Paul Alauzy, outreach worker for Doctors of the World, walks down an underpass in Paris where teenagers who have migrated from West Africa survive. Credit: Photo by Kaia Sand
In Paris, France, a 17-year-old from Côte d’Ivoire held out an X-ray depicting his right shoulder from two angles. His doctor leaned forward, studying it while the teenager described the details of the injury. Behind them, posters promoted the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Over the past several weeks of the 2024 Olympic Games, many doctors similarly tended to sports injuries for global teenagers all around the city of Paris. This Olympics is renowned for hosting sports throughout the city — beach volleyball at the base of the Eiffel Tower, judo and wrestling at Champ de Mars, fencing at Grand Palais, dressage at the Palace of Versailles, swimming in the river Seine.
Mamadou (a pseudonym), the teenager, stood with his doctor near another famous site, the Pompidou Center. He was not competing in the Olympics. He was preparing to sleep in a tent placed on a slab of cardboard in a concrete walkway.
About 50 other boys and young men — mostly West African teenagers from Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and other former French colonies — spread out blankets on cardboard. Most slept on open blankets, and a few, in tents they set up atop cardboard like Mamadou. They lined them up perpendicular to concrete pilings, creating almost dorm-like structures in the warm summer air.
More boys and young men slept behind a cage-like structure in an underpass where the air was less fresh, but they were better hidden. Many were caught in a bureaucratic gap between declaring themselves unaccompanied minors or seeking asylum.
Meanwhile, they were all homeless.
Many wore Côte d’Ivoire national team soccer jerseys, NBA team shirts, track pants, runners, caps and headphones. The boys chatted with each other, kicking miniature soccer balls, teasing, fist-bumping, and also, cataloging maladies from sleeping on the streets.
Bertrand Chatelain, an 88-year-old physician with Médecins du Monde, or Doctors of the World, stood among the boys, attuned to how he could heal their rashes, fevers, asthma and injured bones and joints.
It was close to midnight, but it was one of the few times they didn’t have to disperse across the city. Each day, police roused them at 5 a.m., and they would pack up their belongings, Mamadou explained.
While Olympic athletes competed in trials to arrive in Paris, these young men endured startling levels of hardship.
For Mamadou, after migrating to North Africa to the edge of the Mediterranean sea, he changed his mind.
“My heart wasn’t peaceful when I saw the sea, so I refused to get in the boat,” he said.
The human smugglers, though, forced him, throwing him into the boat and smashing his shoulder, he said.
His shoulder severely swollen, he suffered through the three-day boat ride. He arrived on the Italian Island of Lampedusa, where he resided for four days.
Struggling with the Italian language because he was a French speaker, he made his way to Paris where he joined the encampment of other boys where I met him.
He’s been in Paris for eight months now, carrying his X-rays in a plastic bag neatly tied inside another plastic bag, surrounded by clothing. Many others pulled out medical records — a discharge sheet listing medications, an X-ray of lungs for a boy who had asthma.
While these boys — many without official documents — suffered the most brutal edges of national borders, borders are less permeable to Olympic athletes traveling from Africa, too.
“European visas have become increasingly difficult for Africans and Asians to obtain,” according to a report on the Olympics by the Institute for Security Studies. “Contestants and performers of African descent have had their nationalities and identities questioned, and France banned its athletes and officials from wearing hijabs.”
The rejection rate for Africans applying for visas to Schengen countries — a status for many European countries, including France — is 10% higher than the global average and “seven of the top 10 countries with the highest rejection rates (40%-47%) are African.”
While exceptions from Dominica and St. Lucia make tremendous stories, wealthy nations that can invest in athletics drive Olympic success on the medal stand. Case in point: because of its oil wealth, Norway has emerged as a new Olympic powerhouse.
The juxtaposition of Olympic teams and migrants who are homeless, both spread around Paris, tells two very different global stories.
I was able to go on a “maraude” — a French word for street outreach — with Doctors of the World along with my spouse, Jules Boykoff, who writes extensively about the impacts of the Olympics on host cities. That is where we meet Mamadou and many others.
Paul Alauzy, an outreach worker for Doctors of the World, hosted us. Alauzy also serves as a spokesperson for Le Revers de la Médaille — or, the Other Side of the Medal — a coalition of more than 100 groups calling attention to the mass displacement of people experiencing homelessness in France, many of whom are migrants from African and Asian countries.
Standing alongside the encampment where Mamadou and maybe 50 others were bedding down for the night, Alauzy described seeing the slogan of the 2024 Paris Olympics: “We are ready to welcome the world.”
“And I was like, ‘No, you’re not,’” Alauzy said. “We already are, and we’re doing it every week.”
Alauzy and other outreach workers, translators and doctors visit encampments of people who migrated to Paris and its outskirts five nights a week.
The French Ministry of Housing estimates about 100,000 people are homeless in Paris and the surrounding region, about half of all the people experiencing homelessness in France.
Alauzy describes the French government focusing on displacing its most marginalized global community, instead of including it, as a “missed opportunity.”
The French police evicted people at a high rate in the run-up to the Olympics. The Other Side of the Medal issued a report that more than 12,500 people were pushed out of Paris the year before the Olympics, an increase of 38.5% over the previous year.
Mostly, police arrived at camps and loaded people on buses destined for other cities in France such as Lyon and Marseilles. The national government paid to shelter them there for three weeks. Afterward, the government released some into homelessness in a new city and deported others.
Much of this will be familiar to Street Roots readers in the context of the West Coast. Rather than create long-term solutions, the government displaced people cosmetically, removing them from the sight line of Olympic sightseers for the short term without long-term housing or services.
Some people managed to survive by living in the woods outside Paris — such as a park in Bobigny where Alauzy and his outreach team took us earlier in the evening.
Anyone surviving near Olympic venues, though, was removed. Early in the evening, we walked along St. Denis, the suburb where the Olympic Village was constructed. Alauzy pointed out an area where a migrant community from Afghanistan used to live; and another, where a migrant community from Sudan lived.
Bike racks filled these spaces — or metal bars, or concrete slabs. Athletes with duffel bags slung over their shoulders walked by. Some people still lived homeless in this area, discreetly behind an edge of laurels where Chatelain’s hand leaned in to check on them.
Because people were scattered, it was harder for outreach workers to find them and for people to find services. Mamadou described how he and others had more trouble finding food during the Olympics, often going to bed hungry.
The juxtaposition of homeless encampments along the Olympics tells two international stories.
“I feel that we are also part of the games and of Paris,” Paul Alauzy said of his group, and the people they worked among. “(The elites of the Olympic games) don’t own Paris. They don’t own the games. Like we also represent the country, and we also represent what it means to be French, what it means to be somebody in solidarity.”
It was midnight when Chatelain made his way through the line of teenagers. Despite being nearly 90 years old, he remained fully engaged, a doctor among his patients whose young bodies were battered by the hardships of the streets.
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