Rn-day Schindler saved 2,000 kids people traffickers
of us walking using one phone screen ht. The route was along the cliffs. A y broke his leg. I had to carry him and my belongings. We had no water.” n Hungary, local mafia sold Ali a in ticket to Paris where he was ested and told to go to Calais.
At the Jungle he firstly noticed the
d and the smell of sewage. George arrived in Little Syria days later. Ali says of helping the unaccompanied kids: “Our Muslim faith tells us every one... is a shepherd, so I became a shepherd.”
George says: “No child had ever been granted safe passage, so it was hard to persuade them to wait, to show up to legal appointments, to not go with traffickers.” Ali tells me: “Killing someone in the Jungle is like you drinking water. I had many arguments until the first boys were offered safe passage. Then half the Jungle [said] ‘take my name’.”
George says: “Every child was hundreds of hours of legal work. It could be 10 weeks a child. Every day was dangerous for them in the Jungle. Every day Ali was in more danger, so were his family in Syria.” Then an Afghan boy, Masoud Naveed, 15, died trying to reach the UK by lorry.
George says: “He was number 30 on our list. He had a sister in London and was entitled to family reunion but after struggling for months in Calais, tried to make his own way.” The campaigners fought on, backed by visits from Lord Dubs and actor Jude Law. In January 2016, UK judges ruled kids in the camps with family in Britain should be brought to safety immediately. The court cases went on. “Within four months we had 80 children safe using the Dublin Agreement,” George says.
“Then came Alf ’s amendment which focused on children without family links.” In April, a second boy died under a lorry. Still the court cases continued.
“We were winning slowly, but Ali’s family were still in a warzone,” George says. “It broke my heart to think what we had been asking of him.” In October 2016, the Jungle was destroyed. Ali hid in a lorry, but it was going the wrong way. He says: “There was no air. I called [emergency services] and said ‘some of us can’t breathe, the driver is refusing to stop’. We were arrested. They said, ‘You have 24 hours to leave the country’.”
Ali made it here without the safe and legal route he helped give others. He is a refugee support worker in London where his children are at school or university.
Tearful George says he can sometimes only think of those who died. Ali says to think of the survivors.
He adds: “Kids from the camp still ring and tell me, ‘I’m getting married’, or something else important. I’m still the shepherd.”
Our faith tells us every one of us is a shepherd HERO ALI ON SAVING THE DESPERATE KIDS