Northern France

The magnitude of this project has been its most defining feature since we began. At every obstacle that arose during the planning process, of which there were many, we were faced with a dread that the problem at hand was too great to approach. The complexities of the refugee crisis felt too huge to comprehend; the perimeters of our objectives seemed too ambitious to be successful; the reasons for leaving our jobs too unfathomable for grandparents to grasp. We felt nervous about being able to be useful in response to such overwhelming complexity.

Today is Day 11, and as we have made our way through Northern France the focus of this project has come more sharply into view. Whilst the problem of education remains colossal, in leaving our lives at Dover and meeting the people living through this ‘crisis’, we’ve come to better understand what is happening and how patterns will start to appear in what is a kaleidoscope of complex individual experiences. We are becoming more confident about what it is we can do, how we can do our ‘bit’ and how we can be useful. We are taking this project in small steps, going person by person, meeting and understanding the needs of the individuals we meet and focusing on what is directly in front of us. After all, “nobody can help everyone, but everyone can help someone.”

From filling our van with essential distributions, to providing cooking, sports and arts activities for men and children inside the gym and outside in our pop-up classroom, we aimed to support the Women’s Centre by providing activities that allowed their team to focus primarily on urgent needs such as hospital visits and distributions. We spent a few (relatively) warm evenings outside speaking to the men living in or around the gym, learning about their experiences in Europe so far, their desire to get to the UK and answering their questions about our experience of everyday life in the place they hope to soon call home.

All of the people we have met and will meet have arrived on this continent because they want a better life for themselves and their families. To be able to do this successfully, they are going to have to learn new languages, develop new skills, build new networks and navigate new cultures. What we can do is find out from these individuals directly what their needs are and what’s missing for them, so that Crisis Classroom and the people welcoming them can better support them.

Yesterday we went to Orléans to meet a woman called Roula for coffee, who told us about her experiences settling into life in France as a Syrian woman in her 40s and her ambitions to develop her career as a web developer, despite the obstacles enforced on her. She spoke about the barriers facing refugees trying to live, work and settle in this country, including language, culture, racism, ageism and bureaucracy. She said to us, “We just need someone to listen to us. We don’t need anything else, we just need someone to share our sorrows and feelings with.”

What we want to find out is: what does the journey out of crisis and into a settled life in a new country look like? What support do people need from their new communities to make it happen? And importantly, how do these needs differ at various points in the journey? For example, the needs of someone who has just arrived in France and who wants to keep moving, such as the people we met in Dunkirk, are going to differ vastly from the needs of someone who has now been here for a few years.

All of these experiences so far have helped us begin to understand what is happening in certain parts of Europe. One thing that struck us in all these places was what Daniel Wordsworth terms ‘the abundance of everyday people’ (from this brilliant blog post). In each of these places there are so many people with such a massive diversity of skills, ideas, perspectives, languages, each with so much to contribute, patiently and impatiently waiting to do so. We have met people who speak up to seven languages, who are qualified lawyers, car mechanics, website designers, agricultural scientists and more. We have discussed Brexit, the economy, football, food, possible solutions to the refugee crisis, basketball and hip-hop. One volunteer in Paris said to us, “I studied International Relations at University, but after one week here I’ve learnt more than I did in three years there.”

For us, this learning is taking shape through kindness and strength of the people we have met, the conversations we have had and the snippets of cultures and languages we’ve learnt from around the world.

We’re going to keep moving and keep learning. Next we’re heading to Lyon and Marseille, before heading to Italy through Ventimiglia. If you know of a project or person we should visit you can contact us on melissa@crisisclassroom.com and/or alon@crisisclassroom.com.

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