Jamie Cutteridge took direct action when he learned of the Calais refugees crisis. Now a heart-warming campaign has been launched. Joy Tibbs spoke to him
When the media homed in on the Calais crisis, people reacted in various ways. Some were fearful that a ‘swarm of migrants’ was about to cross our shores.
Others were angry at the way these displaced people were being described and treated. But Christian writer Jamie Cutteridge fell into the second category and eventually his anger turned into action.
“My default setting when I find something I get angry about is to moan and not doing anything about it,” says Jamie.
Jamie Cutteridge believes that supporting Calais refugees is the best option
“I remember one particular news story about how a refugee had died trying to cross through the Channel Tunnel and it used the word ‘migrant’ in quite a pejorative way. It made me angry.
“The second paragraph read ‘Prime Minister David Cameron apologised…’, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ But the rest of that sentence read, ‘…apologised to British holidaymakers whose journeys had been disrupted.’
“I moaned and ranted about that, and then people who are better human beings than me said, ‘Well, why don’t you just do something about it then?’”
Taking acion
Jamie, 27, came up with a plan. He, his girlfriend and a friend would drive to Calais with supplies. He posted a message on Facebook asking for donations of tents and other practical items and was overwhelmed by the response.
“What started as the three of us in a car ended up as 15 people, a van and four cars full of stuff,” he explains.
Jamie, who runs YouthWork magazine, spent time listening to people’s stories during their day at the camp. He noticed that one man, Abdul from Afghanistan, spoke English with a broad Birmingham accent. He had never been to the UK but had learnt English from his brother, who lived in the Midlands. Another man called David from East Africa had been a member of an opposition political party. He had received a threat via text one night warning him if he didn’t leave the government would kill him.
“No one over there is talking about the UK benefits system,” Jamie says. “You ask them why they’re coming and they explain, ‘This is what I fled from; this is why I’ve had to leave my country.’ This idea that everyone’s making their way through Europe to get to the UK is nonsense.
Less than one per cent have ended up in Calais. People who are coming to the UK want to come to the UK for a specific reason. They might speak English or they’ve got family members over here.”
In addition to the obvious practical needs in the camp, Jamie became increasingly concerned about safety.
“One thing that really struck me was that the place feels really open to people being trafficked. If you say, ‘Look, you give me this amount of money and I’ll take you somewhere,’ people are just going to jump at that. There’s a lot of need for expertise on the ground for those who
get to the UK. There’s a lot of guesswork and that’s probably unhealthy.”
‘Jesus was a refugee… You can’t just close your eyes’ – Jamie Cutteridge
When the group returned to the UK, Jamie was determined to do more to help the refugees he had met and the countless others who have had to flee their homes. “We’d talked while we were there about what the best way to keep this energy that we had going would be, and then we came back and I wrote a thing that ended up being shared quite widely, and we made a couple of videos. People really seemed to get on board.
“We came up with this idea that we could encourage youth groups to fundraise to provide a winter shelter for somewhere between five and eight people for £500, so we got that out there and went from there. Through the #LoveCalais campaign we’ve managed to house close to a third of the camp. That’s young people and youth groups in the UK who have raised that money and done that, which is what’s amazing about it.”
Others who had travelled to Calais with Jamie came up with their own ways to continue the momentum. Jamie’s friend Juliet has visited the camp most weeks since that first trip and according to Jamie has become an ‘amazing presence’ in the camp.
“My friend Laura came with us and has since taken a youth group over to sort out the warehouse,” he explains. “My friend Alex came with us and he’s been back and taken his church. So it’s been a springboard for quite a lot of other stuff from the UK happening.”
Asked why he feels Christians around the world should be taking action, Jamie says, “Jesus was a refugee. After he was born in Bethlehem he had to flee to Egypt because a maniacal king wanted to kill him, so that story should resonate with us as Christians. It’s quite easy to palm off poverty when it’s literally on the other side of the world, but the last 18 months or so it’s been as if poverty has turned up on our country’s doorstep, and it’s saying, ‘OK, now how do you respond to this? You can’t just close your eyes, I’m literally here. Are you going to feed me, are you going to clothe me?’ And I guess that’s the challenge to the Church really.
Read the full interview with Jamie Cutteridge in the August 2016 issue of iBelieve Magazine.