Meet 'Mamie Charge', the Calais woman topping up migrants' batteries

Brigitte Lips speaks with migrants as they hand over their mobile phones for recharging at her house in Calais, northern France, on 10 November 2014.

For more than 20 years, Brigitte Lips has witnessed Europe's migration crisis from her home in Calais, on France's northern coast. Rather than shutting her door, she opened it to migrants seeking a safe place to recharge their mobile phones – an act that has earned her the nickname "Granny Charge".

"It started off as 'Mama', and now as the years have gone by, it's 'Mamie' (grandma)," Lips tells RFI.

Now a 68-year-old retiree, she has been helping migrants who come to Calais in the hope of crossing the English Channel for the past 24 years.

Living in a modest house opposite what was once part of "the Jungle", the informal camps that housed thousands of people at a time, Lips remembers that the crisis showed up literally on her doorstep.

"People would ring my doorbell asking for water. I said to myself, 'why me?' Well, because no one else on the street opened their door to give out tap water," she recalls.

"And then, as the months went by, other people started arriving with the little Nokia phones you used to get at the time, and I started charging these little Nokias in my house. And over the months, there came bigger telephones, batteries..."

Communication lifeline

Mobile phones are even more important for displaced people than most, those working on the ground point out.

"Everything requires a charged phone."

Lips sees the demand for herself. So many people come to her house to top up that she has created an informal charging station in her garage, with rows of numbered power sockets and a gamut of cables.


Read more on RFI English

Read also:
Rights group accuses French police of 'enforcing misery' on migrants in Calais
The Calais Jungle brings culture to the French capital
Mixed reactions to new Calais Jungle migrant housing