"Going Home Party" by Sarah Bence

When Iarrived in France, I didn’t anticipate splitting a double cheese pizza with aPakistani refugee in an Auchan grocery store.

But refugee,I’ve learned, isn’t the right word. Neither is migrant. Words are powerfulhere, or maybe, they were powerful all along, but it’s only since being hereI’ve seen my own power firsthand, through the lack of power others have.

So, no. He’stoo much Ahmed to go by any other name. It also couldn’t accurately be called‘splitting’ – at least, that’s a liberal interpretation of the cheese danglingfrom Ahmed’s beard and the majority of our pizza in his belly.

Ahmed istrying tonight. Try is part of ourjoint language here, in the burnt down remains of the northern France refugeecamps, where I’m a volunteer with one of the few remaining grassrootscharities. It means smuggle. It means tomorrow morning, Ahmed could be in theUK. Or a French detention center. Try iscode for human trafficking, a code born in this borderland, the chasm betweentwo countries who chose to turn their heads-of-states the other way.

“It’s aspecial try,” Ahmed gesticulates between bites. “All my money.”

Tonight, aBritish couple will hide Ahmed beneath the floor of their van. “Extra for UKchild,” Ahmed reminds me. The couple’s child will sit atop Ahmed’s hidey hole,and smile sweetly to border security. Ahmed will arrive in the UK in style – nochance of refrigerated lorries or sardine-packed fellow bodies. It will beluxury – but I can only use the word ‘luxury’ in balance with the terror of thelorries. Compared to how I arrived in France – on a train, with a passport,with a ticket – the word ‘luxury’ fizzles.

Ahmedlicks his fingers, and insists on paying the bill. “Going away party!” heinforms me.

*

I’ve beenin Dunkirk, France for a few months, now. I live in a caravan park with theother (mostly white, mostly English) volunteers – there’s no hot water andnobody is proficient enough in French to argue with the landlord. That, or heconveniently misunderstands.

At night,I pad in my flip flops to the caravan park’s communal outhouse. The skyoverhead is a flat canvas of gray-black clouds. Never a pin prick of starlight,but I always look for one. In the caravan, we drink cheap Auchan-brand red wineand eat rice crackers and, recently, meticulously pick lice from each other’shair. Mine is long and dark brown, always braided tightly and covered in abandana, the way a woman from Kurdish Iraq taught me, to keep the lice at bay.

I fallasleep in my sleeping bag, feeling the grit of sand collected in its interior,and think of that woman – a doctor in her country – likely sleeping in the mudof Grand Synthe forest, or if she’s lucky, a donated tent.

Last week,she asked me for a pack of adult diapers. “I cannot leave my tent at night,”she said under her breath, looking pointedly at the tall men leaning againstthe lone water pump. Who am I, to be the one distributing adult diapers, andwho is she to be asking for them? We are here by twin strokes of luck andunluck, the color of our skin, and the governments we were born under.

I alsothink of Ahmed, in the dark car flooring, somewhere in the chunnel. Surroundedby the gentle snores of my fellow volunteers, the sticky buzz of red wine, andthe chatter of bare branches against the window, my privilege is oppressive.Oppressive: An adjective that in my use as metaphor, is descriptive of myprivilege itself. I have a window. I have a toilet. I have the choice to behere, and a home country that would take me if I went.

Somemornings, before we set out in the rusted Honda to pass out donations, I runalong the packed sand beach. Across the water, there’s England. I look at theslate gray channel meeting the yellow sky and think of the country I calledhome for the last four years. Iavert my eyes and continue running.

Even sand feels like mud here.

*

With myAmerican passport, it was just a bit of bureaucracy before Britain granted mystudent visa. After I graduated, they politely kicked me out. I long to returnto England, and the idyll of that freshly adult identity, instead of myAmerican Midwest homeland. After graduation, and with three months left on myvisa, I turned to France like a self-imposed purgatory. A part of me yearnedfor that classic, Instagram-filtered “Eurotrip.” But I also wanted a purpose.So on a small grant from my graduate school, I landed here. I was ready tooffer my newly licensed therapeutic-use-of-self. Instead I found people whowere much more desperate for socks, wifi, and potable water.

