The Crossing True North

On the night that I ended up in Lesbos there was no-one around

and it was like a barren seaside sort of a place.

It was dark, a sort of dark sea.

It was quite windy.

And someone said, "Look, don't go down there tonight

"cos the weather's too bad."

But I was only there about 20 minutes and the first boat

that I ever seen came in.

We were on the beach

and I could see this light flashing. Flashing, flashing.

And the sea was really bad.

It rose up and you could hear the sound.

When it rose up, you could hear the sound and then it dipped down.

SCREAMING

The cries of these people, it was horrible.

Babies screaming and all the rest, and the women were screaming.

I'll never forget that sound as long as I live.

So we kind of formed a human chain

and I was standing there and was pulling people.

Some people were trying to grab their own bags.

And there was this one guy and he kept trailing this bag.

I was going, "Leave the bag, leave the bag, just come on, come on!"

So he managed to grab the bag about the third time.

And he trailed it and he gripped it up into

his chest, you know, and...

HE COUGHS

But it was a wee baby.

It wasn't a bag. It was a wee baby and...

The baby was alive, thank God.

BABY CRIES

At that moment I realised, like,

you know, these guys are risking everything - everything -

for a better life, you know.

-So take it easy on these guys, like.

-HE LAUGHS

They've been through a lot, you know.

And that was my first boat.

It sort of woke me up.

Show these people compassion, you know, cos they have...

they have been through so much, you know.

# Bel

# Belfast

# How I know you so well

# You're like heaven

# You're like hell. #

In the winter of 2015,

the musician Joby Fox is deeply moved by the media images of

the refugee and migrant crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean.

Eat the leg of a scabby donkey, I would.

Unable to shake off the images of suffering,

Joby feels compelled to offer what help he can.

He leaves his wife and young son at home and flies to the Greek island

-of Lesbos.

-The real shocking thing is that the EU is such a big entity

in the world and yet they can't seem to

apply themselves to this situation.

I mean, there's me and there's others, as I say,

who are quite happy to do that, cos we're saving lives

and...

But where is the EU?

Where is the UN?

Where are all these agencies that are there with millions getting

pumped into them to do this very thing?

THEY CALL

Once you're exposed to something like that,

you feel a responsibility to these human beings,

and ultimately that's what it is, that's what the responsibility is.

I'm a human being, they're human beings, they need me.

BABY CRIES

I know what it feels like

for a parent to lose a child.

I lost my daughter to cancer.

And when I watched what I watched and I seen

children dying and drowning in the sea...

Children never asked for this, you know,

so that's my motivation.

Simple.

Joby feels he has to do more than just be a short-term volunteer.

But I talked to a lot of people,

I said, "Why are we standing on the beaches here,

"why are we not out there where the crisis actually is,

"which is out in the sea, when there's people drowning in the sea?

I've seen what I've seen, I know what I know,

and I took this initiative to campaign for a boat.

OK, we're here at Skala,

which is a 10km stretch of beach here,

which is facing out onto Turkey.

This is a calm boat, believe it or not.

I saw on Facebook that he went to Greece.

I texted him, actually, and he phoned me up and said, erm,

hadn't spoken to him in about ten years and he said,

"You're coming," basically.

Jude Bennett, an art curator, is a former colleague of Joby.

He may have the vision, but he knows he needs someone like Jude with

project management experience.

Did you get in all right kid? You all right?

I'm in solidarity. When I went out there,

at first I just thought I was going out there to volunteer for

-two weeks, but then when we saw...

-SHOUTING

It was seeing that I could help,

just putting your arm out and literally helping somebody out

of the water.

People are drowning just metres off the shore and that just seems like,

that just should not be happening.

So literally us sort of going in,

swimming out to the boat and guiding them in and helping them off,

as simple as that, was saving lives.

I just had to stay and do something, so I, like a lot of people,

you know, extended my stay.

Sort of said to work, "Not coming back for a while."

Desperate to save lives, Joby works hard to publicise the charity.

What an incredible thing that you're doing, Joby.

I want to spend more time with you,

on air, so that people realise what you're doing,

cos it's just incredible and it's selfless.

That's superb.

Jude's contacts in the arts world pay off unexpectedly quickly

with an offer of help from a famous artist,

who wants to remain anonymous.

