Oh, you’re volunteering  in Calais? That’s, like,  the ultimate fashion  statement these days. 
IT’S NOT A F*CKING DAY TRIP 
Congratulations on the misery tourism! What are we doing, swanning about  Calais, congratulating ourselves on our fabulous relief effort? It’s not about a bunch  of white, middle-class do-gooders off on a charity holiday. 
Let me tell you about Hoshyar. 
[rant over, large lace break] 
15th February, 2016. DAY ONE. 
“So, who’s this guy Hoshyar we’re going to see?” 
[view of bulldozed patch by the edge of the jungle. we’re walking past.] “He’s just a really funny, nice guy.” 
“How did you meet him” 
“Last time we were here, me and my husband were doing building work, and he  was too. We were just dicking about. Shared sense of humour, you know? 
“They were building this reception centre, and we were trying to make doors for  the Sudanese girls – Men are coming in their houses at night and they’re having  to physically fight them off... The anarchists didn’t want to give us any wood! You  have to laugh.” 
Maybe a few months ago, things were funnier. Hoshyar has totalled up 120 nights  in the Jungle now. So many friends have made it to the UK, but not him. No luck.  Not a chance.  
“Mathilde!” 
“Good to see you!’ 
“Come in! Come in!”

54 55 

We all squeeze into Hoshyar’s hut. Kick off your shoes, then there’s only one place to go – a  softly padded seven-foot-square space. I hunker down in the corner. 
“This is Kate” 
“Hi” 
“Donach” “My husband.” 
“Hi” 
“This is Alaz. He lives here too.” 
“Wow. Cosy.” Two grown men in an eight-foot shack. They each have a sliver of broken mirror  tacked up, to shave by.  
It’s well insulated. It would be warm(ish) except we have to leave the door open, to let in some  light. 
“I’ll make you lunch” 
It’s not a question. 
Hoshyar busies himself in his foot-square kitchen, knocking two eggs together and tipping  them into a pan. The sadness temporarily ebbs from his face in the process. Welcoming,  cooking, sharing. You can tell this fits with his sense of how things should be in the world. 
We play the “let’s show each other our families on our phones” game. “My daughter. Five years old.” 
“We have left her with my mother, see?” 
“For five days. We are here for five days. It is a school holiday – ‘half term’.” “And my son. He is twelve.” 
“Is he with your mother?” 
“No he is staying at home. My friend Sarah is looking after him. He loves his  computer too much to leave it.” 
“Back in Iraq I have playstation. FIFA football. You know it?” 
“My son does!” 
“He will feed the cats. Here are the cats.” 
“Very nice!”  
“A boy and a girl.” 
Hoshyar “Here is my mother...” [we don’t see his photos, just our faces  looking at his phone] “my father” “my sister and her children”  “Oh! They’re beautiful!” 
“Here, my family home.” 
A leafy grove. Acres of land. The family sitting on a carpet on the flat roof in  the sunshine. The contrast with Hoshyar’s current view is stark. 
What must it be like to feel homesick for somewhere it’s not safe for you to be?

56 57 

A bin bag is unrolled and a piece of cardboard laid on it.  
Dinner is served. 
“This is delicious.” 
“Mm.” 
“Oh not for me, thank you. I’m sorry, I can’t eat eggs. I’m allergic to them.” 
Hoshyar springs to his feet and wipes out the pan. “Tomatoes are OK for you? and what is  this? Piazz?” “Onion.”  
“Yes, onion is fine.” 
And he cooks another meal, from scratch, just for me. 
“It’s really tasty. Just the right amount of salt.” 
I mean it. I hadn’t realised how hungry I was. 
[cartoon sequence of tea making] 
“How are you Hoshyar?” 
“I don’t know. What I say?” 
The authorities have announced plans for the final eviction of the Jungle. Hoshyar’s house  is to be demolished, along with most of the camp. Three thousand people will be made  homeless. There is nowhere to move the houses to this time.  
There are fewer than 500 places left in the shipping containers. They’re offering a few  weeks shelter in a camp at the other end of France, but there’s insufficient transport to take  everyone that needs to go.  
The message is clear. 
People are expected to disappear. 
So, Hoshyar is going to lose everything he has, that he has salvaged and constructed, that  people have given freely, because they want to help, because they care. The tiny kitchen. The  sliver of shaving mirror. The set of clean clothes. The walls, the door, the padlock. He can’t  carry them away. 
He’s put his name down to move into the shipping containers, but he doesn’t know if he’ll get  a place. Living in a flood-lit barracks, he’ll have half a bunk-bed to call his own – not even a  shelf or a locker. 
There will be nowhere to make a cup of tea. 
HE DOESN’T EVEN WANT TO BE HERE. 
The plan is to join his uncle in Croydon. But the longer it takes, the more often he fails to  catch that elusive lorry, the harder it becomes to even try.

