- Moya Barnett
- 2 hours ago

From September to December 2024 I was in Calais, at Maria Skobtsova House, a house of hospitality for the most vulnerable refugee women and children on the move. It was a difficult and deeply scarring experience; living in solidarity with and opening myself up to love for these women also meant experiencing great pain due to the hardships in their lives. All of the women and children I met had experienced police brutality and were continuing to experience it as they went out to attempt to cross the Channel. Many had also been victims of exploitation, extortion and violence from the smugglers as well as from the state. One woman had lost a baby due to the conditions in the camps, immediately before she had come to our house. She announced this at the dinner table one day out of the blue and then moved on to doing the dishes.
Our role wasn’t to save these women but to create a space where they could share these experiences. Through sharing, they were able to process some of the trauma and work past it. Often the most crucial time to be a compassionate listener was the early hours of the morning when people would troop back in, having survived a shipwreck or an attack by the police and all they wanted was to eat, tell about it and go to bed. The first time it was told was serious, but by the time they woke up again, it was something that could be laughed about. Paul in Galatians 6:2 urges us to “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.” But it is not an easy task.
It is also a struggle to break down your expectations, cultural norms and the power dynamic which exists between those with papers and those without. While living together, cooking, eating, dancing and watching children nothing separates us, but there will always be moments when the power dynamics become clear; deciding who can enter the house, distributing scarce resources, mediating others’ conflicts and, of course, when it comes time for volunteers to leave, often taking an easy ferry across the same water which has caused these women so much hardship. Not acknowledging this power imbalance causes more harm than good.

As a volunteer sometimes it is difficult to even recognise when people are simply agreeing with you, acquiescing to your requests, because they see you as someone who has power over them. I experienced this as a white child in rural Zimbabwe, when seeing some adult men taking the girls’ netball ball to use for football, I stormed over and demanded it back. I was fired by righteous anger; this was a ball for the girls and the men had used their age and gender to take it from them, but they had given it to me, not because I was right, but because I was white. The girls, my classmates, were not overjoyed that I had spoken on their behalf. Reflecting on this experience as an adult I resolved to take more time to think before acting. Am I speaking for a community I am not part of? Am I fully conscious of the power dynamics in this situation? Is everyone involved informed of all the facts so they can make their own decisions and have agency? Am I the right person to be taking action in this circumstance?
I often had to do this introspective work in Calais, particularly when mediating racial conflicts. With large groups of people living in small spaces, conflict inevitably arises. At one point, the house was split between Arab and East African women. A small conflict had started, between two people, but due to their not talking to each other directly it had ballooned to involve all of the people living in the house and to include tirades about the cultures and religiosity of the people involved. We had a few talks with people directly but no one was opening up. As volunteers, we had to step back, reflect and ensure that how we approached this conflict didn’t, in fact, reinforce harmful dynamics. We decided to take an informal, communal approach; remaining at the table after dinner and using non-violent communication techniques so that everyone had an opportunity to speak and be heard. It is a strange position, as a white person, to be mediating a racial conflict, but being outsiders gave us an advantage. While we lived there, were known and trusted, we also were not weighted to one side or the other. It took a long time and many attempts to leave the table, but we managed to reach an end point of apologies and a tentative truce. A week later, one of the Arab women risked her life for two of the African women.

In the end, as one woman said “We are all refugees, no one is better than the other.” And there were huge acts of kindness, love and solidarity between people of all backgrounds. It is easy to see yourself as a saviour in these situations, to want people to need you. But what I saw was that, no matter what we did, the greatest acts of kindness came from refugee to refugee. And to love someone fully, to be in solidarity with them, I couldn’t be a saviour, however tempting. I couldn’t wrap people in my love and keep them safe from everything. In the end, part of fully loving someone is giving them agency to leave and to make decisions which may put them in danger.
Anti-racism is an ongoing process, as Dom Hélder Câmara said “We are all called to build a world of peace, but we must also build a world of justice, for one cannot exist without the other.” True justice requires that we look to the root causes of these problems, that we truly love our neighbours and oppose inequality and oppression wherever we encounter it. An impossible task, but as I was told in Calais: “We do what we can and the rest is on God.”
Moya Barnett