A much older female volunteer walks past and he says hello to her, and puts his arm on her back to support her as she goes into one of the huts. He jogs back and gets straight to the point, “We are human,” he says, looking me in the eye. “We must work together with one hand. And forget racism. I want to study, I want to get a job, to get married, to have a baby, to get a life. A simple life; I don’t need more.” I thank Faris for talking to me and when we hug goodbye he says to my friend and I: “You’re my sisters and I’m your brother.” If it sounds forced, it wasn’t.You’ve probably read about the horrors of the “forgotten” Dunkirk camp – home to about two thousand people and a 30 minute drive from the Calais ‘jungle’. Conditions there have improved recently; sinking tents (watch this Guardian video for proof) have been replaced with small wooden huts, where either families live, or, more commonly, four guys sleep in a row on the floor. There’s no such luxury as a pillow but at least it’s dry. Where before, refugees had to make do with baby wipes to wash – living in six inches of mud – now there are showers, but they double up as toilets. This, we are assured, is paradise compared to the last camp.The new camp has only been operational for one week at the time of writing, so things are changing all the time. During my days volunteering, for instance, we work on sawing materials to insulate the huts so that the residents aren’t so cold at night.While doing this job, I meet 28-year-old Muhammad. In his former life he was a baker and made bread for his family business in Kurdistan. His English is pretty good, and I speak the tiny amount of Arabic I know from my dad. Arabic is Muhammad’s third language, English is his fourth.After a few hours working together, Muhammad rolls me a cigarette, laughs at me because I can’t roll, and we sit down and smoke a bit. He goes into his hut and makes me some tea so we drink that too. He shows me pictures of his little sister on his phone, a beautiful nine-year-old girl, who he hasn’t been able to get in touch with for five months, since he fled Kurdistan. He says he’s worried sick about his sister and his mother, “Daesh [ISIS] killed my father”, he tells me. “So I’m here alone. My plan was to get to the UK and then somehow get my mother and sister here too. I’m hoping to go to England tomorrow in a freezer truck. But it’s so cold.”The refrigerated trucks are the only way people can get across from France to England now, because the government have built a new high-tech feature at the ferry crossing in Calais that detects heartbeats in trucks. It can’t detect refrigerated trucks, though. The thought of this sweet guy I’ve spent the last six hours working with freezing in a truck tomorrow night scares me, and I can’t stop thinking about it as we continue to work, listening to 50 cent and Drake on my phone because he loves them.