I volunteered in the Jungle for only three months, but during this short period I felt I lived and learned more than in my entire life. At the time I would have hated myself for writing this, for making any reflection or self-serving analysis of the experience.
I arrived in the month of September, innocently thinking that I’d simply deliver a van full of donated fashion clothes from Camden town. To my surprise there were no official NGOs, and I met the most chaotic human mess I could have ever imagined to witness in a developed country. A slum dumpster where humans were considered animals and were treated likewise, keeping them within a confined radius with the help of tear gas and right wing extremists. Rubbish and faeces all over, a couple of taps of water close to the ground surrounded by tents and sleeping bags buried in mud. My heart fell to the deepest pit, and in that moment I was lost. I was taken. Taken by rage and taken by a sense of righteous humanitarian hero complex that rampaged through any self-care and safety precautions that I should have followed. The mantra of all the civilian volunteers soon became: “we have no idea, but we will do what we can with what we have”.
Slowly learning from those who had been there since the beginning of the refugee dumpster, we spent months delivering goods and building shelters for the coming winter. My heart shrank when I realised that I was a 24 year old child compared to the 18 year old grown up men who had walked through deserts, left family to burn and rot on the road, and crossed the sea witnessing friends and family drown. I soon realised that it was us, the volunteers, who had to come up with a distribution system to deliver the donated goods. The endless tasks were organically carried out by volunteer individuals or groups who covered different parts of the Jungle. These included delivering cooked or dry food, water, tents, sleeping bags and clothes, and the most precious mobile battery banks that would allow them to contact their loved ones back in the war zones. We didn't really know how much of what we were doing was legal or not. In the face Europe's inefficient and inhumane response to the refugee crisis, many of us didn't think it twice. The politicians decided to let their dobermans out to do their dirty job, make profit from it and burn any evidence left behind of their actions. Instead, many people chose to show compassion and love, and fill that gap left by the French and English governments. One of the toughest tasks was the repeated hospital runs to take injured refugees from their night attempts to get to England. They had to fight first against each other to get a chance, then against the right wing extremists, then the traffickers, also the police and finally with the truck or the boat trying not get killed in the process. Many weren't lucky. Knowing what awaited men, women and children every night, all we could say was ¨good luck my friend¨.
One of my first jobs was to speak all day to people begging for a shelter, and having to invent a priority system, listing families, women, and young men first, and letting the single adult men for last. These men could have gotten angry easily, but ended up showing more dignity than the countries that pushed them to this hell hole. I could spend hours describing the impact that this sense of dignity had on me. Specially the dignity that was felt from realising that everyone depended on each other even if they prayed to different gods or belonged to different ethnicities. I saw how extreme situations crossed all languages and united directly the heart of scared humans, united in this case against the attacks of the CRS and the fascists. For the time we were there I was in the same boat (perhaps only in my limited ego identification). We were given the same treatment by the extreme right wing fascists whose daily entertainment was to search for lonely refugees or volunteers to beat up. I too had one of those ¨me or them¨ moments I hoped I wouldn´t have to face in my life. They jumped in front of my van as I drove, trying to make me crash by blinding me with their lights and throwing stones at the van. When I realised what was happening, I stayed firmly on course and accelerated towards them, until they finally got out of the way.
As a result I could not separate myself from the refugees and they became my family. In perspective I can now identify my ego trip but I can also see how this was the widest feeling of belonging I’ve ever had, as well as the strongest feeling of being just were I was meant to be. I’m not trying to be hard on myself, I am just trying to be realistic. Many volunteers agreed how messed up it was that unprofessional, probably emotionally unstable people (who needed help themselves) where responding to the cry of help of other human beings. Maybe if we hadn’t been there, it could have possibly become such a tragedy that the EU would have been forced to do something after thousands of people froze to death in their streets. Perhaps there was no way of knowing if we were really helping these people, or creating a hopefull but unreal bubble in time, in which people were sold a poisoned dream. A poisoned dream that sustained this camp with hope, but that sadly, also sustained the underlying interests of different groups and kinds of people (not always the best kind). Perhaps we contributed to it and I can’t take that out of my head.
In some cases volunteers got attention and money. Other times they participated in what become Jungle tourism: come take a photo of misery and say you support refugees, feel great about donating a couple of grand, and see it all burn in five months. The money could have been so much more useful in legal advice or even, what the heck, paying traffickers. Excuse me, at the time I probably had many more crazy and radical ideas than this one. We may have unwillingly contributed to the extortion from the mafias to get money from families for their supposed safe passage to England. In the night, within the shadows I heard the movements of these mafias going around scaring people, who would tell me in the morning: “Eva, don’t get involved. We don’t want anything to happen to you, but we can’t pay so we need to get out of this house you gave us and back into a tent”. So... How could I help if in the end many of them were protecting me and keeping me safe? My head still can´t get around this. Or this: during the eviction we told the French government that we had listed the minors in the camp, who were in danger of being taken by traffickers and sold to who knows what sick drug, sex or organ transplant scheme of a rich European. But that did not stop them. Other volunteers can tell you the exact numbers of children that we lost track of...
During these three months, every day that passed was packed with such intense events that it felt like a whole month of my ordinary life. Since then, writing about them has been a difficult task, not really knowing where to even begin or which of the wicked stories I could tell anyone without making them feel miserable. I'm not the kind of person who enjoys shocking others to let go of their own inner venom. Also, I had not given myself permission until now because I see how easily I fall back into that state of rage and frustration, desperately claiming for social justice. I am only human. Many volunteers, like myself, are still battling with severe physical and mental health issues. When I am faced with this inhumane situations the belly fire takes over and leads me right into the messy human scared side (over the conscious understanding and compassionate side), despite how much meditation or self-development work I practiced before or since, to regain a sense of self, hope and desire to belong to this human experience. I told my anarchists friends, that all I felt for the extreme right was sorry. That they were so far away from their own souls that they could not recognise these humans as their brothers and sisters: self-inflated patronising judgement dressed up as compassion, I guess. However after some weeks and so many confrontations with their hate, I started reflecting it. It was hard to recognise that I began to feel it for them too. My self-righteous ego was caught by surprise when I found I shared the same darkness inside in so many levels. It was like tearing this dream I had made about who I thought I was, and really started to wake up to the reality of the shadows I had hidden behind my supposedly ¨well educated¨, ¨civilised¨ conditioned manners.
I think it became common to many humanitarians in this refugee crisis to be overwhelmed with rage. I had experienced rage before, but not like this one. This one is a rage that caused the biggest damage inside myself, because in the end it was against myself. An uncontainable and frightening rage that I could only try to compensate for, by thinking that it was not about me, it was much bigger than me and it was a just cause to devote my life to. This is what I call the self-righteous hero complex: thinking my help is what you need. Confusing being in service for self-sacrifice, my life become unimportant, my dreams were insignificant whilst their life stories were the only thing that mattered. After a while, this led me to a dark, empty, wicked corner in my own soul, where I had no compassion for myself or for these right wing extremists who were as scared and as ignorant as I was. In this corner all hope was lost, and my soul just wanted to run away from that horrible environment I created within.
Some time has passed before I have been able to realise that living in such pain is food for the darkness in humanity. Some more time has passed before I could accept this pain, and decide to do something about it. I felt hopeless for the lack of humaneness in the world... But this was hypocritical when I wasn't doing anything different, when I was taking away my own love by hating and judging other people's views or decisions. After all they were also only doing all they could with what they had. So much could be said about this, about true respect and becoming true mirrors of each other´s sole responsibility: to take care of ourselves. If we were all to do that we could become respectful self-governing beings instead of the absent and approval dependent beings that we are now. It would be so much more evident where the real attention and action has to go. Usually right next to our door, inside our own homes and in ourselves. Many of us run away into other´s problems rather than facing what's right in front or right within. Perhaps many of you won't share this view that is only an opinion based on my experience. I am no different or no better than any human, and I've decided that the only real thing I can do for myself, and for the good of all, is return to the love within me.
I have the power to choose to cultivate love and be in it, rather than feed my fear into the painful void further. This has been my choice ever since, which of course I sometimes forget. But then, the needles in my heart quickly remind me to choose again what I decide to live for. These needles have the names and faces of all the humans I saw come together to create a mind-blowing multicultural slum in the darkest corner of Europe’s rotten soul. In the mud I heard cries, but I also heard laughs and prayers in all languages; I saw guns and healed stabbings but I also saw hands making food and building together; I saw fights but I also saw men drawing and singing together. In truth, we were so blind… But even when we are lost, we all have inside the map that shows the way back home: the love inside ourselves. If I could name this human journey, I would call it the dance of fear and love. When you lose all hope, love will still be waiting in the void. You can choose to see it or drown in fear. It's not easy, but I'm learning to love my fear.
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