84 – Herbalism and Border Violence, Part One

Welcome to the Frontline Herbalism Podcast with your host Nicole Rose from the

Solidarity Apothecary.

This is your place for all things plants and

liberation.

Let's get started.

Hello. Welcome back to the Frontline Herbalism podcast.

So this episode today and also the next episode are going to be sharing the audio

version of a workshop I did about herbalism and border violence.

So just, just to kind of, yeah, read the blurb about it.

It was a workshop that I was started to host with the rail Yard Apothecary last year and

I'm super grateful to everyone who signed up to it and yeah, and contributed.

It raised about £500, which is amazing.

Which will go towards medicine making costs

for Calais.

I wasn't able to do it live unfortunately because of the baby teething and the co

sleeping situation and stuff.

But I have been sharing the replay and I.

Yeah, I finally uploaded the replay to my

website.

So anyone is welcome to subscribe.

Sign up for that for free to check it out.

It means you can see the kind of slides.

You can also download the transcript.

I've got closed captions on there so you can follow along.

Yeah, and there's links to like various resources that I mention in the workshop too.

So yeah, if you want to have a kind of visual experience, then check that out.

Otherwise you can listen to the podcast now.

So yeah, just about the workshop.

So it explores the role of herbalism in

supporting refugees, asylum seekers and people on the move across repressive border borders.

It explores the politics of the border regime and the role of herbalists in supporting

people displaced by colonialism, capitalism, conflict and climate change.

So yeah, it introduces the work of the Mobile Herbal Clinic Calais, which I'm sure you've

heard me talk about a lot on the podcast.

So this is a project separate to the

since it kind of started.

And yeah, We've served over 10,000 refugees in northern France with first aid and acute

And yeah, I also talk about the Poland Ukraine

border and Ukraine herbal Solidarity and also lessons from kind of like other herbal refugee

solidarity work, you know, people requesting medicine and inside outside organizing stuff

like that.

So yeah, people who subscribe will to watch it will take away practical information about

several of the medicines, made detailed specifics of the herbs and yeah, and just what

kind of herbal medicine can look like in these conditions.

So yeah, please check it out.

I hope it's useful.

Continue to listen to the audio.

Yeah, so on that note, if you value what

you're listening to and you think, yeah, that sounds like really important and inspiring

work, then the mobile herbal clinic Calais is.

We are trying to build up our number of monthly supporters.

So we're an entirely grassroots project.

Right.

Like we've had various, like, small grants over the years.

We've done like, you know, big fundraisers.

Like the merchandise that I've sold, you know, the beautiful plants, no borders plant snow.

No, no borders hoodies and things and the gorgeous bandanas back in the day, stuff like

that.

And yeah, people have organized fundraisers for us and stuff.

It's always been like, so grassroots, which, which is so incredible.

But like, we need that consistency.

Like without it, like we cannot keep operating

in the field like it is.

There is nothing more unbearable than being there, seeing the huge demand, you know,

seeing 300 people line up who've got a cough and a cold, who want medicine and run because

you don't have enough money to pay for the materials.

You know, we could have a clinic there year round, but the costs are so high because we're

making everything ourselves from scratch with really high quality herbs that people have

grown or foraged or sourced organically.

Yeah. And then obviously just the costs of driving there and getting to France and, you

know, getting the ferry and all of this stuff, like, it really adds up.

So each trip costs around 3,000 pounds a month and that's really us operating on like a

skeleton model.

So yeah, if we could have herbalists and other people supporting us, just give like 5, 10, 20

pounds a month, it would be absolutely life changing, like if we had that regular

recurring income.

So I will put a link in the show notes and I'm just.

I know there is so many things to donate to like all over the world, but for people who

are listening, especially from the uk, like, this is our border, you know, this is the

British states border, like the British state, like fund this violence in France, you know,

like people literally die, like crossing the Channel trying to get to the uk, you know, and

this is, yeah, a really like, critical situation that isn't going away, that is

probably just going to keep getting worse with climate change and everything else.

So like, we need that infrastructure.

And I think the Calais project is like one of

the most, in my personal opinion, like one of the most inspiring herbal projects in the

world in that we've developed all these medicines, all these protocols, all these

systems and structures to practice herbal medicine within an ecology of care.

You know, working with other medics, like triaging people to Hospital, like all of these

different things.

Like, you know, there's obviously lots of

amazing examples of grassroots herbalism worldwide, but I do think, like, we're quite

unique in this context.

