The Coats for Calais volunteer group are recently back from a trip to northern France, delivering aid to a refugee camp near Dunkirk that has grown from 1,000 to 3,000 people in 3 months.  It is utterly grim, totally chaotic and overwhelming.

It is 2016: Europe is the richest continent on this planet and no people in human history have lived so long or had as much to eat as we do today in Western Europe. Yet just over the channel there is a camp with 3,000 men, women and children literally living in shabby tents in six inches of mud; human faeces and rats for company. 

Men, women and children will die this winter in that camp.

One of the women in the camp described to one of the team how every night she lies on her back with her two year old son on her chest so she can shield him from the cold of the ground. The nightmare of that little baby waking up with his mother cold beneath him, could easily become a shocking reality this winter. This woman has managed to escape ISIS, has clutched her son in a dinghy across the Mediterranean, walked across Europe, and could all too easily die from freezing to death in a field of mud next to a plush private housing estate in France in 2016, mere miles from the UK shores.

Our governments are not looking after these people but this is not a political rant, it is a call to all people to do what you can to help us go and keep this mother and thousands like her keep warm enough to stay alive this winter.

We are going again on Feb 4th, this time with some more of our friends, and we need your donations so that we can buy critical supplies like thermals, blankets and wellies, waterproofs, hats, scarves, gloves, welly socks.

We are coordinating efforts with a team of volunteers from Bristol taking aid over, See their website www.aidboxconvoy.co.uk for more insight on the efforts underway.  We self fund our fuel and accommodation so every penny you give will be spent on things needed directly and desperately by refugees.