UT students drive to Calais to support refugees 'You have to see it to understand it'

The trip was organised as part of the programme's hands-on approach to humanitarian work. Humanitarian Engineering is a master's track at UT that trains students to work on complex problems in crisis and conflict settings not just technically, but in close collaboration with the people they are trying to help. The Calais trip was designed to bring that principle to life.

"There is a real difference between hearing about something, knowing about it, and actually feeling it," says Annik Riise, one of the students who made the journey. "Going there and experiencing it was impactful in a way I didn't expect."

Once in Calais, the group split up and rotated between two grassroots organisations. The Refugee Community Kitchen operates out of a large shared warehouse and prepares thousands of hot meals every day for people living in the camps. Annik worked in the kitchen and spent a considerable amount of time chopping firewood. "I was genuinely impressed by the scale of what they manage to do," she says. "It is a big operation, but it has a real warmth to it. It showed me how much you can organise when people are committed to something."

The other organisation, Care4Calais, focuses on distributing donated goods and running small community services: haircutting, English-language books, games, hot drinks. In the afternoon, the group visited a living site. Rows of tents and makeshift shelters where people are trying to get through the winter.

"You see the conditions people are living in," Annik says. "And you understand very quickly what it means to be resilient. These people face police raids sometimes every other day. You cannot really grasp that from a lecture."

What struck Annik almost as much as the conditions was how the organisations managed to run something this complex without it feeling cold or hierarchical. "There were solid protocols for whatever might happen," she explains, "but it never felt enforced. It felt safe. And I think that matters enormously when you are working with people who have already experienced a lot of systems failing them."

The students had been briefed not to ask too many personal questions nobody should have to relive trauma for the sake of a visitor's curiosity. Instead, interactions were kept light. At the Care4Calais board-game table, Annik sat down for a game of Connect 4 and lost. Then lost again. And again. "I didn't even know it was possible to lose that many times," she laughs. "These people have been through so much, and there they are, completely destroying me at Connect 4. It felt like sitting in a nice café with a lot of interesting people. Just vibing."

For Annik, the trip also crystallised why her degree programme works the way it does. Humanitarian Engineering at UT places a heavy emphasis on understanding what people actually need. "A lot of what we learn is about figuring out the actual need of the people you are trying to help," she says. "You have to be open-minded and really listen. These people have a completely different perspective than you. The trip brought that home in a way that a classroom simply cannot."