58 59 

This shouldn’t be a personal story, it should be a political one. 
Later, scrolling through my phone, showing-off the cartoons I’ve drawn. “My drawing.  Jeremy Corbyn.” 
“Yes!” 
Everyone here loves Jeremy Corbyn. “He visited us! He will tell David Cameron they must  help us. Then David Cameron will know.” 
“Um, I don’t think David Cameron will listen.” 
“There is a big European meeting at the end of the month. They will work out how to help  the refugees, yes?” 
The enormity, the immediacy of the problem is so clear to Hoshyar, that it seems obvious  that politicians must want to help. 
“But Hoshyar, refugees can’t vote.” 
“Didn’t you know? Immigrants are always feared, always vilified.” 
“They hate you Hoshyar. They think you’re a terrorist.” 
That’s what we don’t say. 
PORTEQÂLEN 
We leave Hoshyar washing dishes with baby wipes, and drive the 30km over to the Dunkirk  camp, to check it out. Mathilde is a midwife, and this is where most of the pregnant women are.  We’re here for less than a week, but we want to be as useful as we can. 
I have fifty quid in donations to buy fresh fruit with, so we stop by another branch of that well known discount superstore chain, and fill a rucksack with the orangiest-smelling oranges we  can find.  
We are surprised to find that the camp is in a park in a quiet residential suburb, directly facing  a street of houses. “Blimey. I bet the local residents aren’t happy about this,”  
(a statement which betrays the effortless way we prioritise the needs of the comfortably-off over  those of people in actual need) 
The rain is unrelenting.  
The site is characterised by submerged drainage ditches, puddles, floods, thick, sticky mud.  Dunkirk is, quite literally, the pits.

60 61 

[police] “Ici! Chercher votre sac.” [check that’s the kind of thing they’d say] 
“What are they looking for? Not oranges, it seems.” 
“Blankets and sleeping bags. There’s an embargo. You can’t bring in dry bedding.” 
“Wha...?!” “You couldn’t fucking make it up!”  
“2016. Police officers uphold the law by preventing refugee children from sleeping in dry beds.” 
The police also stop people building wooden structures on the site, and only intermittently allow  new tents to be brought in. The effects of this miserable edict are immediately apparent. 
[images of squalor in the rain] 
Mathilde arranges her shifts with the volunteer co-ordinator.  
“Sure, I’ll be back in the morning. We’ll just hand out these oranges.” 
“What’s Kurdish for “oranges”?” 
 “Porteqâlen” 
“cheers” 
We all become soggier.  
“not here on the main drag. Everything gets handed out here. Let’s head towards the back  of the camp.” 
And that’s when we see her. 
“That’s Evser!” 
Sloshing through puddles, without a raincoat. 
We follow her back to her tent, where she ducks shyly behind the flysheet. She’s taller than I remember, and she has grown a front tooth. 
We give her mother some oranges. “Pert-i-ka-len?”  
“Spass.” 
There is an awkward moment. Her mother would dearly love to invite us in and offer us tea,  but she lives in a mouldy pit, a hole – it doesn’t even qualify as a hovel. 
I fish about in my bag, find some lemons and press them into her hand. “Spass.” 
Evser doesn’t remember me. 
There are no footballs.  
She’s not laughing any more.

62 63 

As we trudge away, the rain starts sheeting down. 
“Prit-i-calen?” “Anyone?” 
I tentatively duck into the doorway of a large family tent. “Excuse me? Sorry? Prot-i-calon?” “Thank you! Thank you!” 
It’s the sight of the littlest child that breaks me. Her pure smile. Her shining eyes. [me wailing in Donach’s arms in the rain] 
“What are we fucking doing? We can’t solve this with oranges! The kids are all here! They’re all  stuck here! When does this stop being somebody else’s problem?” 
It’s raining so hard no-one will notice I’ve been crying. We hand out the oranges and head back  to the gate. 
And we there see the old Afghan man, muffled up against the elements. He never made it to  Liverpool, to his son, to his grandsons. He’s stuck here too. 
[sight of him up to his ankles in sludgy grey mud, turned, smiling] 
BOLLYWOOD FANTASY 
We’re at the White Mountain Restaurant with Hoshyar  
This really happened, by the way. Despite the title of this chapter, I’m still just describing what  I saw.  
After making Dunkirk ever so slightly orangier, we had headed back to Calais, and, with some  difficulty, persuaded Hoshyar to let us buy him dinner. 
“Look, if I had a house here, I would make you dinner. I can’t make you dinner. Please come to  dinner.” 
He eschews the Three Star Hotal... “That place is dirty” [they’ve updated their sign!] 
 ...and brings us to the White Mountain Restaurant. “This is better. Good Kurdish food.” I get a  sense that he has to be careful where he’s seen with us, and it’s not straightforward, choosing  which establishment to patronise in the Jungle after dark. 
The place is packed (though once again, we’re the only paying customers) and the romantic  climax of a Bollywood film is playing out on a wide screen above our head. This doesn’t appeal  to the all-male audience. The proprietor flips the memory stick out of the side of the TV and  starts an action movie playing instead.

