I first visited the refugee camp in Calais in October 2015. It was a day of many firsts: the first time I’d crossed the Channel on a ferry, the first time I’d been to that part of France, and my first major assignment as a news reporter.
I was 23 years old and out of my depth. But as we entered summer, I couldn’t ignore the extraordinary number of desperate refugees ending up on European shores. I wanted to report on the crisis, despite not having any experience in non-science writing. I was able to land a job at Quartz, an online news site. To my surprise, I was sent to Calais a month in.
A tall and animated volunteer for a British aid group had agreed to let me join their latest trip. We parked less than a mile away from the refugee camp infamously called ‘the Jungle’, which at its peak housed nearly 10,000 asylum seekers from all over the world.
The other volunteers arrived with donated food and clothes, which we packed into plastic bags once the sun rose over us. I came with my pen, notepad and phone, keen to talk to people, to ask them what or who they were fleeing, let them tell me their hopes and dreams.
I walked around the entrance on edge, regretting wearing all black as the sun beat down. Two young Eritrean women who looked my age agreed to show me around the camp and said I could interview them so long as I didn’t use their names or pictures.
Displacement and desperation
The women invited me into their tent, where I heard their harrowing journey to France. Other women who joined us told a similar tale. So did men who agreed to talk.
But the interview that has stayed with me the most was the young Somali man I spoke to just before leaving. I got lost and walked towards a British volunteer handing out food, but he barked at me to get to the back of the line before I could ask for directions. I would be mistaken for a refugee in the camp twice more.
When I walked away, the Somali boy, who looked around 18, offered to walk me to the entrance. I accepted.
"Were you born in Somalia?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"When did you move out of Somalia?" I heard how stupid the question sounded as soon as I asked it.
"You’re Somali, you understand," he responded, almost incredulously.
"The civil war in the 1990s," I quickly filled in, "That’s when you left?"
"Yeah," he said, again. I nodded.
I didn’t know it then, but these were my first steps in truly understanding the impact the Somali civil war had on me. We had escaped the same war, but I was allowed to go in and out of the camp as a British citizen while the undocumented Somali asylum seeker walking beside me was trapped there.
I went to see my mum for lunch a few days after I returned from Calais. She smiled when she opened the door, and kissed me on both cheeks. She gave me a baati (a loose-fitted Somali dress often worn at home) to change into and I stood beside her, watching as she cooked an entire feast for me.
When I told her how often I was mistaken for a resident in the refugee camp in Calais, she laughed. My mum told me she wasn’t surprised because I dressed like an impoverished refugee. "You look like you bought your clothes from Poundland," she said and shook her head.
I pushed on and told her what I had seen in the camp. I told her about the lack of running water, the mud that clung onto everything and the rats that scuttled past.
'How we suffered!'
"Why did you go? Isn’t it bad enough that we suffered through Kakuma?" she asked. She said it in the most casual tone, as if she was recounting a holiday we’d been on. I said the word. Kakuma. It felt both foreign and all too familiar in my mouth. "You would never believe how we lived in Kakuma. How we suffered!"
I tried to get her to slow down, but my mum went on like she was in her own world as she told of the unbearable heat, and reminisced about the friends we had. I tried wading through the memories of my childhood and was surprised at the internal resistance I met.
"Have you really forgotten?" Mama asked me. Her eyes were wide as she stared. Had I?
A year before that meal, my parents had told me snippets of their extraordinary story of fleeing Somalia. Until then, I only knew that we claimed asylum in the UK when I was seven because of the civil war. I had known that we were refugees and I grew up disliking that fact. I knew my mum and I had lived in Kenya and then in Saudi Arabia but the details were blurry. They faded as I grew up in this country and I felt no need to hold onto them.
I didn’t know that I had lived in a refugee camp similar to the one in Calais. Or I had known, and I simply forgot. How does someone do that?
Silenced by survivor's guilt
A refugee rights campaigner, who arrived in the UK via the Kindertransport rescue effort, once told me, "I find my refugee start still drives my life today. It’s not just something that happened in the past. I’m still struggling to lead a life that was worth saving."
My survivor’s guilt had silenced me for years. Sometimes, often in the dead of night, I wonder why I survived and so many other refugee children died. And so many continue to die. I wonder why I got to resettle while so many refugees live entire lifetimes in camps that are meant to be temporary. Why do I have a passport in my pocket, while a young man escaping the same war does not?
I can’t answer these questions. I don't think I’ll ever be able to. I can, however, not let that guilt prevent me from responding to one of mankind’s most basic urges: the need to tell stories.
This is an edited extract from Scattered: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee by Aamna Mohdin (Bloomsbury Circus) which is available in hardback for £18.99 and ebook for £13.29.
