Calais, le tube de l’été

Turin/Marrakech, November ’25

Driiin. They ring the doorbell. It’s Merawi.

“Salam Aleikum.” – “Hey… Aleikum Salam.”

He comes in, takes off his shoes and soon after his orange life jacket. As if nothing had happened, he hangs it up with his other jackets, slips on his pink slippers, and goes to his room to rest after saying goodbye. Yet last night he had no life jacket. But this is not the time to ask a question I already know the answer to.

It happens more and more often, with the advancing heat, that kids at home leave in the evening with their eyes lit up at the idea of a successful crossing, only to return in the morning dead tired, but still clinging firmly to the hope of making it next time…”Inshallah.”

From Patagonia to the Calais border

My name is Mattia, I come from Turin like breadsticks, and I love all those activities where you sweat so much to get to the top of a rock that you tend to come down from ten minutes later. I studied environmental engineering, but I was never really an engineer. In fact, for the last year I’ve been a traveler.

Together with Sophie, my girlfriend, we took a (plentiful) sabbatical year. At first, I set off on my own – to Iceland by bike, then around Europe by motorcycle and on foot. Soon after, with Sophie, we followed the ripples of the Andes in South America, from Patagonia to Colombia.

Fortified by our good fortune of having a European passport, borders have always appeared to us as a mere bureaucratic hassle, and not as a barrier to cross where one could lose one’s life. So we thought early on that we would devote part of our time to a border, close to home, trying to bring a benefit that, surely, was more impactful for ourselves than for someone else.

I had previously participated in “Io Ci Sto” in Puglia and a two-day event in Ventimiglia with ASCS, so turning to them was natural.

Just as it was natural to get used to life at Maison Effatà and in Calais.

Life at Maison Effatà

From the household routine – grocery shopping, cleaning and cooking shifts – to fitting into the scale of this small town, everything seemed surprisingly easy. “Calais, le tube de l’été,” says the municipality’s colorful summer events poster. It depicts a tube of events to be squeezed in, to be thoroughly experienced. But only for a certain quota of residents.

Nevertheless, I really felt at home. Not the parental home: more the one you share with friends in college. There is always something to do, to clean or to improve, but overall it is “home.” In Italian there is no such distinction, but it was home, not just a house.

On a series of sunny afternoons we decided to fix up the garden, painting the flags of the various nationalities on the table and coloring each bench plank a different color. Fortunately, summer was also coming to Pas-de-Calais, in northern France. A few trips to the beach even escaped.

The thought of the waves, playful friends by day and ghostly hands clutching at their calves by night, presented itself in this dual way for the first time in my head.

We made friends quickly, by gesture, with the eight or nine guests of the moment at Maison Effatà. Most of them spoke Arabic or Tigrinya, and the conversations via Google Translate were as slow as they were hilarious for the pearls they gave.

The days flew by between music, playlists shared on Spotify, and a few Arabic “hits” hummed. Then the Arabic-Turkish-English dictionary printed and hanging in the kitchen, afternoons without SECCAT playing Ludo, learning Arabic numbers up to eighteen (then running out of three dice).

The Ludo tournament with two chess boards at the same time was a great moment: the competition was high, the tension felt like that of the 2006 penalty shootout.

Above all, what united us was to start cooking at three or four o’clock for dinner. The amount of onions consumed – even in the morning with yoghurt – is incredible. But also potatoes, carrots, cucumbers…. It is a celebration whenever someone brings a jar of peanut butter from the pantry into the kitchen: a hero, whoever made the effort to go downstairs to get the precious high-calorie nectar.

The inhabitants of Maison Effatà

Who were, at that moment, the residents of Maison Effatà? Those with a nursing degree, those with a Mac at home, those who spent nine years working as a decorator in Libya, those who say “AH! Porta Nuova!” and show us pictures of Turin on their phones.

Lost souls with giant hearts. Funny characters who offer you ginger coffee at all hours and worry about getting ingredients (at their own expense!) for the national dish or to celebrate some religious event.

Once there was a heated discussion in strict Arabic about a temporary guest with a cast on his ankle who could not make it up the stairs and was bivouacking on the communal couch. From the tones we could have sworn they wanted to lynch the poor guy to regain the couch space. Instead we were moved to discover that they were discussing how best to help him. The whole thing was solved temporarily thanks to some dates, which apparently do wonders for broken bones.

There was no shortage of difficult situations. For example, Mohammed, who had everything taken away from him. He had come here to convince his brother not to leave-because in France, where he already has a visa, he is fine. Instead, he found himself beaten up, robbed of his phone and documents, with a broken leg and a hand so badly bruised that he may not recover the use of some fingers. I never heard him complain. He just wanted to go home and live a worry-free life, away from the jungles.

I say things that are surely obvious: we have everything and still don’t know what we want from life. They have nothing, yet they know very well what they want.

At the end of our month, leaving was hard. We go back to vacation, feeling good about ourselves – good people. And them?

Putting your finger in the holes caused by the absence of humanity

Life will continue similar for a while, in a bubble calaisienne, interrupted now and then by the muffled sounds of footsteps on the sand and the cold slap of the sea at first light in the morning, when you try to jump on a dinghy in the direction of the pale shimmer of the white cliffs of Dover. I really hope they can have the life they desire. They deserve it far more than we could ever deserve anything.

Once home, the questions from friends and family were as simple as they were difficult to address. – “How did it go? Would you come back?”

How do you answer that? It is like imagining to synthesize Lord of the Rings in: “Frodo and some friends must dispose of an inconvenient ring.”

For me, the risk is of being reductive and not giving the right space to the emotions. Somewhat as the reader will have noticed in this text: overly descriptive, melancholy, disillusioned, I hope not too empty. But what else should I tell you, dear reader? From the Western media, from magazines, from articles, one has such a superficial smattering of the complexities of the migration situation that I feel like agreeing with St. Thomas: in the holes that the absence of humanity causes, one has to put one’s finger in them, to really believe how deep they can be.

Yet, all the kids I met were ready to fight and come out on their feet.