Transforming anger, practicing solidarity
My name is Silvia, I am 24 years old and now two years ago I first approached the field of welcoming migrants by doing a year of community service in a center for asylum seekers in Milan. Through that experience I realized that I had found a context that suited me, my values and aspirations. So I started looking for a place where I could live a volunteer experience for a few weeks and, after some research and some advice, in July 2025 I left for two months in Calais, a place that until recently I knew very little about.
Human rights violations and the vacuum of institutions
In Calais, I was confronted with a harsh reality, an extremely precarious context in which what should be basic rights are constantly trampled upon and in which institutions completely obstruct the lives and prospects of people on the move. In Calais, every 48 hours police forces clear out so-called jungles, informal encampments scattered in and around various parts of the city. Institutions do not guarantee essential services and do not provide places of shelter.Filling this void are a number of associations, including ASCS, which, together with the Scalabrinians of Calais, runs Maison Effatà, a shelter for men in transit.
Living in that house for two months was an intense, enriching, sometimes complex experience. I saw trusting relationships and deep friendships created in a very short time, learned how many bonds are created by sharing the same living space, cooking together, playing together.
So I realized that there is no need to speak the same language when you now know exactly what time a person wakes up in the morning, how many eggs they will cook for breakfast, and how they will try to cheat for the umpteenth time during the usual board game.
Maison Effatà is a special home, welcoming, full of solidarity, mutual care and sincere affection; it is a safe place where people who are going through heavy periods of their lives and their journey can find tranquility, rest, support, recreation. In that home I learned how important it is to listen and try to understand others: in such a context one has the material opportunity to try to decentralize one’s gaze, not to assume that one always knows what is best for others, but to learn to really listen. You get a chance to deconstruct that Eurocentric approach that we unfortunately carry around with us, often unknowingly.
Creating spaces of resistance and care
As a border territory, Calais is a peculiar place, filled with contradictions: it is a place full of indifference, institutional violence, suffering and death. But in the midst of all this is a small city within a city (which, after all, is not so small) inhabited by dozens of volunteers who devote months of their lives to supporting people on the move, creating spaces of resistance and care where institutions create only neglect and injustice.
Calais is a place that inevitably fills you with anger, but the most important thing I have learned from living there is that it is possible to take out that anger, share it and turn it into concrete actions, which constitute a daily attempt to change things and a clear opposition against border policies. I am absolutely convinced and sure that that part of Calais will continue to organize, to work every day to oppose that violence, to fight for safe and legal avenues of movement for all people who wish to continue their migratory journey across the Channel, or in any other direction.
40 km of sea to cross
When the sky is clear, from Calais beach one can see the cliffs of Dover: it is a very short distance that divides the French and English coasts, yet that sea too already counts many, too many victims. Women, men, children, people who were simply trying to cross that short stretch of sea, but which is easy to cross only for those with strong passports. For everyone else, however, the only solutions are to attempt the sea crossing by relying on smugglers or to try to squeeze into some truck bound for England. Living in a border place one risks getting used to all this, to see people looking at those cliffs on the other side of the sea with their eyes tired but full of hope for their future. I hope that no one, in Calais or elsewhere, really gets used to this, that it cannot be normalized, that it must continue to mobilize those who believe that borders should not exist, those who believe in justice and freedom.
Effatá in Aramaic means “Open.” At Maison Effatà, in fact, one learns empathy, caring, one knows the true meaning of the word “home.” By living there one learns to share, to know oneself, to care for oneself and others sincerely, to respect and love each other.
In Calais I learned how anger is an important emotion, because when it is shared and transformed it can give rise to new realities that can counter injustice and create small attempts at change, where solidarity is at the center and where human beings are truly treated as such. Maison Effatà proves every day that an alternative to those ruthless migration policies is not an unrealizable utopia, but is a concrete and viable possibility.