Learn more about Qasr Al Hosn
In 2013, The National's History Project went beyond the walls to see what life was like living in Abu Dhabi's fabled fort:
SPEC%20SHEET%3A%20NOTHING%20PHONE%20(2A)
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The specs: 2018 Maxus T60
Price, base / as tested: Dh48,000
Engine: 2.4-litre four-cylinder
Power: 136hp @ 1,600rpm
Torque: 360Nm @ 1,600 rpm
Transmission: Five-speed manual
Fuel consumption, combined: 9.1L / 100km
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Almnssa
Started: August 2020
Founder: Areej Selmi
Based: Gaza
Sectors: Internet, e-commerce
Investments: Grants/private funding
The biog
Family: He is the youngest of five brothers, of whom two are dentists.
Celebrities he worked on: Fabio Canavaro, Lojain Omran, RedOne, Saber Al Rabai.
Where he works: Liberty Dental Clinic
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
ELIO
Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Brad Garrett
Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina
Rating: 4/5
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
TO A LAND UNKNOWN
Director: Mahdi Fleifel
Starring: Mahmoud Bakri, Aram Sabbah, Mohammad Alsurafa
Rating: 4.5/5
Dunbar
Edward St Aubyn
Hogarth
The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
2025 Fifa Club World Cup groups
Group A: Palmeiras, Porto, Al Ahly, Inter Miami.
Group B: Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Botafogo, Seattle.
Group C: Bayern Munich, Auckland City, Boca Juniors, Benfica.
Group D: Flamengo, ES Tunis, Chelsea, Leon.
Group E: River Plate, Urawa, Monterrey, Inter Milan.
Group F: Fluminense, Borussia Dortmund, Ulsan, Mamelodi Sundowns.
Group G: Manchester City, Wydad, Al Ain, Juventus.
Group H: Real Madrid, Al Hilal, Pachuca, Salzburg.
WOMAN AND CHILD
Director: Saeed Roustaee
Starring: Parinaz Izadyar, Payman Maadi
Rating: 4/5
How to watch Ireland v Pakistan in UAE
When: The one-off Test starts on Friday, May 11
What time: Each day’s play is scheduled to start at 2pm UAE time.
TV: The match will be broadcast on OSN Sports Cricket HD. Subscribers to the channel can also stream the action live on OSN Play.
SPAIN SQUAD
Goalkeepers Simon (Athletic Bilbao), De Gea (Manchester United), Sanchez (Brighton)
Defenders Gaya (Valencia), Alba (Barcelona), P Torres (Villarreal), Laporte (Manchester City), Garcia (Manchester City), D Llorente (Leeds), Azpilicueta (Chelsea)
Midfielders Busquets (Barcelona), Rodri (Manchester City), Pedri (Barcelona), Thiago (Liverpool), Koke (Atletico Madrid), Ruiz (Napoli), M Llorente (Atletico Madrid)
Forwards: Olmo (RB Leipzig), Oyarzabal (Real Sociedad), Morata (Juventus), Moreno (Villarreal), F Torres (Manchester City), Traore (Wolves), Sarabia (PSG)
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Paltan
Producer: JP Films, Zee Studios
Director: JP Dutta
Cast: Jackie Shroff, Sonu Sood, Arjun Rampal, Siddhanth Kapoor, Luv Sinha and Harshvardhan Rane
Rating: 2/5
The specs
Engine: 2.7-litre 4-cylinder Turbomax
Power: 310hp
Torque: 583Nm
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Price: From Dh192,500
On sale: Now
Directed: Smeep Kang
Produced: Soham Rockstar Entertainment; SKE Production
Cast: Rishi Kapoor, Jimmy Sheirgill, Sunny Singh, Omkar Kapoor, Rajesh Sharma
Rating: Two out of five stars
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Result
2.15pm: Maiden Dh75,000 1,950m; Winner: Majestic Thunder, Tadhg O’Shea (jockey), Satish Seemar (trainer).
2.45pm: Handicap Dh80,000 1,800m; Winner: Tailor’s Row, Royston Ffrench, Salem bin Ghadayer.
3.15pm: Handicap Dh85,000 1,600m; Winner: Native Appeal, Adam McLean, Doug Watson.
3.45pm: Handicap Dh115,000 1,950m; Winner: Conclusion, Antonio Fresu, Musabah Al Muhairi.
4.15pm: Handicap Dh100,000 1,400m; Winner: Pilgrim’s Treasure, Tadhg O’Shea, Satish Seemar.
4.45pm: Maiden Dh75,000 1,400m; Winner: Sanad Libya, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar.
5.15pm: Handicap Dh90,000 1,000m; Winner: Midlander, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar
