"They've closed Dover," I said. "And this guy's tweeted that he and his daughter are being held by the cops in Calais." The ferry shuddered a bit and I put down my bad coffee. I refreshed Twitter.
"Do you think they'll stop us when we get off the ferry?"
"I don't know."
I tried to picture what I would say to a French cop.
Je vais sur un vin croisière. Désolé, je ne parle pas très bien français.
"I'm gonna tweet the organiser - wait, no, do you reckon the cops'll be watching the hashtag? I'll use this other account. Wait, how tech savvy are cops? I mean if they visited the website and did a whois lookup?"
"If you were a cop, how tech savvy would you be?"
"Okay. So we can't tweet. Okay."
The trip was booked under my sister-in-law's name. She couldn't make it, last minute. They were checking the lead traveller's names, not number plates.
I heard the goods we donated got through. So that's good. Everything had been dropped off in advance at central locations.
We put our thumbprints on a map of the world, showing where we'd come from, how far we'd travelled to show we cared.
One of the refugees said, they didn't want any journalists writing any more stories. They wanted things to change. They wanted the chance at having a life.
Another refugee said, "I'm 22. The things I've seen in the past two years in Europe... the camp is so much better than a war zone."
The camp was huge. It went on and on. They call it the Jungle.
About the Jungle.
About the Convoy to Calais.
About the blockade at Dover.
Read more about, or donate to Care4Calais.
