as she prepared for an afternoon lesson. “Most of them are very good people. They are welcoming and friendly. They want to improve their life and make it better, and learning is part of that.” The teachers and Zimarco are focused, now, on setting up a separate classroom to serve around 200 women and two dozen children. The women are outnumbered around ten to one by men in the Calais encampment and most feel uncomfortable attending classes with male students they don’t know, the volunteers say. When that is finished, the former hotel worker whose work getting the school off the ground is remembered in its unofficial name – everyone in the camp just calls it “Zimarco’s school” – has more dreams for making the camp a place to live, not just survive. He wants to set up a football team for migrants, he explains over an instant cappuccino in the immaculate tent he calls home, and even dreams of changing the camp name. He hates “the jungle” because he says it implies the residents aren’t people. “We have a discotheque, a house, a mosque, a school, shops,” he says. “We are not animals.”