He said, "Well, what is this you are working on now?"

And I said, "Well..."

"..we're working on getting a boat

"and a skilled crew for a rescue team."

And he said, "Well, maybe that's something I can help you with now."

So I just got off the phone there and we got a boat!

Oh, what am I going to do now?

Does anybody know how to drive a boat?

Yeah!

-VOICEOVER:

-The whole project just took a whole leap forward.

We're all doomed!

It's all right, it's got a stripy top and a hat.

But never in our imagination did we think that we would have someone

just give us £35,000 off the bat.

Jesus, that's great, that is just such great work, Jude.

That's amazing. It really is absolutely incredible.

It was really quick. We got the offer of the boat and got the boat

out there within two weeks.

But getting the boat is only the first step.

It was like starting a business or something and

trying to get volunteers.

We need crew that were skilled search and rescue on the boat.

And now onto the thorny issue of...

..of insurance.

-Can I ask who's calling?

-Yes, it's Joby Fox from Refugee Rescue.

Right, one moment.

Good morning, how may I help you today?

We have a rib which will be involved in rescue.

Not something that we've ever been involved with before.

That's no problem, thanks a lot.

Two months ago I certainly didn't see myself doing this.

I'm just getting deeper and deeper and deeper into it.

The bureaucracy,

this is where you have to grit your teeth and just get on with things

and remember what it is you're trying to do.

Would you be able to advise me as to who would do such?

I mean, it's European.

-HE LAUGHS

-Insurance companies!

Nobs. They're so hard to deal with.

-Got it.

-Great stuff.

It takes days of phone bashing but Joby finally gets insurance.

-..see what we can do for you.

-All right, thanks a lot, man,

-I hope to speak to you soon.

-Nice to talk to you.

-Tickety-boo. Bye now.

-Cheers.

-Bye-bye-bye.

-Bye.

In just a matter of weeks, they're operational.

They name their boat Mo Chara, "my friend".

HE CHUCKLES

Such an incredible feeling.

It's...

the moment of truth, as they say.

Wa-hey!

Two lifeguards from Devon,

Richie Heard and Ben Jarvis, are joined by Rathlin Island ferry

skipper Michael Cecil.

Mo Chara has her first volunteer crew.

Yahoo!

We're on the emergency frequency

and we're available for any eventuality.

Now, as an independent, new rescue initiative,

we are out there beside all the other rescue teams from around

the world, who obviously existed.

Swimmers back in.

Swimmers happy.

We're, from an organisation point of view, having to work doubly hard to

establish ourselves as a professional rescue team.

-Are you going to give me a rattle with this?

-Of course, aye.

-Pfft!

Good man. Right.

-Erm...

-Are you serious?

-..just very easy on the steering.

-Right.

-Because it'll throw people in.

-Ah.

You just put it forward, yeah?

Yeah. All you have now is a steering wheel and an accelerator.

-OK.

-Main priority...

-Don't hit land!

-Watch where you're going!

-Lads, God, that's brilliant.

Thanks, Michael.

Congratulations, skipper.

Thanks, mate.

Wow.

The refugees' journey into the European Union may be just

a few miles, but this has become one of the deadliest stretches of water

in the world

and the pressure is on Jude and Joby to keep the funds coming.

-JUDE:

-We can't sustain past the end of this month, which is two weeks

away, with the funds that we have.

Main cost is the fuel,

-it being 60 euro an hour.

-Moving to the bow.

The idea of the boat being there and not being able to be out is

absolutely heartbreaking, just for me, it's just not an option.

So we have to raise the money.

Do you want to do a quick man overboard?

Surprise me.

Man overboard!

At night-time, unfortunately, the refugee boats will head for the

lighthouse cos it's the only light they can see on the coast.

It's the worst place they can go to.

If you look around, the landscape, it's very,

very similar to what we find out in Greece and the Greek islands.

The distance here is very similar to Lesbos to Turkey.

It's about six and a half miles from harbour to harbour

and it's probably

what inspired me to go in the first place.

This morning we had 71 people onboard this boat,

and I think it was quite a large two-storey ferry.

But out in Greece we will have the same numbers on a very small

30-foot rubber boat with a rubber floor,

so you can imagine packing all these people into such a small space.

