A few weeks ago my cousin - Dr Bryony Corbyn, a psychiatric doctor - visited the refugee camp at Calais and found out that there is not enough medical provision for the refugees there and none at all at the Dunkirk camp. This means that there are over 7000 men, women and children who have little or no access to medical care. Most of them are exhausted, malnourished and many have a wide range of medical problems. Some are severely ill or injured. All are deeply traumatised by the life they have fled from, the horror of their journey and the desperate conditions they now survive in.
Over the next few days I could not stop thinking about these people and their lack of basic medical aid so I decided to join her and her family on their next trip to the Calais camp.
We travelled to Calais on the Eurotunnel and drove past several enormous barbed wire fences to a huge warehouse where many of the donations for the refugees are sorted. There my cousin and I, along with another doctor and four final year medical students assembled a make-shift set of medical kits from shelves filled with a random selection of supplies.
We packed everything into large rucksacks and drove to the camp at Dunkirk. Sleeting rain and driving winds. We put on thermals, waterproofs, wellies, high visibility vests and walked into the camp.
A sea of mud, ankle deep, hundreds of tents being buffeted by the strong winds - many destroyed and lying in the foul smelling mire. Grim faced men, crying toddlers, everything wet and sodden. Tents hunkered down between trees, desperate people seeking shelter from the howling wind and freezing rain.
We looked around - so many tents, where to begin? A volunteer from Lancaster asked us to go to the tents with babies and young children first. So I crawled inside filthy, damp tents to examine a tiny coughing baby, a sobbing 3 year-old little girl who had been crying in pain for 2 days, a 15 month old with profuse diarrhoea, a young mother with severe toothache, a man with abdominal pain lying huddled under grubby blankets. As we went around the camp, sliding in the mud, trying to protect our medical kits from the rain, we were stopped wherever we went by people asking us to examine their throats, teeth, eyes or chests. So we stood there, in the mud and the rain and we did our best to assess and treat. Called out to passers by to help with translating. Handed out paracetamol, ibuprofen, rehydration sachets, strepsils, dressings applied to wounds and whatever else could be done. Smiles and thanks from everyone despite their appalling conditions.
Overnight a devastating fire broke out in the Calais camp – started by a candle. Severe burns, a badly injured man had to be carried by other refugees to an ambulance outside the camp. Many tents destroyed, 250 people including several families with small children and babies rendered completely homeless in the pouring rain.
On Monday we worked in the Calais camp –“ The Jungle.” Tents as far as the eye could see, overflowing portable toilets, burst water pipes creating muddy lakes, cooking smells mixed with the stench of waste and sewage.
We went to the camp medical centre - three small caravans stocked with limited medical supplies. Surrounding these caravans was ankle deep water, mud and waste that the fast-growing queue of refugees had to stand in while they waited to be seen.
Over the next hours our skills and experience were stretched to their limits. Trying to assess and treat so many ill people with such limited facilities. No antibiotics, no effective medication to treat the serious infections and illnesses that we saw, no translator other than fellow refugees who spoke broken English, no access to running water. It was the hardest, most challenging experience of my life. Leaving the camp to catch our train home was almost harder still, we just could not get to the end of the ever growing queue of sick people desperate to see a doctor.
