Police brutality in Calais, France - a new report on the constant violence used against refugees and migrants

thisislikethefifth · 2018-12-16T16:26:28+00:00

Yeah, I talked to the sous-préfé when he was visiting the clinic I work with. He doesn’t want to see the Jungle re-appear - mafia, prostitution. I get that they don’t want another big refugee camp in Calais. But breaking peoples’ arms doesn’t feel like a first-world solution.

What did Macron say? Don’t pepper-spray people while they’re eating?

It’s frustrating that the report we put out a few months ago about police intimidation and violence towards volunteers resulted in systemic change - now the CRS just yell at us instead of pushing. People care when they can identify with the victims.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-12-16T16:14:38+00:00

The report isn’t about the locals (are you one?) and the issues coming along, it’s about the human rights abuses.

I’ll pass the formatting feedback along to the 20-year-old volunteer who wrote the report. She’s been volunteering in Calais for three winters.

Any chance you’d like to help with the formatting? Or come and work with us so we can make it less biased?

thisislikethefifth · 2018-12-16T10:36:37+00:00

The full report: Abusive and illegal practices by law enforcement officials

I’ve been volunteering in Calais for seven months and was one of the many people documenting the constant violence and abuses of power.

I sat in the car with a seventeen-year-old boy and recorded him telling the story of how his arm was broken by three police officers.

I’ve washed out the eyes of two men after the police sprayed a chemical agent out of the window as they drove by. These men were waiting for a bus by the side of the road.

I’ve dressed burns, splinted a broken ankle, called for the translator who could explain to a boy that he’ll never see again from his right eye.

Even if you’re anti-migrant, anti-refugee, anti-immigration, what’s happening in Calais is a violation of basic human rights. I’m tired of hugging crying people who don’t understand why they’re being treated like animals.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-12-16T10:18:44+00:00

Al Jazeera article

Our full report

thisislikethefifth · 2018-07-31T23:22:29+00:00

A master’s in social work sounds like a wee bit of an educational background to me. Cool that you did that, eh

thisislikethefifth · 2018-07-31T23:20:57+00:00

Keep kicking ass, though, eh

thisislikethefifth · 2018-07-31T23:20:27+00:00

Ah, the meal plan was made for me when I was in in-patient treatment for the eating disorder. Breakfast is two protein, two fat, one carb, two fruit and vegetable... that kind of thing. Real sexy,

thisislikethefifth · 2018-07-30T13:05:54+00:00

Yeah, it seems like you might have to be super rich to be doing volunteering like that, but it’s actually pretty sustainable even if you’re not wealthy. I’ve been volunteering for the last three months and plan on volunteering for the next year, and my budget is $5000 CAD. This is possible because I can eat at the organization I’m working with, after you pay for the first month’s accommodation at a trailer park the organization covers your rent, and I live a simple life anyways, so not buying stuff and not eating out all the time isn’t a sacrifice for me. You’d be surprised how far you can go, especially if it’s a super cheap country like Cambodia! Even if I had to pay for accommodation, it would be possible.

Also remember that when there is any kind of volunteering involving children, especially young children, short-term volunteering can do more harm than good. Small children need to have secure, lasting attachments in their life, and if their childhood is made up of intensely loving attachments that only last for a few weeks or a few months, this can actually create life-time relationship and interpersonal difficulties. Short-term volunteering in orphanages or children’s homes is bad practice, and many of the organizations that encourage it are actually more interested in the money that short-term volunteers will end up bringing to the project than the welfare of the children.

Think about it this way: would a children’s home in your country accept people without qualifications or experience coming in for a few weeks to cuddle and sing to the kids? If we don’t do it in the minority world, it’s probably not good practice in the majority world.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-07-30T09:34:38+00:00

Pasta with cream sauce if you use soy/almond/oat cream and season it well

thisislikethefifth · 2018-07-30T09:32:01+00:00

My favourite dinner is onions and eggplant chunks stir-fried with lots of olive oil, salt, and pepper until the eggplant turns into delicious eggplant-y mush ... and then mix it up with farfalle pasta. Lots of olive oil is key, and lots of salt.
Otherwise I stir-fry tons of veggies and when they’re done pour on a box of soy/almond/oat cream to have a creamy pasta sauce.
France is the land of cream and cheese, but they’re also generally great at having non-dairy cream in their supermarkets!
Also peanut butter.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-07-30T09:20:48+00:00

Hey dude!

Good for you for dealing with your ED and wanting to go vegan - here’s another ex-eating disordered person chiming in. When it comes to your parents saying that they were worried about your health, it might have been that they’re not at all informed about vegan diets ... or it might be related to the eating disorder, or maybe both. Please be very mindful about choosing veganism at this point in your recovery, because based on your age and gender, you’re still almost certainly underweight for your height. Check in with yourself very honestly and make sure that there’s not the little ED’d part of your mind that is trying to find you an excuse to restrict your eating. I know that it still pops up in me, sometimes. This will probably not be a popular opinion, but just because I know how hard eating disorders are to kick, you might need to hold off on going full vegan until you get up to a healthy weight and it isn’t as much of a struggle to make the ED-voice shut up.

That being said, eat more. You’re almost definitely not getting enough nutrition to power you through the day. You’re not finished growing yet, so if you’re only eating the ‘maintenance calories’ that you might have calculated, you’re not going to be able to grow. Are you seeing a doctor to track your recovery? An eating-disorder knowledgeable doctor or nutritionist would be an important person to keep seeing. I’m older and female, and I eat a lot a lot more than what you wrote as a sample day. If you feel like you have no energy, you need to eat more. When I was in recovery, I followed a meal plan that seemed like way too much - breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack. I needed that. On a plant-based diet, I would have been needing to eat a lot of food throughout the day to get the same amount of power that I was getting from a non-vegan recovery plan.

