The UN has deemed the Jungle one of the worst refugee camps it has seen. We knew this before we arrived, but that didn't prepare us for the day-to-day realities of life in the camp.
Last week, three friends and I set off to Calais with a car packed with donations and good intentions and a whole lot of love. We felt inspired by a friend's shelter building project A Home For Winter and traveled with a very deep desire to help.
We arrived on 'women's day'. Once a week the women in the encampment can go to a temporary tented structure which is the unofficial women's centre. There, they can queue for a time-allocated ticket, which they can use to get clean clothes for themselves and their children.
The volunteers recently devised this ticket system so that everyone gets a chance to 'shop'. It maintains the calm, which greatly reduces the risk of riots. The desperate and bitterly cold conditions would rouse panic in most of us, so you can imagine how anxious people feel when they see the clothes truck arrive each week, worried that there may not be enough to go round.
We worked with an amazing independent long-term volunteer, Liz, on the distribution of female clothes. I spent the first two hours fighting back tears while I cuddled and played with the children, many now orphans. I issued tickets as I chatted to women from Iraq, Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and beyond, my constant internal reprimand "be strong" - after all, what did I have to cry about? Mima, who was seven months pregnant, shuffled patiently in line and rubbed her stomach with a circular caress - not even a murmur of complaint. Her face beamed at me when it was her turn to get a ticket. I wanted to cry, and cry hard.
Conditions at the camp are constantly evolving. Volunteers managing distribution have to be flexible in order to respond to an individual's changing circumstances. They offer a 'Personal Shopping Service'. Of course, it's a far cry from the department stores where a smartly dressed attendant trips over you and the finery for sale. Here, tents are collapsing from months of over-population and saturation from the rain, blown over by the freezing winds that whip through the open wasteland, burnt down by fires from the candles that are the only source of light.
People's worldly belongings are regularly ruined by mud, leaks, fires and heavy rains. The Emergency Provisions Service, as I have renamed it, is constantly having to respond to urgent requests for dry bedding, tents, clothes, and shoes and food.
Before we part company with Liz, she counts out pairs of tweezers, combs and nail polishes as she tells us about 'pamper day', another weekly initiative for the women. "Mental health is very much on the decline here. People feel increasingly hopeless, so we try to provide some semblance of normality, relief from their dire day-to-day existence."
Liz must now find food for the six hungry orphaned boys clambering around her. The eldest looks no older than 12. They jostle her affectionately, proudly using the few words of English she’s taught them. "They're brilliant lads" she says, "and they're just about surviving in this shithole - they've been left here to rot, no future, no education."
Our next task is to help another set of amazing volunteers build two insulated shelters. When we were finished a man called Atif could move his sick wife and child out of his heavily mud-stained tent and into their new home - an insulated box with a waterproof roof and a door that locked. By comparison it was palatial. But building this shelter is only a drop in the ocean of the work that needs to be done.
There were so many inspiring stories that both touched and broke our hearts in our Calais. Approximately 7,000 people are living in the Jungle, and the number continues to rise. The number of women and children has quadrupled in recent weeks. But the French government will not declare this an emergency humanitarian crisis, meaning that big charities cannot access the area.
So who is doing what? And how can you help?
The main charities on the ground are:
Help Refugees
L’Auberge des migrants
MSF
ACTED
Association Salam
Ongoing financial donations are hugely important. However, temporary volunteers also have a positive impact; building shelters and sorting and distributing the physical donations is a never-ending job, so they desperately need hands.
Even if you can only offer a day, visit Help Refugees or email them ([email protected]). Via the Eurotunnel, our journey cost us £80, which we split, and only took us 2.5 hours from London by car to get there.
My group, Oona Chaplin, Scott Murden and Jennifer Richardson will be returning on 8 December and we are taking a van load of friends to work all day and sing at the Good Chance Calais theatre in the camp that night. It's a space aiming to and help them be heard.
There is also currently an acute shortage of the following basics:
Torches with batteries, or wind up lamps
New underwear – pants for men and women and bra-tops, small and medium sizes
Waterproof shoes - male target size is 42/43 (UK 8/9) , female range size 34-40 (UK 2-7)
Blankets and sleeping bags
It's hard to imagine the desperation that strikes for things we take for granted, but in the Jungle it's palpable. Please help.