No shopping!

No shopping!

I was assigned to the clothes tent on Wednesday, and tried to put a brave face on it. All the jobs have to be shared, it’s only right. And when I grumbled to Heleen that I can’t tell a T-shirt from a pair of leggings, she said it was like a man saying he couldn’t boil an egg. So anyway, clothes tent. People who had been here in the summer explained that the area had been improved enormously. The men’s clothes are now separated from women and children’s, there is lighting: in short, we have a marvelously modernized facility.

The clothes tent for women and children is another plastic caravan like the food tent, with cardboard boxes against all the walls brimming with donated items. The woman who had taken the shift before us and who had been here over the summer, E, a formidably energetic drama graduate, had introduced a system of wall signs explaining what was where, and asked us to keep to them.

A group of women and children pressed around the entrance to the caravan, exactly like people inspecting a stall at the Monday morning market on Westerstraat in Amsterdam. Pantalons, pantalons! If people ask for trousers, the drill is to bend down and feel their legs, since we only give trousers to people who are wet above the knees. Almost everyone gets wet below the knees, since they clamber out of their boats into the water when they reach the beach. “It will dry!” we say with mimicry, pointing to the sun and fluffing out our own shirts.

Since the children’s clothes are a mix of all sizes from 116 to 164, and the shoes are jumbled and often unpaired, meeting each person’s needs is no easy matter. One person stands outside, trying to keep order and shouting needs to one or two people scurrying around among the boxes inside.

“Small boy completely wet!”

“Two underpants!”

“Pregnant lady needs larger trousers!”

(in an undertone) “Women’s period things!”

“Too big!”

“Too small!”

“Pink?? No, no shopping!”

One of our team goes around the camp and brings back items that people have collected from the clothes tent and then decided they didn’t want. We put them back in the boxes.

When people crowd in too much, we shout “Saaf wahed”, “saaf wahed”! which means “one line!” At one point we were getting mobbed a bit, and I called on the app for backup. A few minutes later, the camp manager arrived with one of the sturdy tables that a carpenter volunteer had made a couple of days ago. She placed it in front of the entrance to create a barrier.

First we marveled at the wonderful table, and tried to find a way of getting round it ourselves. Then we decided it didn’t really work, since even the person outside couldn’t easily reach the women to feel their trousers.

At some point E came back, having not gone home after her shift, and admonished us to keep to her signs and to hand over with the same instructions to the night shift. She was planning to completely overhaul the clothes tent with a neat shelving system, so that it would soon be everyone’s favourite job. (Later, when the night shift arrived and I explained about E’s planned shelving system, one woman shook her head and she said it was a terrible idea. “With clothes, shelves are bad” she pronounced flatly. “They must be folded all the time all the time all the time, boxes are much better.” I wonder how this dispute will be resolved.)

I found a nice pair of shoes for a lady, they looked quite new, and handed them over. But she was unhappy. What was the problem? Oh, two right shoes. Sorry! We laughed a bit, until I realized that some less alert person was now going around wearing two left shoes. Someone more experienced arrived and said “What are you doing? We don’t give shoes unless people have no shoes at all. The shoes will dry. Give dry socks, and plastic bags in between the socks and the shoes.” What plastic bags? Ah, that is why we always run out of plastic bags at the food tent.

I managed to find a nice warm coat for a very cold lady, and she strung together a lot of Arabic sentences, drawing a circle in the air around the clothes tent, then smiled at me so sweetly. I didn’t understand a word she said, but I understood completely that she was saying, “I am so grateful, you are all so kind!”