Day Five – trade unionists for Calais – Wednesday 17th February
Danny’s night in the camp: I spent the night in the camp with a friend, Ismaeel from Afghanistan, who had been translating for me that day. He speaks Farsi and Pashto and learnt English working for the British Army in Afghanistan. We had some food in Café Kabul, an Afghan restaurant which serves strong coffee and brilliant typical cuisine, and struck up conversation with a Londoner who had just arrived in the camp and was devastated at the sight of infants running around and the scope of the demolition area at the front of the camp.
After our meal we went back to Ismaeel’s caravan and I spoke to some Welsh volunteers who’ve been living in the camp for 4 months. As we huddled around a small and intermittent gas heater, conversation remained jovial but soon turned to the impending evictions. When I asked Ahmad if he would stay in Europe, he said ‘we saw Hamlet last week here and it taught me a lot: ‘to be or not to be man’, I have no choice’.
Ismaeel said ‘when people talk about war, I don’t know what they mean: war is all I know, war is my country.’ As the camp slowly emptied of volunteers, music started to play and day-time cafés put on their disco lights and people started dancing.
National identity plays an important role in the camp and this was evident from the different types of dance found in the various tents dotted around the camp. As we sat in one tent, the conversation fluctuated between harrowing tales of violence experienced by the refugees and their dwindling hope to getting to the UK, and memories of their homeland, be it Afghanistan, Iraq or Eritrea.
They tried simultaneously to forget and to remember. I slept in a caravan that Ismaeel had found for me; in the morning I asked him who usually slept there. He told me that he’d paid his friend to sleep somewhere else for the night so I could have a nice room. Ismaeel also gave me his blankets so I’d be warm. He said he was thanking me for washing his clothes the night before. ‘Whenever you need anything brother, please ask me’, he said to me standing in the middle of the snowy Jungle.
