"It's OK," he answers, his face unreadable. The Jungle is not OK. Sheets of tarpaulin and pieces of wood prop up makeshift tents and shelters, lines of clothes stretched between them. Burnt bushes and the blackened skeletons of tents are a reminder of a fire that swept through the Jungle recently. It's quiet during the day, but we see some young men sitting in battered beach chairs in front of their ramshackle tents, like a camping trip at the end of the world. Around the edges of the camp, men loiter with phones. It's the same scene you see on any town square or station platform, people pacing aimlessly as they chat or standing engrossed in their screen.
Bordering the edge of the camp is a strip of sand a few hundred yards wide leading up to a high bank topped with fences, Orange-jacketed workers walk between two layers of fencing, unspooling hoops of razor wire, Armed police officers walk with them, eyeing us balefully as Stephen climbs the bank to take photographs, CNET's Stephen Shankland under the towering fences that loom over the Jungle and much of the Calais countryside, On the other side of the fencing is the road that leads to the Channel Tunnel, Trucks rumble by and seagulls wheel overhead, tantalizing ghostek covert 2 iphone x bumper case - clear / pink reminders of how close we are to the water, to Britain, to a new life, The layers of white fences make the trucks look ghostly and unreal..
One young man tells us in decent English about his journey from Afghanistan, where he says the Taliban prevented him from going to school. His name is Kamil Shamal. He wants to teach, he says, or be a businessman. Shamal has a phone, a simple Samsung, but no one to call. His parents are gone, he says, and he doesn't know the whereabouts of his brother, who set out on the same journey, or a cousin who reached the UK. Shamal is alone. Shamal is the first of many to tell us about refugees' nightly clashes with the French police, about violence and tear gas. He's also the first of several to hitch up his trousers and show us an injured leg, the consequence of falling from a lorry.
Although we hear many of these things again and again, he says one thing we wouldn't hear again: "The UK -- it is too difficult to cross, I want to stay here in France."Astonishingly, every single other refugee we speak to would rather brave the fences and razor wire, the danger of falling from lorries, the gas and batons of the police, night after night, to reach the UK, than stay in France, "France no good," we hear from an Iranian refugee, "French police no good."One refugee, Abdul, who did not give his surname, even says he would rather go back to ghostek covert 2 iphone x bumper case - clear / pink war-torn Syria than stay in France, "The Jungle is the same as ISIS," he says, shrugging..
The young family of Nahro Rashed had to flee Iraq simply for doing some work for the Western-backed regime at his garage. Darya Khan, from Afghanistan, has his own reasons for wanting to leave France. "They don't know me, they should not look after me," he says. There are people that know him in the UK and the US, he tells us: the soldiers he worked with when he was an interpreter in the Afghan army. After NATO troops left, Khan says, he was threatened by the Taliban and was forced to flee for his life.
