“Lunch at the Three Idiots in half an hour,” said our team leader.  “Good,” I thought, “I need the loo,” and I swung the machete high again.  I’d been chopping down brush for a good two hours and this was my first full day in the Jungle since Christmas.  I am not normally good at holding my bladder but on this occasion it had taken our team so long to find a suitable spot to start clearing for more tents and shelters that once we got started none of us wanted to stop for ordinary comfort breaks.  We were working on the uplift of all that had been achieved the previous day and expectations were high.

Just a few days earlier the Mayor of Calais had announced that a swathe of Jungle had to be cleared of dwellings to make a 100m buffer zone next to the highway.  This had been a bitter blow to many volunteers and concerned citizens of Europe who had worked ceaselessly since the autumn to fund and build shelters for the refugees camping among the sand dunes outside the Calais Ferry terminal.   Apart from doing our best to create a public outcry at the cruelty of the edict issued in mid-winter to people already barely equipped to survive the cold there was little anyone could do except help refugees to comply.  Rumours had abounded and uncertainty reigned over whether the police would invade with a bulldozer, on which day, and how deep the swathe of destruction would be.  I feared there would be violence.  But on my arrival at the camp I’d found volunteers ebullient from working together side by side with camp residents the day before to clear land for people to move into.  So our team set to, shovelling poo, picking up abandoned clothes, bedding, food, broken tents, filling in holes and chopping back bushes with their long dirty thorns that pierced my clothing and lodged themselves in my legs.

In the warmth of the cafe we sat drinking chai and waiting for our Kabuli rice and chicken. Afghani food is the most delicious in the world and I should have been hungry but fear kept my guts in a knot.  I felt the same overriding concern I’d had ever since my first visit to the Jungle in October – how will they all survive the winter and even if they do, will their hearts ever heal?  These fears were intensified by the approaching cold and the seeming inhumanity of my own government, the local french authorities, and so many of my neighbours in England.  Yet here in the cafe there was so much to celebrate: the team-work, the thriving little business, the human spirit and the beans.  Kidney beans cooked with ginger; mmmmmm.  Next to me sat an assistant producer of tv documentaries who’d taken time out of her work to spend a week sorting donations and distributing them.  And next to her was a 17yr old boy I’ll call Kevin.  Kevin had a mobile phone.  Last week my member of parliament back home had said to one of our ex-city councilors (an amazing lady who was at Greenham Common don’t you know) that all these so called asylum seekers have mobile phones and credit cards – as if that defined them as liars and opportunists.  Kevin was quietly crying into his phone.  He was talking to his mum back in Peshawar and the enormity of his burdens overcame him for a bit.

In the afternoon the sky turned bitter and the wind blew grey.  Kevin was working beside me this time and in his own language began to tell me something of his life and circumstances.  Back home (his home and mine – for we both happened to grow up three decades apart in the same Pakistani town on the Afghan border) he was a fruit seller.  His family were already refugees from Afghanistan who had settled in the previous generation in Peshawar.  Yet the West called.  Pakistan has taken so many Afghan refugees over the last 30 years that the economy is shaken and its hard to make ends meet.  “In your country,” he said, “your women go out to work but in mine they stay in the home and so there’s just me and my brother to support everyone.”  His youthful shoulders drooped a little.  His father was already dead – this he’d told me as if it were an almost forgotten wound.  “You think this is a nice place, this jungle, but it’s full of vice and deals and violence.  If anyone had told me that this, this was what I’d be coming to,” he shook the bin bag he was holding open as I lifted all kinds of unsavoury filth into it with my gloved hands, “nothing would have persuaded me to leave my home however tough things got.  But I can’t go back now,” he said in answer to the question I hadn’t asked, “we’ve spent nine lak ruppees getting me this far.  I can never go back.”  He shook his teenage head and his eyes were dull dimes without hope.  A lonely boy, so alone that he’d been spending everyday of the last week attached to the volunteers in spite of having almost no English and being unable to communicate fully until he’d talked to me.

I didn’t see Kevin the next day but in the evening my friend and I went back to the Three Idiots for our dinner – hoping for more of those beans.  I’d been quite overwhelmed by the manner of a young man there who I’d assumed was a waiter – his polished speeches and dramatic facial expressions seemed to be more suited to a Pakistani tv advertisement than a shanty town restaurant.  Yet on our second visit to the establishment this man I’ll call Gavin spent longer with us and as we talked he dropped the act and showed me something of himself.  We talked of the Swat and Chitral valleys, of the towns we love and the families we know.  His education has been at the school of life as he was needed by family business from an early age.  He can speak many languages, including Danish and Italian. He’s a born businessman and communicator, with hope and courage and a positive attitude.

Yet he too is a second generation refugee who lived his early years in Peshawar.  He left when his only brother, the elder, married with three small kids, was killed in a bomb blast in the city.  His family sent him to Europe.  He spent time in Italy and got papers there but there was no community he could belong to and he felt unwanted so he travelled to Denmark to work in his brother-in-law’s pizza shop.  Eventually caught as an illegal immigrant he was expelled back to Italy and has made his way here.  He wants very much to get to Britain.  “Why?” I said, Denmark, Norway (he has another sister there) these are better countries than Britain.  But that’s not the way he sees it.  He thinks that Scandinavia kowtows to Britain and that we are the big shots in Europe!  How wrong can he be??? But his goals are set, and unlike Kevin, they haven’t been dashed.  He wants to change his life, himself, by his own effort and he wants, in his own words, “to be safe.”  He repeated this phrase many times.  He’s not a transparent person and what lies behind that phrase I cannot guess.  I know that the frequency of the bombs in Peshawar in recent years, sometimes two or even three in one day, have been terrifying for my old friend who is an overworked cardiac consultant in Scarborough who travelled to the West 20 years ago because he too is the only son of an Afghan refugee.  Every visit back to see his old father returned him a greyer, older man.  And as I write this I have just read of the shootings at the University of Charsaddar (a taxi ride from Peshawar) that took place yesterday – an example of exactly why Gavin’s family want their only son working in a safe country.  The cook that gave his life, the chemistry lecturer who tried to defend his colleagues, these are all in the front line against terrorism and they have a right to seek a measure of safety, a back-up against total annihilation, yet in the West we treat them as a buffer zone for our own comfort and will not respect their needs.

We need a political solution (see article

All the donated sweaters in the world aren’t enough to solve the refugee crisis

Natasha Walter )  but it has to start with meeting the refugees as equals and through listening to their stories understanding how we are linked, how our history and commerce and families are linked to them.  We think we can let them suffer in isolation but we are part of the big picture in which they are currently the pinch-zone.  Ignoring them now could lead to consequences we can’t even begin to imagine and we’ll go down with blood on our hands.