HOME: there’s no place like it. And I don’t need no brainless straw-man’s company to click my pretty heels about that one.

As someone who has barely moved a mile from the place of her birth, home calls to me like a foghorn across a holiday resort. I come a-running, every time, with a knotted hankie for a knapsack. It’s not that I don’t love to travel – those tiny toiletries make even this gnome feel positively monolithic – but the away is always made so much more enjoyable by the prospect of home at the other end of the conjunction. These itchy feet are soothed by the green, green grass, and my lust for wander wouldn’t exactly set loins alight, so I guess it’s understandable that my pulse is forever quickened by the sugary sweetness of home.

For me though, home isn’t about location, although Caledonia does often call me – usually with a Glasgow dialling code. Of course, my familiar front door, and the knick-knacks behind its knocker, is where I prefer to lay my chapeau, but it wouldn’t really matter whether the lobby led to Whifflet or Wonderland, as long as the tea party beyond was populated by my own mad hatters.

Family, community, the ravens who share our writing desks: these are the chattels that ground us, no matter the soil underfoot. So it is that home can be a moveable feast, as portable as the friends who journey with us. While places can capture our hearts, it seems, it’s always the people that keep them.

And last week I packed up my own heart and made the journey to meet those for whom the sands of home are ever-shifting – and the incredible people trying to build them a little castle.

Care4Calais, based near Sangatte, is an organisation providing food, clothing, education and advice to those living in the Calais refugee camps. Founded last year by UK volunteers as a response to the growing crisis seen in France but felt across the world, Care4Calais now offers daily support to the thousands of refugees who are now forced to call the camps their homes. I joined one of the charity’s founders, Clare Moseley, at their depot to lend my labours to their crucial efforts.

Like many of the volunteers who have found their way out to Calais, Clare set off to deliver a car-load of donations to the camps, and just never really came back. Eight months later, she remains in the port city without a return date in mind, spending her days managing Care4Calais’s camp visits and her nights planning the next day’s distribution. As it stands, there’s no end in sight for the refugees’ troubles, which means that, even with binoculars, Clare wouldn’t be able to spot her own homecoming from this distance.

I approached the bright yellow gates of the Care4Calais warehouses with good intentions and great company. Never one to be restrained by the effects of a 14-hour journey and manual slog on arthritic joints, my wonderful mum had enlisted for the trip almost as soon as I devised its itinerary. My lovely piece of home and I had crawled early from our hostel beds to attend the usual morning briefing, but there was barely time to utter a hurried greeting to the other gathered volunteers, throw on a natty vest and find a space in the courtyard before our first task rolled up in a blaze of diesel fumes and tildes. A truck from Spain, packed so full of boxes you could practically taste the jam. Almost immediately the hive was an industry and – language barriers be damned – Irish, American, Syrian, English, Scottish and Spanish alike pulled together to pull that cargo apart. It was a baptism that singed my very soles but, after a mere hour and a half of bucket chains and pallet Jenga, a cheer rose into the blue sky and the group piled on to the lorry’s empty container for obligatory photos and celebratory chants.

It wasn’t long though before we were brought back down to earth, to start sorting through the donations and finally have that group briefing over a sly cup of tea. Soon we were split into groups: those taking provisions to the camps and those continuing with the sort. In spite of Clare’s caution that the camps are illegal and, therefore, both police protection and insurance payouts are non-starters, no-one refused either duty and, before I knew it, I was in a convoy, heading towards the jungle with a van full of blankets and goodwill. Turns out, goodwill doesn’t take up much van space.

There’s really no describing that first glimpse of the camps across the official cordon at its entrance – my vocabulary just doesn’t stretch to... erm, what’s that word again? I could mention the ramshackle huts extending across the landscape, the air of anticipation that never seems to settle, or the eyes, filled with question, that follow your own, but it wouldn’t be enough, because you can’t write what you don’t understand. Three trains, two taxis, a car share, two buses, a ferry and plenty of shoe-leather into my week and I was painfully aware that my weary limbs were among the least travelled of the jungle’s 5,000 current inhabitants’. As we trundled over the makeshift paths, between shacks and tents and, well, homes, what struck me most wasn’t the suffering – although impossible to ignore – it was the humour that is somehow still blooming where nothing but self-pity should take root. It’s in the hand-painted signs announcing the rudimentary shops as Tesco Metros, and in the attitudes of the young men who stop the van, imitating officers checking permits with smiles that belie their situation.

But, make no mistake, this incredible show of spirit exists despite the camp’s facilities, not because of them. As we opened the van’s doors and formed a human chain on either side to manage the queue, there was time enough to take in the conditions, to chat briefly with some of the refugees, and to wish there was more you could do than just hand out blankets. Wait, do I mean refugees or economic migrants? Politically, the distinction is important – the difference between legal protection and a shoogly peg – but when you’re standing there, accepting thanks for things that Maslow built a pyramid on, there’s no confusion.

These are people, plain and simple, with needs and wants, pride and humility, dreams and nightmares. No matter where any of us hail from, Sudan or Eritrea, Afghanistan or Syria, Scotland or England, we deserve respect, empathy and compassion, and during that brief time with Care4Calais, I saw the importance of these basic offerings at their very foundations.

By the time we reached the school, and had witnessed the inspirational work that volunteer teachers are doing with their constant stream of students, I was mentally spent. I had seen barely a fraction of the Jungle’s sprawl and already its existence was bearing heavy on my emotional scales. The flowers bursting out of their colourful pots, the books whose tales lighten young minds: the furnishings of any school in the midst of a burgeoning new society. Life, they say, will out. And even the Jungle won’t keep it in.

We returned to the warehouses, subdued and contemplative, but with renewed appreciation for the work we were to carry on there. Sorting shoes could have seemed menial, if not for the memory of the feet that they would soon protect.

Only a day later, I was home. Back where belonging is more than just a question of possession. And while hyperbole is normally both my bread and its chosen condiment, I need none to convey the emotion I felt right then: joy at reaching the end of my journey, guilt for the comfort I’d find there, and gratitude that there are people like Clare and her colleagues in the world who can make homes out of hardships.

You can donate to Care4Calais or enquire about volunteering on their website: care4calais.org.