64 65 

“He’s the greatest! See those muscles! 
Superguard he always saves the day! 
He’s the fastest! You’re in trouble? 
Superguard’s already on his way!” 
“Superguard? Help me, oh please help me. It’s my daughter. Young and virtuous. She has  been snatched by smugglers.” 
“Imprisoned? At the docks? Don’t worry. Those low-life scum won’t know what’s hit them.” 
The crowd leans in, smiling, there are murmurs of approval. The people smugglers are  about to get the shit kicked out of them. That’s entertainment. 
Because, it’s not a fantasy. It’s real life. 
LET’S TALK ABOUT PEOPLE SMUGGLERS 
For now, we’ll resort to that dubious metaphor, of refugees as a flood. 
And so, spending millions upon millions of pounds of public money on fencing and policing to  seal the porous border at Calais can be likened to putting a plug in a sink. 
But the water still flows. 
Towards England, why? Perhaps because people around the world speak our language, and  also because our country is (perhaps wrongly) perceived as fair and tolerant. And also because,  having watched their families die, people are desperate for reunion with relatives in the UK. 
But what turned on the tap? 
The bombs and the guns: the ones that we drop and we sell and we profit from. The marauding  psychotic death cults of Daesh (ISIS) and the Taliban, that rose from the ashes of the countries  we invaded.  
Just imagine that you have a young child – half the world’s refugees are children. Imagine your  country is at war, that your goverment is dropping bombs on your city, that the terror troops are  a day away from your town. What kind of parent would you be if you stayed? 
Putting the plug in that sink forces the water to rise up and spill over the sides. If the only way  to the UK is via people smugglers, that’s what people will resort to. 
We have created a market run by unscrupulous crooks preying on the vulnerable. Gangsters  with no incentive to tell their victims the truth. 
Any lorry driver stopped at the UK border with an ‘illegal migrant’ on board their vehicle faces  a mandatory £2000 fine. 
Look, we even set the minimum price.

66 67 

[flashback to scene earlier with Amez and Khebat with the kids playing outside their hut.] “What can we do?” 
“I met someone says he can help you. He can get passports for the children and Bezma. I think  we can afford it.” 
Amez is going to be selling a fuck of a lot of pizza to pay this off. 
But a month later, I see Daran again in the Jungle. “Hey Kate! Why you no come and have tea  with me?” 
“You’re meant to be gone! I thought? Wolverhampton?” 
“Yes, we will have passports and go in a car. Inshallah. I know Dad gave the money. We’re  waiting. Maybe soon?” 
It’s not like you can complain to the Small Claims Court when the people smugglers rip you off. 
[Flashback to the old Afghan man standing in the mud at Dunkirk] 
Mathilde mutters: “Apparently he’s working for the people smugglers.” 
“Hiya!” 
“Hello!” 
“You’re here! Liverpool?” 
“No Liverpool. No. If I go UK the police they... [gestures his hands like hand cuffs] make me  back Afghanistan. The French police they make me back Afghanistan. I hiding here.” 
Well, the people smugglers would tell him that, wouldn’t they? Then they can use him. They’re  not to be relied upon for accurate immigration and asylum advice.  
[british long term volunteer guy in the Jungle, by a tea urn] “Jungle teas” 
It’s easy to spot the people smugglers. These guys waltz in here with purpose, they’re checking  “the place out. They strike up a conversation straight away, and it’s always the same one. “If I  get to the UK, I get a house, and I get a place in college and a good job, yes? The government  will buy me a TV. Life is good in UK, yes?” They need to check that I’ll back up the lies they’re  spinning to the refugees.  
“I always act dumb. “I dunno. I don’t really know what happens when you get to the UK. I just  serve the tea, mate.””

68 69 

“How are you Hoshyar?” 
“I don’t know. What I say? The people smugglers they want £5000 to go to UK. It’s such a lot of  money... 
“They rob me. They come in here three nights ago and they take everything. They take my  tablet. They take Alaz’s phone. He has gone to talk to them now see if he can get it back... 
“They take Alaz’s hair. They...” [he mimes] 
“They shaved his head!” 
“What? Why?” 
“They are not nice people.” 
And they are people’s only hope.