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Wednesday, 10 August 2016
Refugees cling to Wi-Fi in the Jungle of Calais
Thousands
of refugees in northern France rely on internet access and mobile tech
for human contact. But that doesn't help much when they're trying to
smuggle themselves onto a truck to the UK.
Refugees cling to Wi-Fi in the Jungle of Calais
I see why it's called the Jungle.
This
refugee camp in Calais is a sprawl of hundreds of flimsy tents, plywood
shacks and ramshackle shelters made of tarp, jammed together atop sand
dunes next to the English Channel. It houses about 6,000 Afghans,
Sudanese, Iraqis, Iranians and other men who fled terror in their
homelands only to find reluctance and indifference here in France.
Men
bathe at water taps next to a row of battered chemical toilets.
Tattered laundry flutters in the breeze. Large gray rats scurry among
the tents, while dead rodents litter the sand nearby.
The Jungle, often described as one of the worst refugee camps in France,
is primitive and squalid. Charred timbers show where a fire blazed in
May after a dispute broke out among the different nationalities --
angry, frustrated and forced to co-exist in this bleak 90-acre space.
But open the settings dashboard of your phone at the right time of day and you find a high-tech amenity: a free Wi-Fi network.
That
wireless network, called "Jungala," is beamed into the camp from a
crude but serviceable hand-built antenna that sits atop a battered blue
truck once used to transport horses. It's called the Refugee Info Bus and it's run by a charity group called Help Refugees.
Jungala, the Afghan name for the camp, serves as a lifeline for its
occupants, with as many as 400 people logging on every day. Internet
access lets them get updates about the camp, share photos, read news
from home, learn about asylum rights and study the languages they need
in their new world. Most important, Jungala allows them to stay in
contact with family and friends.
Madena Rashed, a two-year-old girl from Mosul, Iraq a refugee camp in Grande-Synthe, France.
"Wi-Fi
is so important. It becomes your connection to your family," says
Beatrice Lorigan, a UK volunteer for the effort, which burns through 50
gigabytes of data every two days. That's nearly 400 times what typical
monthly mobile data plans in the US offer. The Info Bus group skirts
network data-transfer limits by constantly cycling through new SIM
cards, the chips that grant access to phone networks.
It's worth it. When I ask Amin Talebzadeh what he uses his phone for, every app he lists is for communication: Skype, WhatsApp, Viber and Imo.
He pays 30 euros a month for phone service -- about $33. That's a
princely sum for a 25-year-old Iranian marooned in France without a job.
Those who can't afford that price rely on the Refugee Info Bus.
No
one easily leaves behind the comfort of family and friends for a life
in which they don't know where they'll find food, clothing or shelter,
much less a job. The travel is arduous, dangerous and costs thousands of
dollars. But that's what you have to do to escape living with terror
and violence, according to dozens of refugees I spoke with in June
during a visit to the Jungle with my colleague Rich Trenholm. We also
spent time at a fenced-off section of the Jungle offering government
housing made of metal shipping containers and another camp of relatively
sturdy plywood sheds 25 miles east in Grande-Synthe.
We wanted to see for ourselves who's providing help and
what kind to the refugees and migrants living there. But our larger goal
was to find out the role technology is playing in this global
humanitarian crisis. Is tech helping refugees? Is it unimportant? Is it
frustrating people's efforts to start new lives?
What we found is
that phones are the most important survival tool for many of those
stranded at the northern tip of France, a three-hour drive from Paris.
They're also expensive luxuries if you don't have money. It costs 200
euros for a cheap model, and that's before network access fees. Although
apps like Facebook for social networking and Viber for messaging
connects them to people back home, they do little to solve the
fundamental problems that made people refugees in the first place -- or
to help resolve political problems that keep them from settling
permanently.
Hostile reception
Aid groups like Salam, Help Refugees and Care4Calais
offer free food and clothing. The clothes have to be in good condition.
"It's important [for them] to keep their dignity," says a Care4Calais
aid worker I met at one of the informal restaurants in the Jungle. I
notice that one refugee, carrying lunch provided by Salam, has the same
Asics running shoes I bought at REI for $100 -- but his are in better
shape.
Clothing isn't the problem. It's that much of France isn't
ready to welcome refugees, asylum seekers and stateless people. There
were more than 330,000 displaced people in France at the end of 2015,
according to the United Nations, and terror attacks on Paris in November just heightened fears of foreigners.
When
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo in May announced plans to build a new refugee
camp in the Paris area, right-wing politicians lashed out. Florian
Philippot, vice president of the anti-immigrant National Front party, tweeted
that the mayor's plan would bring the Jungle everywhere. Eric Ciotti,
president of the Alpes-Maritimes department in southeast France, predicted
it would encourage more people from Syria, Iraq and other war-torn
countries to make the perilous Mediterranean Sea crossing into Europe.
Refugees
choose the Jungle because Calais is close to the UK, where they often
have family or friends. Many refugees speak at least some English, which
means a better chance at employment if they can make the 20-mile,
one-hour train ride across the channel.
