In awe.

Wednesday 17 January: Extraordinary and humbling day scribing at a collaboration meeting between Moroccan UNHCR and local "agents communautaires": community members working as volunteers 20 plus hours a week with some of Moroccos 4,800 refugees and asylum seekers across the country, providing support on health, welfare, transport, documentation, asylum, housing and all the rest; a meeting between community organisation staff, volunteers and UNHCR -who has no hope of tackling this without them - carried out with care and respect and attention to every detailed issue raised in two languages (every word translated backwards and forwards between Arabic and French by one of the many bilingual people in the room); ordinary people giving three days or more a week to help those in dire straits coming to their country from multiple countries to the east and the south. Ordinary, not wealthy, young and middle aged, multilingual, compassionate, frustrated, hard working, practically minded, this-is-the-situation-and-we'll-just-get-on-and-deal-with-it people. A feeling of shame at my embarrassing government and deep honour for ordinary people in Morocco and at home, awe at this country's civic ethic and disbelief at the barbaric mess that is European asylum policy, incandescent outrage that *both* my kids are so moved by the hell that is Calais that they're both there right now and a fierce and unshakable hope that as we see this disaster spiral into a cauldron of inhumanity with all the other planetaryl demons we face, we become ever more determined to wrest back control of this complicated but spectacular global Community of Us All from the soul-dead elite that are fucking it up and turn it into what it was always meant to be: a safe and dignified home for us all.