Page 65 - Phonebox Magazine November 2015

A Great Success with the help of Les L’Auberge Immigrants
that would give them hope. Yet, despite their experiences, individuals were filled with a sense of creativity and optimism. For example, a makeshift school teaching French and English was very well attended, as was their church.
I’d heard a refugee saying: ‘Our skin may be a different colour, but we are all one blood’.
I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by what was being said by some back home against the hundreds of people I met. Britain won’t have them, France doesn’t want them, and the rest of the world ignores them. Our effort was meager, almost ‘not worth making’, but we all knew that was not the case. As we pulled out of the ‘Jungle’ camp, cries of ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ came from all directions. Groups of mainly men smiled and waved in what seemed to us a very surreal situation. Leaving the dirt road, we turned onto the tarmac highway and headed for the Calais terminal - and home.
Their homes were back in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea, abandoned as they fled in fear of their lives. Many knew they had exchanged the ‘substance for the shadow’ but remained unremitting in their desire to find a better life. A sodden field, in a refugee camp surrounded by a 10 foot high, razor barbed- wire fence, was no substitute for Shangri-la. And yet – they hadn’t given up hope.
I couldn’t help but think of that well-known poem ‘The Soldier’. With many of the refugees highly educated, it wouldn’t have surprised me if they were familiar with Rupert Brooke and transcribed his immortal line to read:
‘There is a corner of a foreign field that is forever Syria’.
As we crossed the channel, my thoughts were back there with a man from Eritrea, warming his hands by a paraffin lamp that had gone out long ago. ‘Thank you all for coming’ he said. ‘It shows us we are not forgotten, and that people from across the sea came to help us.’ ”
For more information go to: olneyaid.co.uk
Olney
Dover Calais
Phonebox Magazine 65