So I would love it if the herbalism community could kind of step up and support the project,

like consistently with a regular donation.

Like, you know, her cost of a ****** coffee

these days is like four quid.

Like if you could stick that in our crowdfunder once a month, like on our page,

you know, it comes out from stripe.

Like you won't ever notice it if I'm honest.

So, yeah, I'm just, I'm just begging you, please sign up if you can and please ask your

friends and family.

We're going to do a BIG launch on 1st

February, encouraging people to become a monthly supporter.

So, yeah, okay.

And the other announcement I wanted to make

was like, basically like a thank you for everyone who's taken action, for my friend

Farah, who's in prison, who has stage three breast cancer and is not getting treatment, is

not getting quality nutrition that she needs.

The prisoner being super obstructive about getting her the chemotherapy that she needs.

And yeah, basically there's like a campaign trying to support her at the moment led by a

project that she started called the View magazine, which is about women in prison that

goes to thousands of prisoners around the UK that has been advocating against the criminal

justice system, you know, talking about ideas, abolition and stuff for a long time.

So, yeah, she really needs our support.

So I'll put the link to the action alert in

the show notes.

Basically you just fill in your details and it

automatically contacts the prison.

1700 people have done this already and the prisoner getting ****** says HMP Bronzefield,

where I used to be.

So personal vendetta.

But yeah, just please, yeah, please do your best.

There's also a petition going around to get the judge who's ruling over a case kind of

kicked off basically because she's an absolute misogynist and just keeps ruling for abusive

men.

No surprise.

Um, so, yeah, I will include that too.

But yeah, please, please check that out.

And yeah, I hope you enjoy the workshop.

I will publish part two as well.

Okay, thanks for listening.

Take care.

Bye.

Hello.

Welcome to the workshop about herbalism and

border violence.

Just a little overview of what I'm hoping to cover.

So I'm just going to give some kind of like, practical things, introduce myself and then

we'll dive into kind of what is the border regime and we'll talk about the mobile herbal

clinic Calais and kind of do like a deep dive into some of the medicines used in the clinic

and then I'll talk about the work with Ukraine and we'll kind of end talking about this idea

of like border abolition and sort of like practical struggles towards that.

And then I'll share some resources and yeah you will be able to.

I'll make sure the slides are available to download and I'll send you um a PDF of the

different recipes we use with the mobile herbal clinic.

So yeah you're welcome to take notes but you will kind of get these, get these slides.

So yeah, first thing I'm like so grateful for your presence and your time and energy and I'm

so sorry about not doing this live.

Basically I've got a six month old, he's called Lee.

This is him as I put a little picture of him.

He's so cute.

And yeah we, we co sleep and he's normally like a brilliant sleeper especially in that

first part of the night and we ARR the Talk for like 8pm UK time thinking I'll be able to

sneak out the room you know with a camera on him or maybe my partner could sit next to him.

But he's recently been waking up more frequently and being very distressed because

he's teething.

So I just said like hey I'm really sorry I don't feel like I can do this live at the

moment.

But yeah, you're really welcome to send any questions to my email which is info solidarity

apothecary.org um, I'm a little bit slow with emails at the moment because I don't have that

much kind of childcare help.

My partner's out a lot so yeah I would just do my best to get back to you but please like

feel free to contact us.

Yeah and just like a content warning, you know a bit like the kind of prison workshops I do

like there is kind of like explicit mentions of violence.

Excuse me like with the border regime and yeah stuff in Calais is just endlessly horrific and

you know I'll talk about the racism, the anti blackness but this is obviously violence

inflicted on racialized bodies.

And yeah I'm just aware that that content can be quite difficult for people.

So yeah it just to kind of like take care of yourself.

It's totally normal to dissociate when hearing distressing things.

Like I normally kind of say this stuff when it's like a live workshop, you know finding

something to kind of help anchor you like to support through the material.

Whether that's like your favorite herbal Tea or you know, yeah, organizing like with a

close friend to watch it together and like debrief if possible or writing about your

reflections or I think like getting active is really nice, like in terms of movement but

also like politically organizing.

Like, you know, maybe after the workshop you could like drop a donation into a project that

are organizing support for people on the move and stuff.

So yeah, that's just a little thing for that.

And yeah, just some disclaimers.

Like it is obviously like a massive topic in a

small amount of time.

And yeah, it's just kind of one lens of state

violence.

