“It seemed vaguely productive”, Zara explains when I asked her why she volunteered with Roots, a humanitarian organization in Grande-Synthe, Dunkirk. “I do study politics, so I write about these things in the abstract, but I thought it could be nice to get involved in that way. There’s only so many summers of uni left.” She pauses. “It’s not the most noble reason ever.”
I first met Zara O’Shea, 22, from Northern Ireland, when I visited Roots at the end of July this year. Roots, an environmentally conscious humanitarian organisation, provides aid to migrants hoping to cross the English Channel from France to the UK. According to its website, Roots was founded in 2017 when its founder and current President of the board of Trustees, Thomas Gilbert, started recycling old batteries to make low-cost power packs for migrants. Since then, the organization has hosted over 140 volunteers. Roots provides charging services and humanitarian aid to migrants and maintains free-standing water tanks and showers for migrants to use. Sarah Berry, the Treasurer of Roots, told me when I visited, “It’s really vital work we’re doing here. Nobody else is bothering.”
I followed their volunteers and coordinators on a day’s “community hub” aid distribution. We drove out in a convoy of cars and vans to a clearing nestled between a main road and some railway tracks, passing French CRS riot police on the way. Around the clearing are unused fields, bushes and trees that make it impossible to see beyond a few hundred yards in the furthest direction. There, they erected two gazebos weighed down by cinder blocks. They set up a generator connected to improvised wooden boards with dozens of charging ports. A hundred or so migrants from Iraq, Sudan, Eritrea, and a host of other countries were already there waiting—some standing talking in groups, others sitting on pieces of torn-up cardboard boxes. Throughout the day, different groups and people came and went. Migrants would constantly disappear and reappear from the trees and bushes. A local French collective arrived and gave out hot meals. A woman from Belgium showed up in her car and started handing out gloves and socks out of her trunk. A migrant woman set up a shop, a regular fixture apparently, out of a shopping cart, selling snacks and cigarettes. A winding line of male migrants stemmed from each provider and twisted around the clearing: mothers and children waiting on the side for whoever was queuing on their behalf. At one point, an ambulance with a police escort showed up to collect a pregnant Vietnamese woman in a “critical condition”, so a coordinator told me.
My memory of Zara in Dunkirk is of her dressed in a faded hoody, combat pants, and her green Roots high-vis bib. The coordinators told everyone to stay in pairs, to stay in the clearing, and to stick near the gazebo —there had been a shooting in the area the night before. Zara and I watched over the children’s board game area and the charging station together. I was struck that day by Zara’s sense of humour in contrast to the other volunteers and coordinators who were very serious. A student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Zara is now studying for a semester at UC Berkeley in California. Reflecting on the day we met, she says, “The stuff you’re seeing in Dunkirk doesn’t fit in with the normal conflicts you normally have and the stuff that’s bothering you in normal life. So you just can’t process it in the minute.” She laughs as she talks for much of our interview, just like when we spoke in Dunkirk. But it is still a laugh that does not seem sure of itself. I sense that Zara is still processing her month with Roots.
Dunkirk and Roots had never been Zara’s plan. “I was looking to go somewhere in Greece. It seemed suited more to my skill set. It’s more settled in Greece. There are people setting up schools and community centers there. I was looking for something more community-focused because I don’t have any hard skills. After all, I chose a humanities degree—silly.” She laughs. “I ended up spending my summer lifting cinder blocks.”
Again, I asked her why, of all the things she could have done in the summer, she chose to work with refugees. This time, she goes further, “The focus of my studies is welfare organisations, and I’ve had a lot of involvement with the Free Palestine movement. A lot of that is about how I just don’t believe there should be borders. Obviously, I’m literally just a child so my opinion on this doesn’t matter, but I don’t think there should be borders or nations in an ideal world. I don’t think it’s right or fair in any way that some people are allowed to be born with so much and so much entitlement and others with nothing.” It is a recurring theme in our interview that Zara has pithy remarks for all my questions. Yet, when I press her, the speed of her responses gives me the impression that she has been asking herself the same things.
Zara applied to volunteer with a community organization in Greece, but was unsuccessful. She then found Roots on Instagram. “I emailed Sarah my CV, and she said yeah, that’s great.” Sarah Berry is the Treasurer of Roots. “It was all sorted within two hours of emailing her.”