When Imoved to England four years ago, it was because I wanted adventure – the kindintroverted Midwestern kids grow up devouring in the pages of Harry Potter and Emma. I wanted an education I could actually afford to pay off oneday. I wanted access to adventure and I thought that by wanting these thingshard enough, I made them happen. My summers working in food trucks and smilingblandly from my hostess stand and studying until 4am brought me here. InFrance, I learned how wrong that assumption was.

So, when Irun along the beach, I look away from my adopted home and its memories ofrain-slick cobbles, blue buses, Tesco’s chocolate digestives. In a few months,thanks to my expiring visa, I’ll be back in my home state of Michigan. A statethat, four years ago, voted for a border-hungry president by 10,000 votes.

But, asalways, my resentment fizzles when I remember Ahmed and the other people here.We don’t talk about their homes, but I know in Pakistan, Ahmed’s homosexualityis a crime punishable by death.

*

The movie Dunkirk came out a few summers ago.People loved it. Scrolling through social media, I was often met with HarryStyles’ pasty face. Dunkirk: When 400,000men couldn’t get home, the movie poster read.

In presentday Dunkirk, lines of brown-skinned men wait for the meal that is offered tothem once each day.  Cases of trench footcrop up among them – the first in the area since World War II.

InDunkirk’s Grand Synthe forest, an Afghani boy and his little brother makeorigami boats, set them to sail in the brown puddles. “Where did you learn tomake that?” I ask him. “Lesvos” he says, reaching to hold my hand, as we watchthe paper boat absorb brown water, and sink gradually into the mud.

The Frenchpolice swagger through these same puddles with guns strapped to their hips. Onenight, they halted another volunteer and I at the entry road to the forest. Inour arms, we carried a thick red blanket from the donations warehouse – meantfor a blind unaccompanied minor who had arrived that morning, to warm himthrough the night. “Çales encourage” a policeman with blond sideburns said, hands on his hips. It just encourages them.

I know therule: No fixed abodes. No homes in that desolate forest.

*

But peopledo make homes. That’s what we were designed to do, that’s the base of ourtheoretical pyramid – the one I learned about in graduate lecture halls at auniversity across the channel. Abraham Maslow, himself the son of refugees. Hetells us: first comes food, water, shelter. Then, the rest.

The clinkof shopping carts in Auchan, gleaming with its rows of cream, apples, bread,cage free eggs. Ten minutes’ walk away, a child is sleeping in the mud. Twoimages, which mean more together than apart. I am here to witness both. But allI seem to be able to do is pass out socks, baby formula, occasionally tarps. Asmuch as I want to, I’m not here to change the architecture of this pyramid. I’mhere to patch the pyramid’s foundation – so as it crumbles, less people arestanding in the way.

So thisforest, burned and then forsaken by Doctors without Borders and the WorldHealth Organization, is not just woodland. Its clearings are communities ofdonated tarps strung between trees. For the lucky ones: tents. For the lesslucky: dug out beds of dirt, a campfire, a circle of rotting logs. Thousands ofpeople live here at any one time – Kurdish, primarily, but also Afghan, Iraqi,Pakistani. Thirty minutes away, in Calais, are the Africans: Sudanese,Eritrean. And all around are the French, the English, and me.

I want tobe one of the good guys, but I’m not so sure I am. Because one day soon, I’llget on a train, and then a bus, and then a plane. And I’ll go home.

*

Themorning after Ahmed’s Going Away Party, I arrive in the camp, as usual. I andthe other volunteers clamber out of our not-so-trusty Honda, just as a crowdbegins to form. I open the trunk to reach for our damp box of socks, a highlyrequested item and the first line of defense against trench foot. As I resurface,there’s –

“Ahmed!” Igasp. It’s a reflex.

What elsedo you say to a man who traveled 5,861 kilometers from a home that wants himdead, is 124 kilometers from his destination, and just spent all his money on afailed try? “I didn’t expect to see you,” I fumble.

Ahmedshrugs. I swear there is still cheese in his beard. “Police,” he gesturesbroadly. At the helicopter in a dirty white sky. At the children cross-leggedon the asphalt, pointing up at it. At the Honda, at my tight braids, at the endlessmud.

Then: “Nochance.” As if those two words encompass all there is to say.

So, I pass him a pair of socks. He’ll need them.

***
Photography by Tom Tvr

Sarah Bence is a freelance writer and licensed occupational therapist. She is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets award, and a finalist in the Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing awards.