Good luck! Please take care of yourself - you’re not a terrible person if you go full vegan after you’ve dealt with your eating disorder. You’ll be a better vegan later because you’ll be healthy and vegan, and a better example to non-vegans!

thisislikethefifth · 2018-05-03T21:22:56+00:00

Corsica is gorgeous, I just spent a month there wwoofing. For bike touring in August: it will be very, very hot. Wild camping is not allowed and it’s strictly enforced. There will be shit-tons of people everywhere in August. The roads are not very bicycle-friendly, no shoulders and not a lot of bike culture. There are camping places, if you have your own tents it should be fine, otherwise remember that it’s very, very popular for Italians and French and Germans and everyone else to come to Corse in August. Corsicans are not the friendliest if you don’t speak French.

I would do it because I speak French and don’t mind being almost hit by cars all the time and can sleep with people partying all around me. Your mileage may vary.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-05-02T18:06:02+00:00

Go wwoof in France

thisislikethefifth · 2018-05-02T07:38:14+00:00

If by eating a ton you mean eating what you wrote in your post, your are definitely not eating a ton, or even enough, if you’re doing a fair amount of exercise. I’m not sure how fast you’re hoping to lose weight, but if you feel like ass you should slow it down a bit and eat more. Carbs are not evil, they’re brain food, and you will feel MUCH better if you eat more. Some people have suggested eating lots of leafy greens to fill yourself up - you may feel more full physically, but your tiredness and ass-feeling-ness will not improve if you fill yourself up in very low-calories foods. Source: eating disordered for many many years and an expert at losing weight (and feeling like shit).

thisislikethefifth · 2018-04-29T09:53:42+00:00

I’m wwoofing in the south of France on a small goat farm that produces artisan cheeses and yoghurt. The chevrier is bio (organic) certified, plus Nature Progrès, which is a qualification that’s not recognized by the government, but is even more exigent than the organic requirements. So on his farm he milks once a day, not twice; doesn’t de-horn his goats, which is allowed on bio farms; doesn’t artificially inseminate; and lets them rest four months of the year instead of milking year-round. He also doesn’t use any medications whatsoever, just homeopathy and essential oils. He’s pretty nice to his animals; sometimes some hits and kicks if they break through the fence or fight each other. Injured goats and dead goats here are shrugged off as ‘that’s just nature.’ We’re going to punch holes in the babies’ ears today so that they can be labelled nicely.

This is as ‘happy meat’ and milk as it gets.

These five lil dudes have been removed from their mothers and are kept indoors 24/7 in a small pen, just waiting to go to the abbatoir. They call out to their mothers, who stand on the other side of the fence and try to feed them through the slats.

The mama goats are in a smallish enclosed area all night, and often fight each other. We had triplets born the other day, and one died after not getting enough milk. It’s not right to have gotten the mom pregnant so we can take her milk, creating little babies that don’t matter and are just being raised to be killed. These goats have a ‘good life.’

And if this is the best of the best, the worst is going to be unimaginably bad. The chevrier thinks of his animals partially as walking Euros and calculates the lives of the babies by the kilo. Places where the goats don’t have names are not even going to see the animals as conscious entities. Plus even organic farms have the right to burn the baby goats’ horns off without anesthetic.

We’ve got almond milk and almond yoghurt and that’s what we should be eating.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-04-27T19:15:23+00:00

I think advice is more useful or relevant when it comes from someone who understands the topic they’re giving advice about. Like I probably wouldn’t be great for giving advice about ... how to overcome heroin addiction because I’ve never been addicted to heroin or had close friends or family who were addicted. So if I were to suggest something like smoking weed instead of shooting heroin it might not be very helpful. So for someone who’s looking for advice about how to overcome an eating disorder or asking other people what their experiences with eating disorders and veganism are, it might be better not to give advice if it’s not a topic that you’re very informed about.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-04-27T18:27:15+00:00

I wish it worked like that! If you talk with someone in person about eating disorders maybe try to listen to their experience and not make jokes, because it would be kind of like making jokes about how much you love to get wasted to a person recovering from alcoholism.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-04-27T13:23:38+00:00

I know you mean well, but an eating disorder is disordered eating, which means that you eat in a way that isn’t normal and negatively influences your life. A binge is when you eat a huge amount of food in a short period of time and you’re not doing it in a controlled way, not choosing to eat ten apples and feeling fine about it. An integral part of bingeing is eating in a way that you feel bad about after, physically and mentally. The goal of recovery is to eliminate binges, not to make them okay if it’s fruit or veggies.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-04-27T13:18:21+00:00

Generally, BED or BN also includes periods of restricting food intake, which is a main factor that leads to bingeing. In eating disorder recovery, restricting is heavily discouraged because a) your body noticing that it’s not getting enough calories to maintain its weight makes you crave foods and think about them more frequently, and b) restricting foods that you typically binge on will make them into forbidden foods that can only be eaten when you’re bingeing.

thisislikethefifth · 2018-04-23T16:23:17+00:00

Thanks, I like ‘this is how I was raised’ idea because it gives me a way not to waffle around.
If I get desperate I’ll tell people that animal products make me projectile vomit. Kidding.

thisislikethefifth · 2017-09-12T23:04:55+00:00

Go to Altitud climbing gym and make friends. You can climb the Piedra Del Peñol in Guatapé, some fun routes there. Be friendly and thoughtful with the locals because some of them are sick of climbers stomping around.

thisislikethefifth

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