At Hastings, far from the government’s firmness of Boris Johnson, an association collects funds and equipment. Here, lost canoes are now swinging almost every week.
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The sea is gray, spread, almost empty. At one of the ends of the Hastings (United Kingdom) pebble beach, in the Sussex, the Sea Rescue Hangar (the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, RNLI) is closed, its boat is not at pier . It is 15 hours, it’s already dark, the air is frozen. A few hours earlier, Wednesday, November 24, about twenty kilometers further east, twenty-seven people (including seven women and three children), drowned off Calais (Pas-de-Calais) while trying to Join the coasts of Kent. They probably aimed at Douvre or the tip of Dungeness, a little closer to the French odds, like most small boats starting from Dunkirk (North) or Calais.
“The Hastings Sea Rescue Boat was exiting today, that of Dungeness too, they attended two boats but did not brought them back here,” says Jane Grimshaw, Hastings Refugees Supports. This cinema costume receives, close to the beach, in the offices of his colleague Rachel Lowden, a specialist therapist of autism, which co-founded the association with it. The news of the drama has just fallen, the two women share their sadness: “This road borrowed by huge ships is so dangerous, it is afraid that there have been more disappearances in recent months than those officially postponed [ten before the drama of Wednesday]. “
Since London, the Prii Patel Minister of the Interior pushes to the adoption of the Parliament of a reform of the asylum authorizing the United Kingdom to carry out pushbacks – the referral of the boats by the coastal guards towards French waters -, to try to “regain control” borders promised by the Brexiter government of Boris Johnson. But in the Kent, citizen communities refuse this hostile environment to migrants and attempt, with the means of the edge (donations, call for volunteering), to help people now arriving daily on their beaches.
Hastings Refugees Supports was created in 2015 “In response to what was happening in the Jungle of Calais and all these Syrians who flee the war,” says Jane Grimshaw. The association organizes fundraising and equipment, which it sends in France. But last summer, the migratory crisis took a much more tangible turn for the two women. Rachel Lowden tells: “It was August 21, I was on a beach east of Hastings for a barbecue with my daughter, he had to be noon. There was a helicopter in the sky. On the beach, Someone with binoculars tells us: “It looks like migrants!” I saw a flat boat and dozens of people on it. I am: what can we do to welcome them? “
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