60 people in the water would be a major, major emergency in the UK.

You know, every helicopter that was available would be sent out,

all the lifeboats would be sent out

and it would be headline news

all around the world for days and days.

But it's just a daily occurrence in Greece.

It's quite intense, quite dramatic.

You're trying to keep everybody safe,

your adrenaline's quite high yourself

and everything happens very, very quickly so it's always trying to

tell yourself to keep calm and keep everything else calm,

keep everybody around you calm.

It's inherently dangerous to go to sea on a rubber boat if nobody knows

you're going and you don't have any equipment, you know, it's very,

very easy for something to go wrong and it can happen within 100 yards

of a shoreline, which is why we're here.

We're going to go alongside.

There can be elderly people or children or injured people that end

up in the water, there's young kids that are hungry and cold.

It becomes, you know, a living hell on those boats,

on those rubber boats.

Mo Chara searches the coast for refugees dumped in the sea

by traffickers overnight and left to swim to shore.

They come across an entire family on isolated rocks.

We got in close, Richie swam ashore to see what condition they were in.

Richie communicated with them as best he could.

Do you speak English?

-INAUDIBLE SPEECH

-OK.

They were quite shaken up from their experience,

they'd been dropped in the sea and had made their own way ashore and

were trying to get dry and warm.

-It's OK.

-BABY CRIES

-It's OK.

-It's always tricky, things can always go wrong,

people can slip and get hurt or get injured.

-Ooh! Ah.

-It's OK, it's OK.

-Yeah.

-Go, go, go.

Upty.

-BABY CRIES

-Three.

-I've got it.

-OK.

-We have it.

It's hard to imagine how traumatic and how bad things must've been

for a father or mother to put their children in a boat

and take them across.

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

-It's OK. You're going to be fine.

-SHE SOBS

It shows that there must be something driving

them forward, making them do that, you know,

things must be so bad where they are that they really have to,

they've no choice, they have to get out of there.

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

My pleasure. My pleasure.

This is what they call the life jacket cemetery,

and it's just a big pile of life jackets,

nothing else.

Hundreds of thousands of them.

Each one of these represents a person, doesn't it, really?

That's a new one.

When I saw that, I thought maybe that was a real one,

-but it's not, is it?

-Nope.

It's the same...

parcel packaging as all the rest, eh?

I honestly don't think you would find a real one here.

On Lesbos, the number of refugees and migrants are growing.

Very few are being allowed to travel on,

many fear they'll be deported out of the EU and back to Turkey.

When I first came here, just as an ordinary volunteer, it was easy,

it was simple.

But, you know, since those days,

it's moved on to almost like more sort of a corporate level.

EU pressure is now forcing Turkey to shut down the smuggling routes.

Joby's team aren't having an easy ride with the Greek coastguard,

a military force whose primary role is border security,

rather than life-saving.

Ultimately that's risking lives,

this kind of power struggle which we don't really care about so, yeah,

we're at a stage where we're very frustrated.

It's always a possibility that the Greek authorities or maybe European

authorities are trying to make this crossing

a little bit more difficult, little bit more dangerous

in the hope that it puts people off attempting it in the first place.

If there's no welcome here, if there's no rescue resources here,

then people might be reluctant to cross.

-THEY CHANT

-Refugees are welcome here!

Once you open the door, it's the Pandora's box, really.

Now I can see the raw, naked side of

Fortress Europe.

I'm on the phone to like Human Rights Watch, you know,

different lawyers,

asking about what is going on here, trying to understand, you know,

what is breaking the law and to try and protect the crew but also trying

to protect the refugees.

Most are prisoners in a detention centre,

others are in unofficial satellite campus.

This one is threatened with closure.

This is Ireland and Pakistan international, is it?

-Oh!

-INAUDIBLE

These people, they're no different from us.

How would you like it, you know,

having to leave your home and your family and everything else?

What can people not understand about that?

It's so fucking easy just to flick off the TV and shut the door

and forget about it all.

I'm not here to do politics, if you know what I mean?

So, I'm trying to help fellow human beings, get them into safe ground,

get them dressed, get them dried, get them looked after and then

they can fucking politic all they want after that, you know, as long as the people are safe.

The sea, look, it can be so beautiful.

