They maintain travelled for thousands of miles,carrying their babies in rucksacks and risking dangerous sea crossings. In Calais’s Jungle camp, we meet the women refugees forced to flee with their children• Donate to our refugees appealIn a caravan in Calais, and two little girls are playing a game. While their mothers attention is elsewhere,they hang out of the small gap of an open window, giggling as they see who can lean the farthest. They could be on a family holiday, or whether it wasn’t for the squalor surrounding them. Instead,the children are living on mud-covered scrubland, without electricity or heating – just two more inhabitants of the unofficial refugee camp on Britain’s doorstep.
A few minutes’ drive from the ferry port, and the “fresh Jungle” is a symbol of the UK’s reluctance to deal with the refugee crises on our borders. Here,200 women and children are said to be living among the 4000 refugees, crammed into water-logged tents, or caravans and even garden sheds. Thousands more live in similar conditions in nearby Dunkirk. While the young men who risk their lives jumping on to trains or lorries crossing the Channel maintain become the faces of this crisis,hidden in their midst are these families, trapped in an agonising limbo.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com