The UK also has a
reputation for handling asylum claims faster than France, which is why
refugees try to get to there before starting the process, says Daniel
Barney, a spokesman for Doctors Without Borders. Even so, it typically
takes months to process claims in either country.
A refugee makes the five-mile trek from the Jungle refugee camp to the highway where he can smuggle himself onto a truck.
Stephen Shankland/CNET
Some
refugees try to buy their way onto trucks headed for Calais station,
where they hope to catch a train to the UK. But few can pay the
8,000-euro cost per person -- sometimes discounted to 5,000 euros per
person in a group -- that human smugglers charge, says Rory Fox, who
runs the Dunkirk Children's Center, a 20-person volunteer school at the
Grande-Synthe camp.
So refugees try grabbing passing trucks and
hauling themselves onboard. It's as dangerous as it sounds. More than 30
men, women and children have died trying since 2015.
And it's
frustrating: Most who set out from the Jungle every evening trudge back
in the morning, thwarted. Adam Sharawi, a refugee from Sudan, spent nine
months traveling by car
across Africa, by ship to Italy and by train to France. He wants to
settle in England. "The UK has all my friends," he tells me after making
the five-mile trek back to the Jungle from yet another futile effort to
hop a truck.
It's also getting harder, with authorities erecting
miles of high steel fencing to keep refugees off likely spots on the
highway. Double rows topped with razor wire are patrolled night and day.
It's a low-tech but formidable barrier.
Over time, the Jungle
wears refugees down. After seven months working to get to the UK,
16-year-old Kamil Shamal from Afghanistan decided to seek asylum in
France, even though he's concerned some French didn't welcome him to the
country.
France received 74,200 new asylum applications last year, up from 59,000 in 2014, according to the United Nations.
Helping with the crossing
There
aren't any apps for smuggling refugees onto trucks, but tech has helped
keep some of them safe on their journeys to Europe.
Mohammad
Ghannam, another spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, works with
volunteers through a Facebook group to track people crossing the
Mediterranean. The boat journeys are treacherous. At least 880 died in the first five months of 2016.
The
Grande-Synthe camp 25 miles east of the Jungle offers more humane
living but also is much farther for anyone trying to get onto a truck in
Calais.
Stephen T. Shankland
Refugees
use phone apps to determine their coordinates, then send longitude and
latitude data to the group through WhatsApp every 15 minutes during
their voyage. If the messages stop, a volunteer calls coast guard
authorities nearest to the passengers' last known location.
Ghannam has tracked 20 crossings, including his brother-in-law's successful journey from Turkey to Greece.
Translation and language apps help, too.
Language
barriers are common given that migrants and refugees in the Jungle come
from so many different places. I don't know any Farsi, but with a
dictionary app on a modest Samsung phone, I learned that one refugee is a
welder who wants his children to grow up in Canada, where they can
become doctors.
Refugees with phones often use service from Three, a UK carrier.
Abdullah Khan, 24, an Afghanistani in the Jungle, resells SIM cards and
account refills purchased in the UK. For about 24 euros, he'll sell you
a refill that includes 12GB of data, 300 minutes of talk time and 3,000
text messages. That comes in handy when the Refugee Info Bus is out of
range or when refugees are out of the camp, trying to jump onto a truck.
"It has good roaming benefits," Khan says of Three, so it's economical
in France even though it's a UK carrier.
Want to charge your phone in the Jungle? Find a friend with a power generator and a business to fund its gas.
Stephen T. Shankland
For
many refugees, 24 euros is a small fortune. A full meal with a drink
and salad at one of the Jungle's unofficial canteens costs about 3
euros. But many make do with free food from aid agencies because they
can't even afford that.
Another popular carrier is Lycamobile. Its chief selling point: members can call each other free.
Of
course, a phone isn't any good if it can't be charged. There's no
electricity in the Jungle. So Khan helps with that as well; he has a
precious power generator and will let you juice up your devices -- for
friends or customers buying something else at the store.
On the
surprisingly chilly June day I visited his store -- a dim room floored
with loose planks that's screened off from a larger timber-and-tarp
shack by a bed sheet -- his five-plug power strip was maxed out, with
chargers scattered on a table. At the front of the store, three propane
fuel tanks were tapped for another part of his business, selling naan at
three pieces for 1 euro.
Phones are also photo albums, documenting memories both happy and harrowing.
Nahro
Rashed, 35, who brought his family from Mosul, shows me photos on his
iPhone of his 2-year-old daughter Madena taken before they fled Iraq. He
eagerly points out she's wearing a Union Jack T-shirt, a sign the
family was already fond of the UK. As we stand at the entrance to his
plywood home at the Grande-Synthe camp east of the Jungle, he flips to
another photo. It shows Madena and her 6-year-old brother, Muhammad,
sleeping homeless under a blanket in Hungary.
It's a reminder that pictures are more powerful than words
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