Roots is unique among aid organizations in northern France because it provides its volunteers and coordinators with a communal living space. “We were all in this warehouse, and it had been renovated, so it was these little box rooms with two sets of bunks in each”, Zara explains. The Roots warehouse is on an industrial estate comprised of other gated warehouses and scrap heaps. Even in July, I remember it being dark and damp. At the top of a spiral staircase sticking out of one end of the warehouse is a loft. Inside, I found volunteers making cups of tea in a wood-floored kitchen while the coordinators made plans in their office. “On our days off, we all hung out together. And I do think that grated on the four volunteer coordinators because they had to behave in their roles even at home.” The Roots website explains that volunteer coordinators are “experienced and qualified individuals” who are “dedicated to ensuring that the services we deliver at the camp are dignified and sustainable.” Zara explains, “It was the social stuff that made me tweak because you can process the coordinator who you’re exchanging microaggressions with. So that was what I was crying on the phone to my mum about, not all the other stuff.” The Roots website also says, “[the coordinators] are at the camp every day to ensure that volunteers are comfortable, and the displaced individuals have a familiar face to approach with questions.” When I asked her how she felt about the living situation, however, Zara had no regrets. “The accommodation was a massive plus and why I chose to go to Roots—I wouldn’t have been able to afford it if my accommodation hadn’t been covered.”
Still, Zara does tell me that a couple of weeks after I visited Roots, there was an “implosion” at Roots. Izzy Redmayne, a 24-year-old English aupair working in France, arrived to volunteer at Roots soon after my visit. “Me and Zara were really… we were basically inseparable. We just shared one brain cell the entire time that we were together. It was really important to me because I felt like everyone hated me”, Izzy explained. The trouble started, Izzy continued, on her first day during a briefing when she was told that she must not speak to any journalists. When Izzy then told them she had started writing articles for a French paper, it was “really, really badly received.” She explains, “The whole reason I didn’t think to mention it before was because I was just like this random girl running around France asking people what they thought of Le Pen… I realized that was a mistake because I knew in myself I wasn’t gonna write anything.” Izzy told me that after this, she was only allowed to work in the warehouse preparing aid packets filled with hygiene products and refilling the water tanks that Roots maintains around the area migrants. “People did talk to me, but, like, only to call me a narc.” Not long after Izzy arrived, the four coordinators resigned. “The coordinators kind of set the tone for let’s all ostracize this girl. So after they left, things got a bit calmer.” When I asked how things improved, Izzy explained, “Zara is such a charmer and so popular. And so I think it really helped me to kind of have that vote of confidence from her. It meant that other people were much more accepting of me because I kind of was attached to Zara. And everyone loved Zara because she’s just amazing.” Zara does not want to discuss the episode beyond relating the facts and connecting me with Izzy, with whom she is still in regular contact.
Although she acknowledges she might not have processed them at the time, Zara tells me that there were very challenging moments working with the migrants in the field in addition to the drama going on inside the warehouse. On July 29th, days after I visited Roots, a 17-year-old boy armed with a knife attacked a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England. Three girls under the age of 10 were killed. Nine more children and two adults were injured. Following the attack, misinformation about the identity of the attacker spread online. News website “Channel 3 Now” falsely claimed that the attacker was a Muslim, undocumented migrant who had arrived in the UK on a boat from France. In the wake of such misinformation, riots started across the UK. In Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a mob of rioters tried to storm and set fire to the Holiday Inn Express, a hotel housing asylum seekers whose claims were waiting to be heard. A 27-year-old British man has since pleaded guilty to arson with intent to endanger life and has been sentenced to nine years in prison. “During the riots, there was lots of stuff online where the far-right would be threatening to come across on the ferries”, Zara tells me. “We would have a lot of cars circling.” When I asked her what she meant by this, she explained that members of the “far right” would drive on the roads around the distribution site in loops. “Sometimes there would be too many cars circling around the lot, and the coordinators would be, like, this is sort of unsafe”, Zara laughs. “The Red Cross left that day.”