You know, there are countless other forms of

state violence which intersect with border systems which I'll talk about.

And yeah, the distribution of this violence and oppression is not even right.

Like it's racialized, it's classed, it's gendered.

And this talk like focuses on the kind of so called, like British French border.

I'm aware lots of people that come in via kind of rail yard apothecary are in the so called

US and so really sorry it doesn't contain content about like the US Mexico border.

I would love to like connect with people working on that border in terms of herbal

medicine.

There's one project that I mention in the talk, but yeah, I would love to kind of do

some podcast interviews with folks that are organizing solidarity on the ground there.

And yeah, I just want to, you know, say again that the kind of British state has like

mastered this art of statecraft, right? Mastered this art of policing and borders and

prisons, like through colonialism.

And yeah, and when we talk about abolition and resistance to this, I want to name that these

movements have been led by black feminists and radicals like from the very beginning and

still are.

And yeah, I'm, I'll just introduce myself, but I'm.

Yeah, I use she, her pronouns.

My name is Nicole Rose.

Um, I'm, as you can see in the picture, I'm white, but my lineages are English, Welsh and

Irish.

Um, I've been a kind of DIY herbalist for over

a decade and then completed this formal clinical training with the Plant Medicine

School several years ago.

Now, need, need to update this slide, but I run this project called the Solidarity

Apothecary and I focus as a herbalist on supporting people experiencing state violence

with herbal medicines.

Yeah, and obviously, you know, I just want to name that I am, you know, I am white.

I'm like, you know, I grew up like super working class in the UK context, but you know,

I'm just, yeah, super privileged, have papers like every time I, every time I drive to

France, you know, it's like a flash of this passport, you know.

And I'll talk about that in the, in the talk.

But yeah, I just want to name as well that the

work I do is part of like loads of collective organizing.

When I introduce the clinic, like it is a complete collective project, you know, with

lots of people making decisions and loads of different contributions.

Likewise with Ukraine Herbal Solidarity.

So I know sometimes I can like be a bit of a

mouthpiece for some of these projects because of my podcast and stuff, but they are, yeah,

collective, collective efforts.

So the mission of the Solidarity Apothecary is to materially support revolutionary struggles

and communities with plant medicines to strengthen collective autonomy, self defense

and resilience to climate change, capitalism and state violence.

And you can see all the different offerings and bits and bobs that I do@solidarity

apothecary.org

all right.

Oh yeah, so just like a little overview of the

project.

So I support people experiencing state

violence with care packages with one to one support, support.

I distribute a book called the Prisoners Herbal that people might have come across to

people in prison for free worldwide.

I'm part of this mobile clinic project and Ukraine Herbal Solidarity.

I support a lot of people engaged in kind of like movement work and organizing.

And I have a podcast called the Frontline Herbalism Podcast.

But I've mostly been supporting people in prison for the last two years.

I'm an ex prisoner and yeah, most of my sort of political organizing, it's been around

that.

Yeah. And you know, I wanted to do something with the group like life when I'd made these

slides.

But I just want to honor those like killed by

borders.

Yeah. So please like pause the video and take a breath.

Light a candle if you can.

I've just lost count of how many people I've met in France who we've treated with the

clinic one week who've then drowned in the channel, including like an entire family about

three years ago.

And it's still happening, you know.

So yeah, these systems are not only obviously

unnecessary, but like they're murderous.

Right.

Like people lose their lives trying to cross to get to the uk like across the channel.

I'll talk about that more like later on in the workshop.

But yeah, I just wanna, I just, I can't talk about this stuff without honoring people that

are, you know, killed by these systems.

Okay. So yeah, a little bit about the border regime.

So yeah, if this was live, I was going to ask folks like what are borders?

Get people to kind of contribute their perspectives of what they think a border is or

what the border system is.

And yeah, they're made up basically like animals, plants, insects, birds.

They've all migrated forever.

Humans have migrated all over the world.

Yeah, the sand, you know, migrates like the oceans move like.

Yeah, they are a complete human made construct.

Obviously we have, you know, different separations between land, scene, sky, but even

those like shift with time.

So. Yeah. There is a quote here in a book called Violent Borders by Rhys Jones.

I'll read it out for people that are just listening.

Borders are not natural divisions between people or benign lines on a map.

They are mechanisms for some groups of people.

Excuse me, baby, sleep deprivation.

They are mechanisms for some groups of people to claim land, resources and people while

fundamentally excluding other people from access to those places.

They create and exacerbate inequalities and they protect the economic, political and

cultural privileges that have accused accrued over the past few hundred years through the

spoils of colonialism, capitalism and most recently economic globalization.

Excuse me.

Drawing a border is an inherently violent act that relies on the threat of force to support

a territorial claim.

So, yeah, so basically borders are tools of states.

Right, of colonial entities to, you know, enforce separation between people, to control

who's coming in and out.

But it's worth emphasizing that borders are

not always closed.

Right.

They are actually always open for capital, you

know, for the movement of goods and services, for exploitation of labor.

People don't realize, but like the really big companies.

Oh, excuse me, sorry to keep you on.

The really big companies were actually, you know, anti Brexit.

Like they, you know, love Brexit because they want that constant flow of, of kind of labor

to exploit.

Yeah. And you know, countries like Greece have things like golden visas if you pay €250,000,

you can access a visa if you buy property.

So yeah, so the rich don't have any problem flying around the world at all.

Yeah, so just wanted to, to emphasize that.

And before I dive into the talk, just a little note on language.

So there's a really nice crew called the Migrant Rights Network here in the UK who

organize around kind of solidarity with migrants, including Refug.

And yeah, I just wanted to run through some of their definitions.

So they identify a migrant as any individual who has crossed borders between two different

countries for the purpose of temporary residence, for example, to study or work.

And. Yeah. Oh, sorry, I haven't put their first names here, but I think it's Gracie

Bradley and Luke Dinora in Against Borders, which is like another fantastic book, right

how the violent exclusion of people defined as migrants, which then makes it possible to

illegalize, detain and deport them, should be of concern wherever it emerges.

So, you know, I'm not going to be using language like illegal immigrant or alien or

you know, this kind of, you know, language that people use to kind of perpetuate like

violence in the media, for example, or encourage deportations, things like this.

Yeah, and I just want to emphasize that people have multiple identities beyond this kind of

status character characterization of why they have crossed a border.

You know, someone is, isn't just a refugee or an asylum seeker or a migrant, you know, or,

you know, a.

Sorry, sorry to swear like an expat.

Right, Like a white expat.

Like who get that name and other migrants don't.

Anyway, it's a whole other workshop, but yeah, Migrant Rights Network talk about how a

refugee or an asylum seeker is an individual who has been forcibly displaced from their

home country because of war or conflict, settler colonialism, excuse me.

Or because they have been harmed or threatened with harm due to their ethnicity, religious or

political beliefs, disability, gender identity or sexual orientation.

An asylum seeker often has very limited rights in the country they have arrived in.

Asylum seekers may seek formal official protection from the country they have arrived

in.

Otherwise they may live outside the remit of

the law, fearing apprehension by the home Office and forced removal.

Okay, so what is the border regime?

So it is used as kind of shorthand for all the many different institutions, people, systems

and processes involved in trying to control migrants.

So what feels like another lifetime now.

But while I was doing my clinical training, I

had a part time job, like just working from home as part of a group called Corporate

Watch.

It's all sort of like anonymous writing, but yeah, my kind of co worker and comrade put

together this book called the UK Border Regime based on his years of experience organizing

around like refugee solidarity.

Like, he's, yeah, Iranian and it's, you know, he's like super active in different

communities.

And yeah, I helped to kind of edit the book

and promote it and stuff.

And yeah, you can get it for free.

I've put a link in the resources section.

It's an absolute beast.

But yeah, you can kind of download that and get an overview of borders.

And I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about this more in a minute.

But I just want to emphasize that like, borders are everywhere, right?

It's not just the physical location, say in France and Calais.

It is literally everywhere.

So yeah.

Gracie and Luke write how borders do not materialize only at the Edges of national

territory, in airports or at border walls.

In fact, borders are every day and everywhere determining how people relate to partners,

employers and the police where they live and work and their access to health care and

welfare support.

So, you know, there's all these kind of like complex systems, like all together at the same

time.

So you know, the reporting systems, like

people having to go to the home office and you know, like regularly sort of like report in

where they, you know, they risk like arrest and detention.

And it's always like a huge source of stress for folks.

The dispersal system.

So like where people are kind of moved to

live, you know, they're often sent to kind of cities really far away, you know, in really

horrific kind of like slum accommodation, the systems of raids and the work of the

immigration enforcement raid squad.

So this is like a team part of the state who raid kind of businesses and homes and other

kind of things like mosques and stuff to, to kind of, yeah, arrest people and deport them.

Um, and it, you know, it's just an absolute like weapon of fear.

Like it's taugh a lot in this border regime book.

The detention center, the detention system.

So people are kept in detention centers.

Yeah, without, you know, with kind of indefinite amounts of time.

And yeah, they're just kind of, they're, you know, they're prisons, they're absolute

prisons.

Like people are often suicidal, extremely

distressed, like unable to leave, unable to access like high quality legal support because

of the system.

And yeah, people, you know, kill themselves and there's a lot of self harm and abuse going

on behind these walls.

Excuse me, deportations.

So people are actually like physically, quote

unquote removed and put on, on flights and you know, forcibly removed, say for example, just

from the uk.

But obviously this happens, you know, all over

the place, especially in the so called US and yeah, there's a lot of, you know, for every

part of these regimes there's like resistance to them.

Right.

Like there's people that have been fighting

for a long time to stop deportation who, you know, tie themselves to planes or kick off or

target airlines, things like this to stop people from being deported.

Maybe people heard in the media about the UK wanting to deport people to Rwanda as an

alleged like safe third country.

Sorry, I could like go into so much detail about these, but I'm just trying to give like

a kind of summary.

Yeah, so continuing investment in Calais, which is, well what I'll be talking about a

lot.

So this is the port town in France where many

people are trying to cross.

So the British state invests millions in fencing policing surveillance systems to make

it as hostile as possible to people and they obviously collaborate with the French state to

do that.

The hostile environment, this is language that a former Prime Minister, Theresa May brought

in.

So this is about, yeah, kind of creating,

literally creating a hostile environment for people to live in with very strong kind of

anti migrant measures.

You know, whether that's banning people from access to certain care or hospitals or, you

know, gathering a lot of surveillance and data to, you know, like people being.

What's it called, like made destitute.

Stuff like this, like, you know, loads of

rhetoric in the media.

Yeah, just this whole vast array of like anti migrant measures and finally like hostile

data.

So this is systems that the Home Office used

to kind of track people.

So there's like, you know, billions invested

in these kind of surveillance systems, like electronic tagging for example.

And yeah, throughout this kind of talk I have included little pictures from this project

called Conversations From Calais.

So they get so different volunteers and people

working in France like tell them little anecdotes of what's happened and it kind of

communicates quite viscerally like what is happening there.

And then these are kind of like, like wheat pasted, like around cities and stuff.

There's a whole book of them now.

They're like really, really moving.

So this one, the person said, you told me the day before you had to.

You had tried to cross the Channel and had spent seven hours at sea.

You called the UK Coast Guard but for hours, but nobody came.

Your face was burnt and blistered.

You asked me for the number of another coast

guard, one that would.

Yeah, and that's just kind of a typical story of.

Yeah, collaboration between, you know, the coast guards and the border regime of this

situation of, you know, different coastal teams, like not picking people up.

Right.

And people getting dragged back into French

waters and then dragged back into the British waters.

And you know, just like all this kind of like horror of not answering people's distress

calls and again trying to create this kind of hostile environment for people trying to

cross.

So yeah, so there's a whole bunch of different actors involved.

So like the Home Office is like the main government department in the UK responsible

for immigration control.

Then we have, you know, like the Border Force.

So like these are the guys in uniform responsible for control at the frontiers.

You know, people working in airports and ports, like checking people's passports,

searching vehicles, you know, kind of.

Yeah, being on that front line.

And then there's the collaboration of all these other companies.

Right.

Like Airlines, ferry companies that let them

do this.

That let.

Yeah, that.

You know, racialized people, racially profile

people getting on their coaches, things like this.

Travel agents, for example, that book all their deportation flights.

You know, there's like, so many different actors that are part of this entire system of

oppression against people, you know, against migrants and refugees and asylum seekers.

Security companies who kind of.

Yeah. Do a lot of the border searches, run

their detention centers for profit, for example.

Yeah. And ID IT geeks developing this kind of big data software and inventing new

surveillance systems and weapons.

Big business lobbying to try and keep down labor costs.

You know, bosses who call immigration enforcement raids on workers demanding higher

wages.

So lots of people who kind of resist or push

back on labor conditions are often kind of dobbed in by their.

By their employers.

Yeah. And there's also, you know, just like, snitches who are just people in communities

that think someone is like, you know.

Undocumented. Undocumented. Undocumented.

And will, you know, call a certain hotline and

that will trigger a raid.

There's obviously the role of the media,

there's all these politicians.

That kind of posture is like, tough guys,

tough on immigration.

And then, you know, there's like, far right agitators and fascists who try and kind of

push the window even more of, like, acceptable hate.

And we saw that recently with kind of some fascist uprisings in the uk.

Yeah. And even say in England, there's council and homeless.

Homelessness, charity workers that go out with immigration enforcement to find foreign

workers or rough sleepers to help deport them, which is just like, effing horrific.

Okay. But yeah, you can read more about that in the border regime book, like I mentioned.

Like, I'm not talking about borders in other contexts.

I'm talking mostly about the situation where our clinic is working in France.

But I just want to kind of give this, like, bigger picture around Europe.

And, yeah, there's a kind of map here of like, major migration routes to Europe in case, you

know, you don't.

You don't live in Europe.

And this is kind of all new to you.

You can kind of see the red arrow flows.

And actually, this is quite out of date

because there's now this other route in terms of, like, Belarus to Poland, which is like,

yeah, kind of more getting more established.

But yeah, there's obviously kind of, you know, the European Union, like, works together with

a system called Frontex to kind of police borders to protect, like, what.

Allegedly protect the whole of Europe, if that makes sense.

Because there's, like, A Schengen Agreement, which means people can kind of move freely in

between these European countries, if, you know, if you have papers, obviously.

But, yeah, these are some of.

Some of the common routes.

So if you can see, by the time people get to Calais, they've already had, like, one hell of

a journey.

You know, like, maybe they've been living on the island of Lesbos, you know, that's part of

Greece.

And maybe they've been there for two years

waiting for papers and documents in Greece, for example, maybe they've got all the way to

Germany and lived there for a few years or a few months, and then decided, right, they're

going to go on to the UK because they want to be reunited with a family member here.

You know, maybe they've been kept in a detention center in Austria, for example, or

maybe they've been employed in Spain on some horrific migrant worker worker camp.

Or maybe they've, you know, gone via Paris and had to do sex work, like, you know.

You know, maybe they've been enslaved in Libya, for example, you know, we've met people

who have literally been enslaved who've been, you know, stabbed with machetes through their

guts.

Like, literally, like, every horror you can

imagine, like, it is happening, and people are.

Yeah. You know, stripped naked and pushed back over borders, for example, in Hungary and

Serbia.

It's just.

It's just, like, beyond words.

And nothing I can say can do this justice of

the oppression people face every step of these journeys.

And, yeah, I just want to speak to the kind of, like, fierceness and courage that it takes

to.

You know, obviously, people don't have a

choice.

Right.

But, yeah, I just want to name, like, the resilience for someone to get all the way to

France, for example.

Okay. So that's just like, you know, absolutely, like, butchered.

Small introduction.

So, yeah, I'm gonna.

I'm gonna introduce the context in Calais, and I wanted to just read something out from a

group called Calais Migrant Solidarity.

And I think something they've written about Calais just kind of summarizes it really,

really well.

Okay. So a fundamental component of the state's attack on daily life has been the

constant denial of shelter.

This was done by refusing to provide

sanctioned sleeping spaces alongside the invasion, eviction, and destruction of any

autonomous living places that people created.

The ability to live in Calais becoming a point of struggle.

The ability to live in Calais becoming a point of struggle for migrant communities alongside

the daily attempts to subvert the physical border.

Over time, people have made their homes all over the city in disused buildings or squatted

camps known as jungles, from Sangul, the Pashto word for forest, both inside and on the

outskirts of the city.

However, violence and arrest in Calais has never just been confined to living spaces.

It is a daily reality that people face both while attempting to cross the border, but also

whilst going about other aspects of daily life.

The train stations, parks and just the street are places where people have been repeatedly

targeted for ID checks or controls.

Violence and arrest, as well as constant

surveillance and intimidation at the places where people go to eat.

At the different food distribution places that have been in Calais over the years, the

violence faced by people trying to cross the border is the constant that never changes.

In Calais, people are beaten, caught by dogs, gassed by pepper spray or more serious gas,

and routinely threatened and humiliated.

And this is all alongside other injuries or dangers that people face while making attempts

to cross the border.

While violence in public places and living

spaces fluctuated over the years, the police have never shied away from violence in these

places, where often nobody is watching when nobody is filming.

