Jane's experience sorting and distributing food in Calais

Last week I went over to Calais to drop off 100 food parcels which my brother in law had generously donated for the refugees in the camp. He sourced the food from a Aytac foods in London who import food from Turkey who generously gave the food at cost price.The food included oil, tins of vegetables, tomatoes, fish, apricots, dates and Turkish delight. Also, a big thanks to my dad who paid for me to transport the food to the warehouse.Whilst there, I met up again with Tina who I had worked with as a volunteer last December. She set up and runs the food distribution area in the warehouse which distributes food directly to the refugees in the camp and also supplies the community kitchens.I had a brief chat with her about her work and what the situation is like at the moment and below is a transcript of our conversation.She also recommended a great little film about the kitchens on YouTube called Calais Kitchens - gives a real insight into the camp and the work going on there, well worth watching.

Here is the transcript of my chat with Tina who runs the food distribution area in the warehouse in Calais on 7th January:






Me: So can you tell me a little bit about what you’re doing here?

Tina: So, what we are trying to do is have regularity and predictability when we send food out, so that these people know on a Monday we always get food, other people know on a Wednesday we always get food so having that commitment and that promise to people, but obviously we can only sustain that if we have enough food coming in to do that, so my biggest worry is that we have built up this expectation, rightly so, that we are accountable for what we start delivering but unless we have food coming in we can’t keep sustaining it, so that’s my massive worry.

And also numbers are growing, so for example, we were doing a big drop for 300 people two weeks ago, last week that group grew to 500 people and today we have now sent out food for 800 people in one drop, so that’s 45 groups sending their representative to a single drop off point to where we are and they collect their food for their group and take it back across the camp.

Me: So you’re not doing line distributions anymore?

Tina: No more line distributions. It’s more deliveries now to different groups or to communities. So what we’ve done instead is go out and ask people what are you eating, how are you eating – individually, as a family, as a community…? and then we deliver food in the way that they are naturally, socially, culturally eating.

We are trying to do it more respectfully and in a more dignified way, and also as part of that, finding out who has gas, who has fire wood, and who doesn’t, for example the Syrian guys have no gas or firewood, so there’s no point us sending anything that needs cooking. And with that information, we’re trying to plot where we build new community kitchens so that we can give those people some kind of facilities so that they can cook hot meals, and with the weather this last week, it just got horrendous. I did a 7am food drop yesterday morning and the whole camp was underwater, it had been raining all night, and in that, some people don’t even have any gas or fire wood to make a hot drink. So we are trying to map all of that and use all of that information to structure how we send food out so we are doing it in a much more respectful and dignified way.

Me: So is it better now to bring food not parcelled up but in trays and boxes?

Tina: Yes, we still do some parcels. Some areas still ask for it in one person or two people packs. What we are finding is that different nationalities do it differently for example, the Sudanese mainly eat together in groups so we send more bulk food out to Sudanese areas; the Kurdish people eat much more in families or individually so we send out one people or family packs to those areas.

Me: So when you want it delivered, you prefer it now in bulk and you can sort it from there?

Tina: Absolutely.



Me: What’s the worst thing about this job?

Tina: The worst thing about this job is like the other day when I realised we didn’t have enough food for people the next day, like the shelves were empty.

Me: What did you do, did you just not go out?

Tina: I wanted to hide under my duvet, then you think there are 7000 people living in tents in the mud and we have built up this relationship and I am responsible to them for delivering what we have set up. So we made a little film which we put on you tube and in a day we got £10,000, which is phenomenal, but that’s only 5 day’s worth of food because it costs us £2000 a day to send out food just to sustain what we are doing.



Me: Is the easiest thing for you to receive money or to receive food?

Tina: Either. If people want to get money to the food distribution area, they look for Calais kitchen on the Calaid-ipedia website and donate through that. We can’t do it without everyone at home doing their bit. Unless we have the back up from the UK we can’t do it, nothing would happen if we didn’t have the stuff sent, so thank you everyone in the UK for all your amazing support.