So today was quite tough. As the Children's Centre was closed I spent the day in the Women's Centre offering jewellery making and nail painting workshops. Afterwards was an opportunity to get to know individual women better. I met a lady from Afghanistan who had to leave as her husband was a business studies teacher and the Taliban didn't like that. She has family in Manchester (parents, sisters) who settled a while ago, but she isn't allowed to join them.
It's amazing to see the normal, middle-class existences of the women on their Facebook pages knowing now that their lives have been completely turned upside down and they are living in a refugee camp.
One of the older ladies who speaks no English but who listens daily to the lessons insisted on me coming to her cabin for dinner. The family are Iraqi Kurds and the husband has legal British citizenship, having worked in Glasgow for 16 years, but his family - wife, 3 year old son and teenage son with what I think is cerebral palsy - are not allowed entry to the UK. It was my first time inside one of the cabins. Carpeted with offcuts and immaculately clean, the plywood walls have no windows and a single bulb hangs from the ceiling. All four family members sleep, eat and live in the 2.5 x 3.5 metre cabin, which has a small covered area for storage. There is an oil fire but nowhere to cook, so this is done on one of the four iron fires in the Women's Centre. I was given rice and a mushroom dish and asked to eat first, before the plate and spoon were passed round the rest of the family. The family were very insistent that I have enough to eat (and I dared not say that mushrooms are something that I usually avoid like the plague).
Another visitor to the hut was asking if I would take him to the UK (I declined, citing the French police with dogs and guns at the port), but the family's young child and disabled son make it impossible for them to try their luck on the lorries like the majority of the camp's young male residents do nightly.
The rest of the Children's Centre staff have gone to Bruges for NYE but I'm just not able to square what I witnessed today with participating in the New Year's jollity. The women invited me to come to their 'party' in the Women's Centre but the French rules required me to be offsite by 8pm, which is probably for the best. Women around the camp at night are not the safest. Children of all ages are put in nappies at night to save having to trek to the toilets (hence the need for the larger sizes) and the women also avoid going out if at all possible. Having said that, I managed to drop my debit card in the Women's Centre and it was found and returned to me shortly afterwards.
Leaving is going to be hard. Knowing that I can leave, drive off, go to the supermarket or get a takeaway is impossible to square with the lives of those who have not got those choices, despite just a few years ago working or studying and living like I do. I cannot get my head around the politics of who we do and don't let into the UK and the reasons why or why not.
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/caroline-dunkirk-refugees
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