By Lucy Lönnqvist
This piece first appeared as a featured article in volume 95, issue four of Pelican. You can view our print archive here.
Tasked with responding to the world’s most vulnerable people, those who have lost families, been removed from their community, persecuted by the militia of authoritarian regimes, deceived and tormented by smugglers they had no choice but to trust, and left to fend alone in a country that deems them unworthy of counting.
To be face to face with their grief is an experience that grates at your humanism, but also your helplessness and frustration at the infrastructure of our society that allows some people to exist in a vacuum, cast off the grid, stripped of their identity and excluded from the algorithm that makes our world beat. After living through these scenes working at the Grande-Synthe Refugee camp in France’s north, I have been afforded the unique opportunity to see and understand holistically the reasons why refugees flee their homeland, and why world leaders employ turnback policies.
Having grown up in Perth, renowned for its geographical isolation, unbound by shared borders yet barred by strict censorship of our nation’s offshore-island detention centres, we are often sheltered from the unfiltered scenes of the migration crisis as it unfolds on the ground. The country’s ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach effectively suppresses the reality that plagues millions of stateless people from reaching public discourse, let alone our shores. Through being raised in this climate and denied exposure to such phenomenon myself prior to working at the Grande-Synthe Refugee Camp, upon my arrival in Northern France I found myself starkly confronted by the desperate attempts at survival in the face of loss and injustice.
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The Grande-Synthe Refugee Camp is situated in France’s north between the two port cities Dunkirk and Calais. This region functions as a highly concentrated transit zone for migratory flows, as many seek to cross to the United Kingdom where the language barrier is softened and entitlements to financial compensation and social liberties are available. I worked at the Camp with a French NGO, Utopia 56, charged with addressing the emergencies that occur with boats at sea or unfold among refugees on Camp. The association itself is quite radical, and wasn’t regarded fondly by the French police, so I was careful to hold my guard and keep my Australian passport on hand. The frontline nature of the crisis response was the primary reason I chose to work with this association. Moreover, I was a 19-year-old girl from Perth, inexperienced and unqualified in the field of refugee aid response, and this NGO was brave enough to give me a chance.
On duty, I would patrol the camp distributing the association’s number to refugees, directing them to call us if they ran into emergency at sea, problems with police, or if they needed to be taken to hospital. I would brief the migrants on boat safety procedures, hand out condoms to protect their phones from the water and explain to them how to send GPS coordinates so their boat a could be located. I spoke to at least seventy refugees every day, asking them about their journey. The majority came by foot from Afghanistan, having walked across Iran, Turkey, Hungary, and Belgium to France fleeing the Taliban. Most others were of South Sudanese, Eritrean, and Kurdish origin. The Camp was entirely male.
I saw how the effects of the extreme isolation, fear of violence, and lack of adequate mental health care had a deeply dehumanising effect on these men. The refugee camp at Grande-Synthe is run as a high-security military base where control is based on fear and punishment enforced by the French border police, the Gendarmerie. It can be frightening approaching the refugees each day because you don’t know how lightly to tread with the questions you ask them, and the questions you ask yourself. Are these men traumatised? Are they threatening?
As I went around camp introducing the association, I would see their faces light up in hope, they’d greet us with bright smiles and stand up as they saw us approaching. Soon enough I’d find myself encircled by twenty Afghan men wanting to speak to me in their broken English. I would talk to hugely built men with full grown beards and they’d tell me they were ‘16 years old with two degrees in international finance and business’. We’d have a laugh, and I’d tell them I’ll believe that once Afghanistan beats Australia in a cricket test match! (This is impossible as Australia refuses to play Afghanistan in protest over the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s education and employment.) It felt very warm, they tried to be as accommodating towards me as possible by laying down any extra rugs or pillows they could find for me to sit. Some afternoons I would be invited to have tea and an Afghan lunch under their tarpaulin – it astounded me that although these men had nothing to give, they went to such lengths to welcome me into their makeshift homes.
I was surprised by their generosity, and I would ask what makes them so hopeful. The way I saw it, crossing the English Channel crammed onto a tiny pump-up boat with eighty other people is one of the most monstrously frightening tasks. They would tell me that the English Channel is their last leg, a small boat ride to their final destination. Most of them had been on the move for two or three years, and here they were under one hundred kilometres away from setting up a new life for themselves in the UK. It’s an incredible journey that they make, to be separated from your family, your country, and all sense of familiarity. To not know what direction you’re heading, who you can trust or whether you will be able to support yourself along the way. For me, it was upsetting enough to leave my family and come to this Camp even though I was settled in the knowledge they are safe in Australia. I don’t know how they do it without losing hope.
