Calais: the charities

Calais, October 2024.

Megan Lindsay was dressed all in black. Her curly hair was pushed over one shoulder, her trousers were speckled with small orange bleach marks, and with a phone to her ear, she paced back and forth. Above her was a banner reading ‘Solidarity Not Charity.’ The rest of the warehouse we were in was covered in similar slogans: Defund the Police, Do No Harm, a couer vaillaint, rien d’impossible–to the valiant heart, nothing is impossible. Megan had been in Calais on and off for 18 months.

The volunteers perched on an assortment of old sofas with their coats still on. The unheated warehouse is run by the Auberge des Migrants, an association of charities working with refugees and migrants in Calais and Dunkirk. The warehouse is covered with anarchist slogans, posters, and murals, and the volunteers drank tea underneath a sign saying ‘Welcome to the Jungle, Population: 5497.’

Megan began briefing them; most them were part of a monthly convoy organised by CamCrag, a refugee charity in Cambridge. They had driven down the night before to deliver donations, and help the charities for the weekend. That day, they would be going to a camp to clean up rubbish.

The camp they would be going to was in an abandoned warehouse just up the road. There were a few hundred people there, but nobody was quite sure of an exact number. A run of good weather had meant a lot of opportunities to cross.

Outside the warehouse were piles of rubbish–food containers, torn clothes, water bottles. Megan told me that the Mairie, the local Mayor's office, was refusing to join these camps up to the normal rubbish collection operation, so some of the volunteers had started an initiative to force the Mairie to take it. They would go to camps, collect all of the rubbish, and then call the Mairie and ask them to come and take it away. They said it had been working.

Rubber gloves and bin bags were distributed, and soon there were a mix of volunteers and refugees filling bags. By early afternoon, it had all been cleared, and 328 bags lay by the front gate. A call was made to the Mairie, demanding that they come and collect it.

These smaller camps have become the norm in Calais since 2016, when the French authorities have tried to prevent the growth of permanent camps. There are around 10 semi-permanent camps in Calais, with more in Dunkirk, ranging from a few hundred people to a few dozen.

Refugees dry their clothes on razor wire behind the warehouse they squat in.

In 2015, a large permanent camp began to grow on an old landfill site in the east of the city.

It came to be called The Jungle, a phonetic translation of the Pashto ‘dzhangal’ meaning ‘forest’.

The Jungle was dismantled in October 2016 by the French authorities.

Since then, the French government has pursued a ‘zero point of fixation’ policy to prevent another permanent camp forming.

Refugees are forced to move their tents and belongings every 48 hours. Anything they cannot carry is taken.

The site has since been turned into a nature reserve for migratory birds.

Despite the 'zero point of fixation' policy, the number of people successfully crossing has increased since the pandemic.

Data Source: Home Office

The number of people who have died attempting to reach the UK has also increased, with 2024 seeing three times more deaths than 2023.

Data Source: International Organization for Migration

Sara Chianchiano, the field coordinator for Collective Aid, in their wash centre in Calais.

Tom, a CamCrag volunteer, helps to move tents upstairs at the CollectiveAid wash centre ready to be distributed.

Sara Chianchiano, 27, the field coordinator for Collective Aid, showed me their tent stockpile for the week; a hundred small, cheap tents were stuffed into three alcoves in the basement of their wash centre in a residential part of Calais. They distribute 20 a day–one tent per two people. They stopped distributing sleeping bags in July so that stocks would last the winter. But stocks will not last the winter and neither will CollectiveAid. The charity is closing down its operation in Calais due to a lack of funding.

CollectiveAid was one of 10 charities that lost their main source of funding in 2021 when ChooseLove, the celebrity backed refugee charity, decided to stop funding all but two of the charities working in northern France. CollectiveAid’s monthly budget used to be €45,000 a month. Now, they have less than that a year.

When they lost their ChooseLove funding, the charity scaled back their operation, and started a clothes wash centre in the town. Soon after opening, they were informed they did not meet fire regulations, and had to close whilst they changed the plumbing and installed a sprinkler system. Despite this, they were told the centre still did not meet safety standards, a decision they are appealing. But the closure of the wash centre has made it even harder to secure funding, forcing them to close their Calais operation.

Noah Hatchwell, the executive director of CollectiveAid, said: “We're dedicating as much of our remaining resources to supporting other organizations and being able to meet the remaining needs, especially over winter. But something we can't change is there is less money going towards humanitarian operations, and especially humanitarian operations operating in Calais.”

Despite their funding difficulties in Calais, CollectiveAid has just launched a new operation in Lesvos, Greece, an island close to Turkey that has seen nearly 10,000 refugees arrive in 2024. This new project will be funded by ChooseLove.

They are handing over their responsibilities to five other charities. Hatchwell said that because there are so many organisations in Calais, what little funding is available gets spread thin, and that CollectiveAid pulling out could help the organisations that remain get more money.

However, in Calais there are concerns that the charities who remain are already strained.

Megan Lindsay had first come to Calais nearly two years ago. Raised in Scotland, she had found herself living in London after university. "I kind of lost my purpose there," she told me. A friend of hers had been in Calais, and recommended that she come. She had started volunteering for the Calais Food Collective, and had come back to Calais a month ago after a short break.

The Calais Food Collective works out of the Auberge’s warehouse. They distribute uncooked food and ingredients, as well as providing water to the smaller camps in the abandoned warehouses and patches of forest around the city.

But they do not have enough money to buy more food stocks past January, and might be forced to stop their food deliveries, focusing solely on water distributions.

They do 10 water drops a day, filling up large water containers that they have put in the camps. They normally start at 9, but the van broke down on the Saturday. By the early afternoon, they got it started, but it broke down again at 9pm whilst they were out on a drop. They had to leave the van and returned the following day with another one, nicknamed Fizzy because of its propensity to overheat, borrowed from another charity.

Megan prepares to go on a distribution after their van broke down twice in 24 hours.

By 3pm on the Sunday, the three CFC volunteers were still trying to get the water tank strapped down in the borrowed van. Then, someone noticed smoke coming from the car park to the side of the warehouse. An old rat proof box of abandoned clothes and sleeping bags and engine oil had caught fire. The Pompiers came, as well as the Police, and after putting it out, decided that it could have been started by a cigarette butt. “It will remain a mystery” one of them said. They did not seem too interested in investigating.

It started raining, and Megan sat in the muddy car park, watching the box of clothes to make sure it did not catch alight again. They still had 14 distributions left to do that day. She had hoped to stay in Calais until February, so that she would have spent two years there, but she was going home early. She was done.

Whenever someone dies attempting to cross, volunteers from all of the charities gather in a park in the old town of Calais. Someone had started keeping a list of the names of those who had died trying to cross, going back to the early 90s, and it was printed out on a scroll that was unfurled each time. New pieces of paper had been stuck to the old, and now it stretched 15 metres.

As the sun showed itself through the clouds for the first time that day, just before it set, someone added an entry to the list. A baby, Maryam Bahez, had drowned the day before when the boat carrying her family capsized, and she was ripped from her father’s hands. Her name was near the bottom of the sheet, and soon another piece would have to be added.