At the same time it can be so...

..violent at the same time.

Much like human beings.

Much like human beings.

Hellenic Coast Guard, Hellenic Coast Guard, this is Mo Chara.

We have found a body.

Hellenic Coast Guard, Hellenic Coast Guard,

this is Mo Chara, we have found a body.

When we were alerted there was bodies in the water,

they were probably in the water for about 12 hours.

Hellenic Coast Guard, Hellenic Coast Guard, this is Mo Chara,

we have a body, over.

The crew arrives too late.

15 refugees drowned in this incident.

Just two were saved.

If we were allowed out on exercise and being in the area

quite freely, then we most likely would've come across them earlier.

Yeah. Contact.

The coastguard actually said,

"We promise we will get in contact with you if something big happens,"

you know. No, they won't. They didn't.

What does it take for the coastguard to actually contact us?

The pressure is taking an emotional and a physical toll on everyone.

You know, it takes a lot of energy,

it takes a lot of energy to keep the whole thing going.

It sort of wears you out sometimes.

The pressure's been immense. It's affected my health,

and the same with Jude, she's been challenged.

I thought I was sort of dealing with it OK, but being on the ground,

it totally drained me, to the point where I actually collapsed.

Because you sort of don't think,

"Well, I'm not in trauma," because these people are the ones in trauma

but you're seeing stuff that people are going through that they really

shouldn't have to be going through and then it became the norm, like,

the boats coming in and, you know, helping people, you know,

I'm going out and having a coffee or something and then boats are coming

in, I'm running in in my jeans and helping babies out and bringing them

into the camp and that became the norm and, like...

you know, it's not normal.

The threatened camp closure goes ahead.

Deportations are starting,

the main detention centre built for hundreds but holding thousands is at breaking point.

-NEWS READER:

-The divide over the migration crisis is deepening within the EU.

Thousands of refugees are arriving every week. They are making...

More than 60,000 asylum seekers remain stranded in Greek camps.

The frustration comes from

seeing what happens on the ground,

what is actually happening in reality, and then what people are

being told on the news.

There's just so many horrible things being done.

People forget real quick, you know, how bad it's been for these people.

It's fucking awful for these people.

THEY CHANT

HE SHOUTS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Christianity, goodwill, whatever you want to call it,

where the fuck is it? Where the fuck is that?

At least 50 people have been arrested after violence erupted

at a migrant camp.

On top of all of this,

the coastguard demands 24 hours notice before Mo Chara goes to sea.

We're here to do a job and it's extremely frustrating.

We've explained at lengths to them we're only here to help.

We've reached a point now where we're pushing back now because

compliance hasn't worked, trying to communicate, it hasn't worked.

We've fought off an absolute bureaucratic assault on our organisation,

here, there and everywhere,

and they've tried to curtail us as much as they possibly could,

and try and control us, and we've fought them tooth and nail.

People like me have to come along and serve up to these people,

these big, world, over-bloated humanitarian organisations,

so-called humanitarian organisations.

They do great work, so you can't criticise them when they get it wrong.

Well, they got it fucking wrong here and people need to fucking know about that.

They got it spectacularly wrong and the price that was paid were fucking lives out on that sea.

Night-time crossings are increasing and it's more dangerous than ever.

The death rate is now double what it was in 2015 and 2016.

People migrating is as old as time.

People are so desperate they're going to keep coming,

and they're going to keep coming by sea, so whether we're in Lesbos

or if we're out in the Mediterranean, I feel like that's

why I want to stabilise the organisation now because it's...

it's bigger than us.

We keep coming back, as do all the volunteers.

It gets into your psyche,

you go home and basically wait for the next opportunity that you have

to get back out here again.

Something moved in me.

I don't know, people may call it God, people, whatever they call it,

I know that something moved in me and it brought me to this path.

But if I'm on my deathbed, this'll be something that I'll...

..give myself a wee pat on the back for.

I'll have a wee wry smile.

I think it's nice to be on the right side of history.

Something I'm probably privileged to have gone through.

In the beginning it was haphazard, to say the least,

but we did the job, you know, saved lives.

I'm proud of that, too.

You need people like me, frankly, to come along,

and like Jude and Michael and the rest of us...

..and say, "Fuck that, no."

"We're not having it."