually are and what many of them have suffered through—you’ll soon realise that they’re simply human.

Thank you ever so much for reading this article. If you would like to find out more about volunteering yourself, please do check out the Refugee Community Kitchen. They’re a fabulous group of people. And if you have been affected by this article or would like to discuss it further, please do reach out to Pi—we’re always eager to hear your thoughts.