Punching above the weight
The woman had been waiting for some time, sitting on a folding chair with the others, all men, waiting patiently, with her back to the wall of the small plastic cabin. She was African, wearing a red shirt, her black hair beautifully braided, striking in her patience and her dignity. Her small son was sitting on her knee, sometimes climbing down and standing beside her. He was bored and hot. She talked to him quietly. The door of the cabin was open, I’d left it that way because of the heat, and from outside came the sounds of the camp. Voices in an unknown Middle Eastern language, the cawing of some scavenging crows, the petrol generator humming, a distant electric saw. The sun slanted in through the scratched plastic windows, onto the screwed plywood floor. Beside me at my makeshift desk at the back of the cabin were several cardboard boxes full of paper. Notes, forms, explanations of processes, questionnaires, leaflets and booklets, all prepared by numberless volunteers to help explain things to the people who came to the cabin every day and waited, and waited. Most were from a small list of countries – Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Eritrea, Libya. All the usual suspects. All the places where violence and war were making ordinary life impossible. Where that impossibility of living had driven all the people here to desperate decisions and trajectories that had spread them all across Europe and had today put them in front of me, in this little plastic hut in France. I talked to them, took notes as best I could, gained an understanding of their journeys, their histories en route, their situations now. Where they had been stopped, turned back, detained, jailed or beaten, and where some unknown person in authority had taken their fingerprints. And then I turned that into whatever advice I could possibly give them about their legal options, where to go next, who to talk to, where to turn. Often the advice was depressing, both for the giver and the receiver. News that you have no chance of achieving what you have been dreaming of through months of severe hardship is tough to swallow. Many couldn’t accept it. Many were simply trying to see if there was a legal way of doing what they intended to do anyway. Unsurprised by the negative answer, they would thank me politely and go back outside to continue their completely unchanged plans. For the few that I could help, there was a mountain of work to be done, and we all lived for those. That was why we were here.