As I got closer, I realised that all their clothes were wet. Not just caught-in-the-rain wet, they looked as if they’d been completely soaked from head to foot. When I asked what had happened to them, they explained there had been “a problem with the boat” and made plunging signs with their hands. I understood; they had experienced something that has become all too common here in the last few weeks.

They had decided to risk their lives crossing the Channel, but their boat had sunk just off the French shore and they had been rescued. As they own only the clothes they stand up in, they had had to get as dry as they could and then spend the day waiting for the damp to leave them – not easy in the autumn in Northern France.

Some 970 refugees have been reported rescued in the seas off the French coast this month. It’s easy to see that as just a statistic, but that’s almost 1000 people who risked their lives trying to find safety, who must have been terrified as they waited for their rescuers, and then who had to live with the memories afterwards. It’s horrific.

For us it means there are lots more people who are soaking wet at night needing dry clothing as a minimum – we make sure to look out for them to offer all the help we can. Of course that’s what we did for the men I met.

This situation is chilling when you think that we’re approaching the first anniversary of the worst-ever loss of life by refugees trying to cross; as many readers will remember, in November last year, 29 people died horrifically when their dinghy sank. The horrific truth is that nothing significant has been done to prevent it happening again.

This should be the real story when we talk about 30,000 refugees crossing the Channel; 30,000 lives being needlessly risked, and that risk increasing as the weather starts to worsen. It is the most important reason of all that we need to provide safe passage for refugees now.

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There was one family with a small boy and a lady who was just crying uncontrollably. She was obviously in shock, and kept saying how awful the crossing had been. I think she had a vitamin deficiency, and her little boy looked like he was in shock as well. I gave her a complete change of clothing, and by the time she had to leave, she said she was a lot better.

Working alongside our friends at Channel Rescue, we handed out packs with hats, gloves, sliders, socks and scarves. And oat bars – I deliberately got wrapped oat bars because it’s Ramadan and someone won’t necessarily want to eat straight away. Then we distributed water and blankets. The little kids loved the Easter eggs we gave them.

There was one lady who was diabetic. She was very unwell, and the others asked me if I had any chocolate, so I ran to a shop and got some Easter eggs! I gave her those, and then she was taken off the boat separately.

Watching the refugees when they got off the boat, you think about the journey they’ve been on – these guys today were on the boat for eight hours because they’d gone really far out. We try and make their arrival a little bit more pleasant considering what they’ve gone through, which is going to be hiding out for hours, hiding from police, in the freezing cold.

It’s difficult, because nobody explains what’s going to happen to them. So we explain the process. I tell them that they’re going to be searched, and have their things taken off them, and then they’ll have to get on the coach and go to the Kent intake unit.

The government is deliberately hostile to them, and they make their lives even harder. You’ve got amazing people that often have incredible skills that would be an absolute asset to the UK, who are treated appallingly.

After today’s horrible announcement about offshore processing, it felt extra-important to welcome these people to the UK. Anything that we can do to make the lives of people more bearable when they have already been through a really, really difficult time, is valuable – and now more than ever.

To make a donation to our welcoming work visit: www.peoplesfundraising.com/fundraising/c4c-emergency-response-team-dover&tag=

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So what I can do? I must go on.”

This is how Osama from Sudan described his life in Calais to me. I was sitting at Osama’s campfire after distribution one evening with some of his friends. They’d built the fire where they were living, in some scrub land in the hope the police wouldn’t come and destroy their tents.

He told me was the eldest of seven children. With the conflict in Sudan meaning they had no hope of escaping danger and poverty, the family had given him all the money they had to help him get to northern France. Even so, he had arrived here with only the clothes on his back, and is now getting by on the help that organisations like Care4Calais provide.

“You know, phone charging is the most important thing you do for us,” he said. Phones are vital to refugees. They’re the only way to stay in contact with home, and to check the weather, which is really important if they’re crossing by boat. They also need the GPS to make sure they’re going in the right direction, and then they may need to call the coast guard to be rescued.

Sometimes they have to walk a few hours to go to a phone charging point and then wait for their turn to charge the phone. At distributions, Care4Calais provides charging points – rows of sockets fixed to a board which is then plugged into a generator. Although the boards can charge dozens of phones at a time, there are always more people than sockets, and the generators only operate for a few hours a day.

Sometimes it can take a whole day just to get a phone charged. People often have to choose between a shower, a hot meal or charging. It also means they feel they lose a day as they can’t try to cross if they haven’t charged their phone. They wait so patiently and although they are disappointed when we leave there is never any trouble and the people collect their phones and wander off back to their bit of scrubland in the hope their tent is still there.

Many refugees lose their phones in evictions, and replacements are expensive to buy, but we try to provide as many as we can. We mainly rely on people in the UK donating their old phones to us, so if you have one please send it to us – we’ll make sure it finds a good home, and you’ll make a refugee very happy.

I hoped Osama’s phone got him to the UK all right. “I cannot be silly with this life,” he said as we ended our conversation. “I know either way to the UK is very dangerous, but what can I do? My family is praying for me.”

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As the weekend ended, somewhere on the coast of northern France, three Somalian refugees climbed into a small dinghy and set off to cross the English Channel.

Their boat was notably smaller than dinghies often seen being used to cross the channel, and was certainly not suitable for one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

The men will most likely have been aiming for the Kent coast, but the tides bore their tiny vessel far off course, out beyond the eastern tip of Kent. Around midday they would have been drifting on past the mouth of the Thames and on past Southend.

The fear they must have felt is unimaginable. Four thousand miles they had come looking for safety, across two continents, with unknown suffering along the way. And for want of a sensible way of asking the people of the United Kingdom for help, they had ended up here: lost and adrift in the cold North Sea in a tiny inflatable boat.

By mid-afternoon the little boat, now halfway across an 80-mile stretch of water between Harwich in Essex and Belgium, had begun to sink. Around 3 o clock they were spotted by the UK coastguards, who triggered the alarm, and three lifeboats, together with coastguard and Border Force vessels, sped out to them.

The boat was by partly under water, and only two men were left with it. The third was missing.

As Border Force took two recovered refugees back to shore, coastguards used boats, helicopter and plane, with lifeboats helping, to search into the evening and through the night for the missing man. It was hopeless; by 2pm Tuesday the search was called off, and the man presumed to have drowned. The two rescued men were, according to the Home Office, being processed within UK immigration rules.

These are the facts as we know them at this time.

That we can only refer to him as “the man” is part of the wider tragedy here. This was not an anonymous individual, but a son, a person with a mum and dad and family and friends. Yet it’s possibke that those friends and family will not know that he has been lost; they could be among many Somalians reading the reports online, and wondering if it is their son or brother or father or friend.

Shockingly, the Home Office’s statement on the accident came dangerously close to blaming the men themselves. There was no expression of sympathy for the man presumed to be lost, but thanks for “those who responded to this incident and who continue to work tirelessly to protect lives at sea whilst securing our border.”

Fine, but was it really necessary to mention protecting the border? It seems unlikely that two men in a sinking dinghy presented much of a threat.

The spokesperson added that the accident “was a reminder of the extreme dangers of crossing the Channel in small boats”, and said the Home Office “was determined to do everything we can to prevent people dying in the Channel.”

It has been pointed out many times by many organisations that if the Government wants to do something to prevent these dangerous crossings, they need only put in place a sensible, modern system whereby refugees can apply for asylum in the UK without risking their lives.

In the light of the second death of a refugee on the UK-French border in four days, the Government’s continuing refusal to implement such a system looks not only perverse, but almost malevolent.

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