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During the day, we often responded to the medical emergencies that unfold at camp by driving refugees to the nearest hospital or doctor to be addressed. Refugees with injuries that don’t qualify as an emergency have nowhere to go, living in pain with no-one to care or cover for them. On one instance, I received a call from an Afghan man who had collapsed on his way to the bus stop from maladie de la goutte (gout) which he’d been infected with. It was a ghastly sight, bugs eating his leg from the inside out, and he was shaking and on the verge of death. The Afghan man had a daughter with him who looked just younger than me. He reiterated to his daughter that he needed to go to hospital, but she begged him not to because it meant they could not cross to the UK that night. We gave him temporary medicine, warm protection, and eventually convinced the daughter that he must go to hospital otherwise he would die, but this discussion took over an hour.
Night shifts are the most psychologically confronting work at Grande-Synthe. Since Utopia56 operates as an emergency organisation as opposed to distributive, when refugees find themselves in distress at sea, our services are in high demand. The work entails manning the association’s emergency phone at all hours of the night while patrolling the coastline to identify any crossing attempts and ensuring the border police act within their prerogative. We’d watched the silhouettes of refugees crawl out from behind Calais’ sand dunes, scramble across the stretch of beach and pile onto the rubber boats organised by the smugglers. My heartbeat raced at the sight, fearing the border police were looming round the corner, waiting to release grenades and tear gas. There are often many scenes of violence on Calais’ beach at night.
On an average night shift, our association’s phone is ringing from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. and answering calls from boats in distress. It may be that their motor has stopped working, there is a hole in the boat, or the conditions at sea are just too violent to cross. Upon receiving these calls it is vital to remain composed and reassuring, otherwise you put the migrants in greater distress. This proves a difficult task when communication is muffled by screams of terror and crashing waves. It feels like you hold the weight of eighty lives on the phoneline. It was heartwrenching for me to hear the fear in their voices while they panickily attempted to locate their coordinates, crammed together on a rubber boat barely floating in the darkness, completely at the mercy of the English Channel.
To be on the other end of a phone managing people’s lives at sea is a position I never thought I would end up in, particularly so early in my life and in a country that isn’t my own. It is an all-consuming moment, my throat tightens, my chest races and my muscles tense, but my mind is so pre-occupied with completing the task at hand that I don’t process the gravity of the situation until it elapses. My body trembles after hanging up the call, partly out of disbelief that I handled the situation, but primarily out of hope the coastguards reach them in time.
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Less than a week after I finished my work at the Grande-Synthe refugee camp I was in London: the destination all the refugees I worked with sought to reach. I have the passport, the privilege, and the freedom to get there, granted to me completely by chance from the society and family I was born into.
This was the first time I had visited the UK, it just didn’t sit right with me. I felt like I had cheated, that I didn’t deserve to be there after seeing the austerity and sacrifice it took for others to get to the same destination. For weeks after completing my time at the Camp I received messages from refugees I’d given my number too, telling me “Lucy we’ve made it to Dover!” Seeing these messages after only experiencing one-tenth of their journey brought me to tears.
Returning to Perth after this experience made me realise how easy it is to forget that this humanitarian crisis is ongoing 24/7 because the structures of society are built to make it invisible to people. The camp was situated in the middle of a barren French countryside, no commercial centres or even a grocery shop within 50 km. It became clear that nobody could ever find this camp unless purposefully searching. It is not a place that coexists alongside us as we pass through our daily routines, but one that nobody gets to see.
Working at the Grande-Synthe Refugee camp allowed me to understand the value in investing time into acquiring front-line experience in humanitarian crisis response, as opposed to absorbing facts and figures behind the filter of a screen. It is very easy to read a ‘Stop the Boats’ campaign online, without seeing the people on those boats, and I think many Australians have a lot to gain from this.
We live in a world full of diversity and difference, be it ethnic, cultural, or religious, but when faced with those moments of cutting pain, those moments of tragedy, if we strip all these differences back we are left with a shared humanity, right to liberty, dignity, and security. The sooner we collectively realise this, the more likely we are to sympathise and embrace each other, endowing me with greater hope for the future of the migration question in Australia.