The far right was not the only source of danger to Roots volunteers or migrants, however. “There were also times where there were shots fired, and we had to leave,” Zara says. Izzy echoed what Zara told me about the gunshots, saying it “happened a few times.” She continued, “being right in the middle of camps surrounded by all these people with gunshots really quite close. Like, close to the point where the coordinator was saying, woah. That’s close. Does anyone wanna leave?” Izzy summarised, “It was quite an intense day.” Focus on smuggling gangs has increased since the election of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose slogan for combatting illegal migration to the UK is “smash the gangs”. Earlier this year, BBC investigative reporter Sue Mitchell and former aid worker Rob Lawrie released “To Catch a Scorpion” a podcast series in which they tracked the notorious head of a smuggling gang that operates in Dunkirk to Iraq. Following the release of the series, Barzan Majeed was arrested by local police in Iraq. “One of the new girls came and said it was really cute how those South Sudanese guys would walk around with their best friends when actually I don’t know, it was probably the case they were in a gang together. But she was like, it’s so cute that they’re besties. It was really funny at the time.” Back in July, Zara pointed out to me how certain migrants were allowed to skip the line to receive aid, likely because of a smuggling gang connection. When I asked her if her proximity to organised crime and the gunshots scared her, Zara says they did not. “I didn’t find that aspect challenging. There’s a lot of traveller communities where I live and they would have their personal beef, but I had no part in it because I’m not a traveller.” She tells me about two families with “major beef.” She explained, “I could interact with either of them, but I could interact with either of them because I had no skin in the game.” Zara also tells me about another incident she remembers that is harder to place in any specific context. “There was also this guy who was walking around swinging a tent pole, so we had to cancel water distribution one day. He had glued a Gilette razor to the end. Like arts and crafts.”
Out of everything that happened in her month with Roots, Zara seems to suggest that what she still thinks about most often is her interactions with a migrant child. “There was this girl who was very clingy, but she wanted to be lifted onto the table and touching any of the kids is a big no-no. One of the coordinators was like you should instil a bit of ‘stranger danger’, but I find it hard to be mean to children; call me evil. I didn’t discourage it. I’m a big softie. I’m a horrible babysitter.” Zara pauses for a while before continuing, “She went missing at a certain point. No, there was a child that went missing, and we don’t know if that child was ever found or if it was her. But I never saw her again, and I never saw her family again. And I worry a lot that the family made the crossing. They had lots of children, and I don’t know what I would do in that situation. I’m not a mother. I don’t know what my mother would do in that situation. The way that it works with the crossing is that you’re given no notice. You’re just told we’re going today and you have to, you know, make moves. I just think about it a lot. If she’d just been left or trafficked somewhere…” The tone of our interview changes when Zara starts talking about the child. There is no hint of mirth in her voice anymore. “I was on water refilling that day, so I left early, and then the volunteers told me a kid was missing. I don’t know it was her, though. There were lots of kids..” She trails off. “In my head because I’m not rational. I just worry that it is her and that it’s my fault. I never saw that family again. I didn’t teach her the stranger enough. I think about that a lot.”
The plight of migrant children in Northern France has been an ongoing concern of aid organizations since migrants started to gather in increasing numbers on the French coast in 2015. In 2016, after the eviction of the Calais “Jungle” migrant encampment, Reuters reported that roughly one third of the 179 migrant children tracked by aid organizations had gone missing. In 2021, Human Rights Watch released a report on the French Police’s practice of regular evictions of migrant encampments that called on child protection authorities in France “to do more to give [unaccompanied migrant children] as full sense as possible of the range of options available to them” in the context of trafficking being “widely thought to be a concern” in Grande-Synthe. Traffickers aside, the environment itself is hazardous to children in Grande-Synthe. I saw so myself on my visit when one of the Roots coordinators run shouting and waving onto the nearby train tracks to grab a migrant child who had set up a small tent between the rails, oblivious to the oncoming train. Anything could have happened to the child Zara is talking about.
Zara found it hard to leave Roots when her month was up. She had to return home before starting her semester abroad in California. I get the sense from our conversation that there was some guilt tied up in how she felt when it was time to leave. Eventually, she says, “I don’t think it actually matters if it’s morally pure or not. Your outcomes only matter.” She continues, “We can’t all be selfless all the time.” and goes on to say, “I still read the Guardian and follow the topic.” Even though she has now left France, she still finds herself being contacted by migrants. She explains, “It’s very easy to find my instagram. I’ve got a lot of dms from people who’ve made the crossing, and they say, ‘oh I’d love to know someone here,’ and I just haven’t responded to any of them because I feel weird about the whole thing.” There is another long pause after she says this. “My poor friends had to listen to me cry and talk about these things.” Zara starts laughing again.
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