The cold struck her the most. For Lauren, while she was shivering under her hostel blanket, “all I could think about was the fact there are people squatting in warehouses.” Every month, Cambridge Convoy Refugee Action Group (CamCRAG) takes convoys of people and supplies over the channel to assist other NGOs working in Calais. They leave late Friday evening and are back by Sunday night. At the height of the Calais Jungle, it was home to roughly 10,000. Since the Jungle’s destruction by the French government in 2016, numbers have dropped, but Calais has remained home to many refugees seeking to cross the channel to the U.K. Now, roughly 700 refugees are living in various squats throughout the city, but their situation is in no way better. Volunteers with CamCRAG range from students to university staff and people living in the wider Cambridgeshire area, who ride the Eurotunnel to Calais to provide urgently needed manpower for a weekend.

“I didn’t even know that was something people could do,” remarked Lauren about the short-stay volunteering convoy. Lauren, a third-year HSPS student at Homerton, has been on three convoys now, and Natasha, a third-year historian at Pembroke, went for her first time this October. Both went out of curiosity as much as a desire to help. Natasha is “keen to work on humanitarian work” and so went partly just “to see what it was like in Calais.” Through Instagram, they filled out a Google Form to apply - the charity paid for travel and most food, they just had to pay around £40 for their hostel accommodation.

“I thought that I knew what I was going into, and then I was shocked”

Catherine, chair of the charity’s Executive Committee, tells me how “we are one of the only few left” out of groups running shorter volunteer convoys. Now, with the global refugee crisis only worsening, and media attention easily drawn elsewhere, numbers in Calais are “so low and so stretched.” Organisations are increasingly shutting their Calais programmes, like Choose Love closing Calais funding in 2021 and Collective Aid ending Calais operations only this December. CamCRAG also runs donation drives and fundraisers. Last February, the grounds and the hall below the spire of St Giles’ Church down St Andrew’s Street were studded with people sleeping under the flapping fabric of tents for the group’s annual fundraising sleepout. This year, it’s on the 8th of February, along with their Winter Fair.

Out of a large warehouse, a variety of NGOs, such as Care for Calais and Roots, run different operations to support refugees in Calais. CamCRAG offers help wherever needed. Upon arriving, Natasha recalls they first did a litter-pick in the surroundings of a squat. She tells me how the previous Jungle had its own waste-disposal systems, but the Calais council no longer run these for the present refugee camps. “Because of this, the refugees have no way to dispose of things, they are expected to just live in their waste.”

Within three hours, they had filled 306 bin bags. The overwhelming smell stayed in their memory, and both Lauren and Natasha paused for a moment to consider how they felt guilty at their disgust at the conditions. For them, the dirt was only short-term: “We are going to leave here and have a shower.” “How dare I find this so disgusting?” reflected Lauren. Other tasks were easier. They drizzled chocolate onto flapjacks with Refugee Community Kitchen in the main warehouse – “That was fun, I like cooking,” reflected Natasha. The close care taken to the cooking stuck out to Lauren, she pointed out to me that the kitchen “not only wants to make food but wants to make good food.” In general, she noted that the group places importance on maintaining the dignity of refugees, checking donations carefully, and giving people choices during distributions: “Oh, I’d really like a pink tent.” Lauren also sized shoes and clothes to replace inaccurate high-street labelling. She checked sleeping bags and tied them up to be distributed. “It was nice that you had little tasks to get done,” Natasha told me. She would be told to clean a crate and “I can do that”.

“The impression from both was that the lack of government support for refugees in Calais was glaringly apparent”

One day, they cleaned out an old wash centre for the refugee camps. Plastered across the walls of the wash centre were drawings of refugee children, an insight into who the people stuck in Calais are; “a little glimpse of their stories.” Lauren looked through the drawings of children: their parents and their dogs at home, or the streaking red, white, and black stripes of the Sudan flag. Seeing in person the real human experiences of people trying to escape to safety was emotionally tough. “The litter pick was hard,” shared Natasha, “I thought that I knew what I was going into, and then I was shocked.”

Small moments of community stayed replaying in her mind. She remembers how people were playing football outside the camp; reminding her that “football is a universal language.” During a coffee break mid-clean, Natasha and Lauren spoke with refugees who had come out to join the litter pick. Most were men from Sudan, hoping to get to the U.K. either to join family or to make money so family could then follow. The impression from both was that the lack of government support for refugees in Calais was glaringly apparent. The wash centre was once used by refugees themselves, not just to clean their clothes but as a community hub. After the council ruled it unsafe, they were barred from it such that now volunteer groups have to take their washing for them, and despite attempts to fix the building’s safety elements, from the council “the whole operation was stalled,” noted Lauren.

I was initially doubtful about the utility of inexperienced volunteers offering only a weekend of immediate help. Natasha similarly was initially “sceptical.” But physical manpower is critical for these operations. In particular, many of the long-term volunteers Natasha spoke with while there reported feeling “very tired and demotivated”, making “short bursts of people” indispensable. The short-stay means volunteers can manage it around student work-load, or professional work life. Both Lauren and Natasha reported that managing work around the experience was possible, and if anything the brief escape from Cambridge life was welcome. “We are in this crazy bubble,” commented Lauren, emphasising the importance of “getting out of things, doing something bigger than yourself and that supo essay.” Eating dinner out in Calais with everyone on the final night, “gossiping” and chatting with people who aren’t just from the University, made the trip feel a social one too.

When telling people about the volunteer convoy they were going on, most hadn’t heard of it. “A lot of my friends were like ‘Oh wow’,” laughed Natasha, as she pointed out that going away for two days doesn’t need to be “a big thing.” “Sometimes people need to take volunteer work off the pedestal and just do it,” she tells me. Both acknowledged the trip is undeniably a commitment: Lauren noted that it took longer than the weekend alone for her as she often returned with a cold to recover from. But she reflected on the very intellectual approach Cambridge left-wing circles tend to take, when actually “someone has to be doing the work, so why not me?”

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