Charity worker, 41 to wed refugee from the Jungle in his 20s
But I didn’t go there looking for love, she says
A BRITISH charity volunteer is to marry a younger Syrian refugee she met while handing out food parcels at the Jungle camp in Calais.
Sarah Gayton resigned from her fulltime job five days after meeting Hamoude Khalil, a law student who fled the besieged city of Aleppo.
The 41-year- old then returned to the squalid camp where she worked alongside the refugee.
Within a few months, the management consultant accepted Mr Khalil’s marriage proposal and returned to her £800,000 home in Chiswick, west London, to start planning the wedding. Her Syrian fiance, who is in his twenties, sneaked into Britain illegally on a lorry and has since been given leave to remain for five years.
Details of the relationship emerged just days after allegations surfaced about British women who were volunteering to work in the camp so they could have sex with migrants.
Some aid workers have slept with ‘multiple partners in one day’ and then contin-
‘We are two people that fell in love’
ued on ‘in the same vein the following day’, according to a volunteer. But Miss Gayton insists she was ‘definitely not looking for love’ when she crossed the Channel and says their relationship is genuine.
She accepts that some will be sceptical about a marriage between an English woman and a younger refugee seeking a new life in Britain.
‘You can always look at someone else’s life or relationship and make assumptions, but that’s pretty sad in my view,’ she said. The main charities in the camp have implemented a ‘zero tolerance policy’ regarding relationships with migrants because of alleged predatory behaviour among volunteers.
But according to Miss Gayton: ‘There was never anything said. Everybody saw us together happy, and there was not a concern about that at all.’
Mr Khalil, who dreams of becoming a police officer, said he fled Aleppo in 2014 after seeing two of his friends beheaded by Islamic State. He crossed the border into Turkey and paid smugglers £750 to ferry him across the Aegean Sea to Greece. From there, he travelled to northern France.
The refugee was working as a translator at the Jungle when Miss Gayton arrived last year.
They spent much of the next five days working in a warehouse run by the charities Help Refugees and L’Auberge des Migrants. And when Miss Gayton returned to Calais after quitting her job in London, the pair grew closer, Mr Khalil said.
He then took her aside and told her: ‘I know that in Europe it’s traditional to be together for five or six years as boyfriend and girlfriend but me, I don’t like this. I don’t need this to know my decision.’ Miss Gayton then suggested he should propose, which he did.
Speaking to The Sunday Times, she urged people not to be prejudiced by where she and Mr Khalil met. ‘We are two people that fell in love and remain that way,’ she added. ‘We could have met at work or in a pub, but we didn’t – we met in Calais.’