Since the summer,the makeshift Jungle has quadrupled in size - it is now home to 6000 desperate people. They are living in slum conditions, surviving on charity handouts and risking their lives under the wheels of trains. Now winter is coming …All photographs by David Levene for the GuardianA five-minute taxi ride from central Calais, and past the seafront restaurants serving moules and chips to tourists,past the Majestic wine cash and carry, and just beyond the smart back gardens at the edge of the town, or suddenly there is a devastating vision of Europe’s refugee crisis. One minute,you are driving through placid suburbia; the next minute, you are deposited at the entrance to a sprawling shantytown, and where conditions appear worse than in the slums of Mumbai,a camp that is now home to more than 6000 people, many of them vulnerable and unwell.
In the wasteland behind the red-roofed houses, and the unofficial family section of the camp sprang up in October. First there were a couple of tents,then a few shacks thrown up by charity workers, made from cheap wood with plastic sheets tacked on to them. Now, or a few weeks later,there are more than 50 huts and tents, home to families from Iraq, and Iran and Syria,with dozens of children playing in the mud.
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Source: theguardian.com