Maria Skobtsova House - Calais

 

Is the Maria Skobtsova House a Catholic Worker? “Eh. Yeah kind of but maybe not really,” was the answer I got from a couple regular volunteers. But CW or not, their hospitality is cut from the same cloth. (They did have French Dorothy Day books on the shelf for what is worth!)

The women and children staying at Skobtsova house are only there for a short while. Each family hopes that before long to make the precarious journey across the English Channel from Calais, France to Dover in the United Kingdom.

Most of these folks will pay smugglers something like 2,000 Euros per person for a space on a crowded, small raft to make the 20 mile journey at sea. Perhaps the most moving moment of my entire European adventure came on one evening when Asiah and Soutan departed for such a trip.

Asiah’s husband Mahmood showed up and in a hurry the two of them began quickly but deliberately to pack the small backpacks they had with them. Everyone else around the house knew what was happening; the smugglers were paid, the sea conditions were right, now was the time to go. They were “on the move.”

One of the other women held baby Soutan to allow his parents to get ready. When the time came everyone hugged them goodbye and wished them safe journeys.

And then they were gone. And a stillness came over the house. Everything was quiet except for the gentle sobbing of one woman and the occasional ting from a cell phone belonging to the lone teenager of the house.

There are hundreds or thousands of people in Calais waiting for their similar moment, most of them living in tent encampments around town that are harrassed by police at regular intervals. Skobtsova house opens its doors to a handful of women and children who’d otherwise be living on the streets.

At their busiest there were a dozen people living in the house and sometimes their family members who stayed in town but didn’t live there would come by for dinner too. Nobody had known each other that long and none planned to stay longer than they had to, but community emerged quick.

Folks took turns cooking and keeping one eye on each other's children. Some evenings there were prolonged but friendly arguments about who would be allowed to wash the dishes. Tea and coffee were regularly brewed for each other. A couple folks even made a homemade pizza feast for the whole house!

In a similar way, while there is also a couple who are currently more permanent, volunteers from all over come to help run the house. My time there saw me working with Alex from Britain, Ieva from Latvia, and Margriet from the Netherlands. They were all taking a month or six weeks out of their lives to help runhouse. Giving rides to the cell phone shop, cleaning toilets, picking up diaper donations were their daily lot.

There are folks all over the city of Calais doing similar work too. I got to sit in on an orientation at the kind of mutual aid hub in town. Because of the thousands of migrants passing through there has emerged a network of folks to help take care of their needs. Some groups feed folks, some run drop in centers, some help coordinate housing. They also told us about the various encampments (referred to as “jungles” in Calais, including by the folks staying there themselves). Many encampments are centered around folks from the same country or region of the world.

Most of the daily work around the house is simply housework. Cleaning toilets, making sure there was food to eat, answering the phone, normal CW stuff. But there was also time for communal prayer each morning and plenty of time to just hang out and get to know folks.

"There was always bread," Dorothy Day wrote and in France that means day old baguettes. Since everyone loves fresh baked desserts, I decided to make bread pudding a few times. While tasty it couldn't stack up to the big beautiful birthday cake one guest made for Alex's birthday.