| Location: | Totnes |
| Story Number: | Story-036 |
| Themes: | Calais, Dunkirk, France, Refugees |
| Listen: | |
| Transcript: | Recorded 12.10.2018 by Carmen Talbot Transcript by Jayde Stevenson I first went out to northern France in 2000… September 2015 to Calais, umm… and then within the end… the beginning of October I visited the camp at Dunkirk, umm… and… and that’s when I didn’t leave. So, I’d started going to – in September – to do the building – the first buildings in Calais, um on the build team for the family area… for the Kurdish family area. Um and I’d heard about Dunkirk… umm and how it was very small but there was a lot of families there. So, um… one day somebody was going over there from the warehouse, umm… so I decided that I would go over, um, and then… the first – within the first few minutes of getting there I had a young pregnant woman with a small child come over and she was distraught… um and she took me to where she was living which was, you know, a tent in a mud pit up to her knees. She was quite heavily pregnant, um… the tent had leaked – it was full of mud and water that smelled disgusting, um and I just looked around and everywhere I looked, um, there were these families living in the same conditions and um… I just didn’t leave after that. I stayed. Um, and numbers grew very very quickly. They grew literally within a week and a half they’d gone from five hundred to twelve hundred… umm… and so I became – I gave myself the job of being the person to visit every single family, make sure all the pregnant women had, um, fresh spring water for drinking, if they were bottle feeding I made sure that they had water to be able to sterilise bottles, um… fresh fruit, um… make sure that they had the nappies. Sometimes you could get it from distribution, sometimes I would go out with funding that I’d gathered. Um… so the aid that was available came from Care4Calais or from L’Auberge in Calais… and that was the usual thing, so hygiene packs, um… clothing, nappies, there was food that was served once a day from Steve Bedlam’s kitchen – the RCK kitchen they would come, umm… that would be one meal. Um, the rest of the things that I went and got, um I did a crowd funder for myself cos I – what I eventually did was to help to set up the women’s centre, um… at the camp. Just to provide a safe space for the women to be. And a women’s distribution… umm… so that there was a separate distribution because, umm, where the men’s distribution was, women didn’t go into that space – it was a predominantly a male space. It wasn’t that they weren’t allowed, um but they didn’t go into that space, so the women really needed their own safe space to be and where the women could come together. Notes: Care4Calais L’Auberge de Migrants Refugee Community Kitchen |