Calling all vans and drivers!
** Help Needed – Please Share ** In the last few weeks people have been unbelievably generous with donations for newly arrived Afghan refugees. It’s been truly heartwarming to see. But – we now need to get all these amazing donations to where they need to be. We urgently need your help. We need VANS and DRIVERS. If you have a van, know someone who has a van, or can access a van and would be willing to help, please please get in touch now. Without your help we can’t get this essential stuff to the people who desperately …
Kids’ kindness will make refugees’ day
We love this! Children at a school in London have made up 60 gift packs – one for each of the refugee children at a London hotel we visited. Christmas is coming early tomorrow! …
Clearances in Dunkirk
On Thursday evening I got a panicked text from a friend in Dunkirk. Hundreds of riot police were descending on the large camp there, they said, accompanied by dozens of vans filled with CRS police and gendarmerie. Behind them were refuse trucks for the tents and belongings to be thrown in. And behind the trucks were land cleaners and diggers. This patch of scrub land had been home to a growing number of refugees, mainly from the persecuted Kurdish regions of the Middle East. It was turning into a bustling community, which is the very thing that terrifies the …
Why refugees love joggers
Today was a good day. We gave out 202 pairs of new joggers – the kind the refugees here like, with narrow legs, tie waistband, a cuff at the bottom, and zip pockets. It might sound strange to have such strong preferences, but there are important reasons for them. The narrow legs and tie mean almost any size will more or less fit you; the zip pockets may well be the most secure place you have to keep your paper and phone; the cuff bottom means they don’t drag in the mud. “I like these, they are safe,” a young …
Afghani artist Shamsia Hassani
Today I saw a picture that completely broke my heart. It’s by Shamsia Hassani, a young Afghan woman who’s a graffiti artist and a professor of Drawing and Anatomy drawing at Kabul University. It shows a woman and her baby united by heartbreak, as aggression and violence ride roughshod over their thoughts and dreams. Looking at it I’m horrified and yet deeply moved at the same time. A refugee in a hotel where I was volunteering showed it to me as we talked about her journey from Afghanistan; that moment melted my heart and feelings beyond words passed between us. …
Sanam’s story
Last weekend we began providing hairdressing services for Afghan people who have fled the Taliban and are now living in the hotels we’re visiting. And yesterday my heart was touched in a way I can’t even explain when I met three-year-old Sanam and her mum. Sanam’s mum sat in the chair to have her hair cut by Lucy, our volunteer hairdresser, and Sanam smiled as I passed a toy car back and forth with her. Then Sanam herself sat down, and let Lucy cut her hair too. As conversation flowed between us, Sanam’s mum explained why her dad wasn’t …
Distributing shoes to Afghan refugees
This weekend I went on my first distribution at a hotel where Afghan refugees are staying. There were 300 people staying in the hotel and, having just completed their quarantine, they were in quite desperate need of many essentials. Almost as soon as we started in the early afternoon, one urgent need became apparent when a young mother with small children came to ask, “Do you have any shoes for my baby, please?” As we began to look, she asked again, “And this child? Do you have any shoes for him?” The baby was shoeless; the little boy had flip …
AJ’s story
My name is AJ and i would like to tell you the story of my journey to Calais. It’s no easier or harder than hundreds you may hear but the thing is these journeys still have to be made. There is still no safe route to claim asylum in the UK. So many families lose their sons needlessly as they have to risk their lives to make this journey to escape war, poverty, famine and violence in Sudan. I speak English well so now that I am in Calais I have been helping Care4Calais and FAST with interpreting when they …
Yemen executions
Today a refugee from Calais messaged me the most horrific picture. It brought home to me the fear and suffering that drives some people to flee their homeland, and the need for Care4Calais to keep doing what we do. The message had a picture of helpless, frightened young man being manhandled by armed soldiers. He looked no older than a schoolboy, but he was being dragged roughly to his execution. Minutes later, my friend explained, he was publicly shot to death by a firing squad. He was 17 years old. According to reports, the boy was Abdulaziz Ali M …
Refugee art: Just An Other Crossing
My name is Andre, and I’m a Portugese artist living in Folkestone in the UK. I’m the grandson of refugees: in the 1960s, my grandparents fled Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal, crossing into France without papers. It’s partly because of them that I make art that invites people to imagine what it feels like to be a refugee. There’s a lot of fear and judgement of refugees so I just ask people to empathise with them for a moment. One day I saw some life jackets washed up on the shore in Folkestone, and I got thinking about people who …
