Plus Two

notesatb
Oct 15, 2015
2 min read

In the last three days, two more deaths have been reported from the Calais border.

Last night (Wednesday 14th) a Syrian woman was hit by a car on the motorway near to the Eurotunnel entrance. She died from her injuries in hospital.

On Tuesday, a body found on the shore of Gravelines, between Calais and Dunkirk, was confirmed to be that of a Moroccan man. On the 15th of September he and a friend attempted to swim to a ferry leaving the Calais port. His companion was hospitalised in Calais with hypothermia, while his own body was found on the 20th of September.

This is beginning to feel like a list; a dehumanising note of found corpses. This is exactly what it should not be.

The intentions of this blog are to report and reflect with consideration and humanity, but it feels like events are catching up and overtaking; before I've had time to compose a thought-out response or anecdotal account of border events I hear more news. I want to write that this news is 'more urgent', or 'of more immediate consequence', but it's not. The 'more immediate consequences' have already happened... People have died, and that won't be changed.

There's an aspect of irony and naïvety in what I've just written. We can't expect events to wait so that we can get on with our own lives and help out when we have some spare time. But that's also what this situation emphasises. This is happening now. People are so desperate, their situations so impossible to live through that they are taking risks that end with their deaths. It's not the deaths themselves that are 'urgent', but what they show; the situation that leads to them, the ongoing circumstances, the now. It might not be the 'now' that you experience daily, and it's certainly not the 'now' that the authorities have to endure, but it's happening, and it's 'urgent', and it has 'immediate consequences'. And it needs to change.

I might be loosing count, but doesn't that make it eighteen deaths, just this year?