volunteering with the Refugee Community Kitchen, Calais
Food prep at the Refugee Community Kitchen
We recently spent five weeks at the Refugee Community Kitchen (RCK) in Calais, an organisation which prepares and distributes hot food to people on the move in and around Calais.
While we were there (February and March 2025), around 600 to over 1000 meals were being prepared daily for people in Calais and Dunkirk. Since December 2016, over two million meals have been served.
Working in the kitchen involves a wide range of tasks, including vegetable chopping, washing up, spice blending, cleaning, serving food, and if you’re there long enough to be trained to do it, cooking vast quantities of food.
Meals normally consist of a carb, often rice, a vegetable curry, a salad, and bread, if available. The atmosphere in the kitchen was generally quite lively - around 15 to 25 people (while we were there) all working towards a common goal: making sure hot food is ready to be distributed at midday and again in the afternoon.
Calais in winter is an eerie place, with imposing fences, walls and barbed wire enclosing the port town, which has the feeling that it is trying to cling on to some distant status as a beach resort.
It’s overwhelmingly cold - that is one of the first things you notice. It’s not far from the mild winters of the white cliffs of Dover - for those of us with certain passports at least - and yet the wind whips off the channel in icy gusts. Large restaurants, designed to seat many tourists, sit empty with only a few bars, and one particularly delicious chip shop right on the beach, reliably busy. But one of the weirdest things about Calais centre is that you could spend several days there and have no idea of the vast number of displaced people living in the UK-France border zone.
We worked in the kitchen five days a week and took our weekends (while the kitchen was closed) to explore the local area and coastline. It is large and mostly flat, with some impressive cliffs near Sangatte from which you can spot the white cliffs on a clear day. In some ways it’s easy to forget the humanitarian crisis that is happening on your doorstep, until you see patrolling army personnel, wearing full camo and carrying large guns and binoculars, marching past.
Life as a volunteer at the Calais Refugee Community Kitchen
One particularly haunting reminder of our presence at a hostile border was when a group of us - friends we made while chopping veg in the kitchen - sat down for a picnic in a beautiful pebbled cove. The sun was shining on the glittering sea and everything felt magical, until one person spotted the torn black plastic of an abandoned dinghy on the rocks not far from where we sat. A stark reminder that our border is taking lives.
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To find out more about volunteering in Calais, or to donate to one of the many amazing organisations working there, head to https://refugeecommunitykitchen.org or https://www.calaisappeal.org.
Martha and Dora