Space for fun in The Calais Jungle

6 Nov

Behnam Taheri writes about his experiences of volunteering in the Good Chance Dome in the Calais Jungle.

I’m 28, and a fairly normal idiot, and a couple of years ago I spent about three months volunteering with Good Chance in the Jungle in Calais.

Volunteering with refugees was never a specific interest of mine, but I was interested in the idea of being useful to those who could really do with someone useful. I will admit that working with a theatre in a refugee camp wasn’t what I expected I’d end up doing — I suppose I thought something more “practical” was what mattered most — but it didn’t take long for me to realise just how important it was.

I’d spent time in France before, a month in Paris with a swanky ex-girlfriend when I was eighteen, but this wasn’t really that France. Calais itself is like a bleak horror-film setting — bland, boring, stuck in the 1980s, lots of purple eyeshadow. We were staying in a caravan park run by an angry guy who I think was called Jean Baptiste. It wasn’t great. But it was better than the Jungle.

When I first arrived, it was about 20F. The big pond had frozen over, and I’m surprised more people didn’t die from the cold. I remember it felt a bit like a really shit music festival. Lots of tents, and mud, and litter and weird structures floating up everywhere. It was crazy—there were Pakistani corner shops where you could buy ten cigarettes wrapped in tin foil for €1, and delicious Afghan restaurants, and several genuinely high-quality hairdressers. There was a nightclub, mosques, churches, all built and maintained by refugees, for refugees. Then there was the library, the school, and the theatre, built by volunteers.

Good Chance was a really popular space. Besides being a theatre, it was a youth club, a community centre, a kungfu studio, a cinema, and sometimes a volleyball court. There were films, dancing, poetry — we even did a fashion show at one point, with tonnes of people coming to dress up in some of the more ridiculous clothes that had been donated, such as stilettos, a three-piece suit, and an Edward Scissorhands costume complete with black wig and scissor-hands. It sounds silly, but it was so important to have a space whose sole function was to let people express them- selves and have a good time.

There were two lads in particular I really connected with, from Afghanistan. I’ll call them Amir and Junaid. I suppose what really got to me was how much they were like me at their age — they would just tell stupid jokes and draw willies on everything and talk about sports and piss around. We had a lot of fun together. One time Amir even snipped off most of a random hippie’s ponytail without him noticing. They both had it much harder as time went on and the camp started being torn apart. They got moved to the white shipping containers the government brought in, and fingerprinted, and their hopes of getting to the UK began to fade.

When the French authorities were issuing eviction notices and the coppers were tearing the place down and coming in with bulldozers, there was a big court case in Paris to determine what was going to happen to the Jungle. Good Chance decided to host a mock trial. An eleven-year-old boy played the judge; we spent about twenty minutes making him a wig out of paper, and of course we had lots of suits from the fashion show. It really felt like a court case; it got quite heated on both sides. My mate Junaid played the prosecution, representing the French government. I can’t remember who won, but Junaid was very good—he didn’t hold back in arguing very strongly against his own interests. I guess he just wanted to win.

I learned a lot from meeting residents like him. There’s the obvious stuff, like under- standing new religions and cultures, but there were also things you can learn only through experience, or by being exposed to people going through things I’ll probably (and hopefully) never have to go through. (Even while I was there, I knew I could head home to the UK whenever I wanted.) I learned that even people at their lowest can have fun and be creative. They can sing, dance, laugh, draw, paint, tell jokes, tell stories, fake a trial, whatever. But I also saw that people can only do these things when they have friends around them to boost their morale, and create the space for fun.

The other really significant thing I found was that children often don’t grow up, not properly, when they’re in these situations. A child refugee can stay the age they are when they flee wherever it is they can no longer call home. An eighteen-year-old who leaves Sudan at sixteen may still be a sixteen-year-old, really, even if they’ve spent two years getting to wherever they end up. You go without an education or your parents or any stability whatsoever — it’s a bit like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys.

For volunteers, on the other hand, working abroad with refugees can be like an adventure. And while this can sometimes slip into the dangerous territory of relishing or gawking at people’s hardships — so-called “voluntourism” — I think it’s something to build on, rather than completely reject. It makes perfect sense to want to go into the world, meet new people, and push your limits, and if you can help others while experiencing new things, then you probably should.

There’s also lots that people can do to help refugees from home, if they don’t want to be away for so long. It could be helping out at a warehouse sorting donations, translating, campaigning, or raising awareness. When we were in Calais, there were some people who would come on the weekend and just pick up litter for the day, then go home on the ferry. Even very limited volunteering can impact both the volunteer and those the volunteer helps.

Amir and Junaid are both now in the UK, but I haven’t seen either of them since they got here. We speak every now and then — Amir is with his uncle and Junaid is with his whole family. They’re happy.

This piece first appeared in the programme for The Jungle at The Curran, San Fancisco Mar-May 2019

DATE: 6 NOVEMBER 2019
Tagged: Calais Jungle, personal story, volunteer, Behnam Taheri