It’s a summer night on a beach just east of Calais, and Abdulfatah Hamdallah, a 22-year-old from Sudan, and his friend are about to cross the English Channel. They enter the water, climb aboard, and push off.
Their inflatable raft is one metre long and 80 centimetres wide. They use garden shovels as oars.
It was the sort of thing they “perhaps found in a beach hut, and in which the two of them could barely kneel,” Mélissa, an activist in Calais, later said.