The police are not the only people who contribute to this policy of violence,

repression or discrimination in Calais.

The way the UK border operates and the fines

imposed on truck drivers found with migrants inside means that the violence at the hands of

lorry drivers whilst crossing is also a significant risk.

Uncountable lives are wasted and suffer from the violence of the border, whether from the

direct attacks by police and border forces, or in the attempt to escape their controls, or

through the dangerous methods of transit, or at the hands of gang masters and mafia.

An unthinkable number of people have died in Calais.

Alongside the increased security measures over the last couple of years, the number of people

being killed whilst attempting to cross in more and more dangerous ways has increased.

The people are always in our thoughts.

Many times over the last years, these tactics of deterrence from Calais have been met with

resistance and defiance.

Demonstrations, occupations and resisting

evictions have been commonplace over the years.

Most importantly, people have always kept coming to Calais, always carrying on, crossing

the border and finding ways and places to live while they are here.

Okay, so, yeah, that's a kind of introduction to Calais.

But in terms of our clinic, which I'll introduce properly in a second, basically, you

can see this picture here of these kind of encampments, right?

So people are living in tents which are taken like every few days from the police.

And volunteer groups obviously keep giving them to people so that they are have Some kind

of shelter.

You know, they're always kind of really horrible conditions without sanitation.

For example, groups do try and organize like water points and things, but again the police

take them, there's regular food distributions.

Again, self organized grassroots groups doing that which face criminalization and repression

from the authorities there.

But yeah, people are kind of like self

organized into these temporary communities and deal with like constant evictions.

Calais is obviously right next to the sea, right?

So it's like really kind of cold and windy and like difficult, difficult like climate

conditions and yeah, just a couple more of the conversations from Calais.

You told me the boat had tilted and that you and your family had almost drowned.

You said you thought that was the end.

Your kids held on, held onto your back, you

had a baby with you in the water.

After you were rescued, you said you would never try to get to the UK again.

But a few days later you attempted the crossing again.

So yeah, like the, the, the kind of pattern I guess in France is it is repeated attempts at

crossing.

Right?

So that could be trying to get into a lorry, that could be trying to get a boat and cross

the Channel, which is the most common way now.

And yeah, they're very dangerous vessels.

Like often people will sell them to you and

completely overload them.

They're not always in good condition.

Often sink people will get to the kind of shore and kind of set off and then be raided

by the police, be dragged off the boats.

You know, I've treated a three year old girl with pepper spray wounds from the police

spraying her.

They were trying to spray everyone on the boat

to try and get them to, to fall off into the water.

And then they said recently, I think this was in some legislation that like, like beating

people is actually quote unquote, better than things like pepper spray.

So they'll just grab people and punch them and get them off the boats that way and it's just

like, yeah, mind numbingly awful.

And people, yeah, people have to try consistently.

You know, often people, mostly people have to pay to cross and that's not always financially

possible.

So yeah, it's kind of, yeah, a whole, a whole

other world.

But yeah, okay.

But yeah, I just want to emphasize that, like,

yeah, I think I talk about this later, but basically there's no safe legal routes right

to the uk so apart from some refugees for people from Ukraine and Hong Kong, which I'll

talk about in the Ukraine section.

But if you want to claim asylum in the uk, you have to get to the uk so you have to risk your

life Crossing this border, crossing this, you know, body of water.

Yeah. And the other conversation from Calais here.

You came up to me to ask if the police would evict you this weekend.

Oh, excuse me.

I said maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, maybe in

a few more days.

You said if the police came tonight, we should

pray for you all.

So, yeah, the police are regularly evicting camps, so that means burning people's

belongings, taking people's tents and belongings.

I met a man whose the cops.

He. The cops were taking his tent and his

sleeping bag and he said, oh, can I just get my glasses?

And the policeman was like, yeah, sure, I'll get them for you.

Got his glasses and then threw them on the floor and just like stamped on them.

And this guy literally couldn't see.

So we, you know, we took him to the optician stuff, got him some new glasses, but it was

just like, yeah, you know, the things that go on behind closed doors, basically, like.

And, you know, they won't let other volunteers and stuff.

Like, there's some human rights monitoring groups that try and monitor evictions, but.

But yeah, it's super, super repressive.

Thanks so much for listening to the Frontline

Herbalism podcast.

You can find the transcript, the links, all the resources from the show at

solidarityapothecary.

Org podcast.