Helpers in a foreign land

Every dish has a special meaning for him, says Mudar El Sheich. Kabsa, chicken with rice, cardamom and cinnamon, reminds him of Friday evenings with his family. It feels like an eternity since they all sat together in his parents’ house in Aleppo. The war drove them apart – to Sweden, Turkey and Dubai. El Sheich now cooks in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Sometimes 
he also makes kabsa. It doesn’t taste the same as at home, but still. There are 
people here who want to share the food with him – and who are interested in the memories it awakens in him.

Rafael Strasser stands next to him at the cooker. The industrial engineer is 29 years old, the same age as El Sheich, who worked in Syria as a teacher of Arabic. Together with friends, Strasser runs a project called Über den Tellerrand kochen. The group organises courses in which participants prepare dishes from their home countries. “People who cook together have something in common,” believes Strasser. El Sheich, the man with the reddish 
beard and a scar on his forehead, says the courses are “like a window”, adding: “They allow me to get to know Germany better.”

El Sheich is one of the 202,834 refugees who applied for asylum in Germany during 2014. Above all, it was the violence in Syria and Iraq that forced many people 
to leave their home countries. This puts severe strains on the authorities that process their applications and the municipalities that house them. In a very short time new hostels have to be built and pro­cedures reorganised. Yet things have also begun moving beyond the realm of state support. Ordinary people spontaneously offer help and show solidarity in many 
different places.

We have now travelled over 500 kilo­metres from Berlin to a warehouse in Essen. This is where refugees come when they need something more fundamental than talking around the kitchen table – warm feet, for example. Mir Atiqullah Mirzad is only wearing lightweight running shoes, although on this day in February it is zero degrees Celsius outside and there is snow on the ground. The 26-year-old Afghan has only been in Germany a few days. He had received threats in his home country because he worked for a US company. He tells his story to Benjamin Melzer, who leads him through the aisles of shoe shelves and clothes racks. Mirzad finds a pair of winter boots, almost new, and tries on the right one. It fits.

At the exit Melzer puts a tick on Mirzad’s list and exchanges a few more words 
with him. Melzer founded the Sozialkaufhaus, a kind of social department store. The 34-year-old had actually only wanted to give his son’s pushchair to refugees, 
but found there was no central collection centre in his town. Melzer felt he ought 
to do something about that. He phoned 
the town hall and eventually received approval for the hall next to the emergency hostel. Using Facebook, he appealed for friends and acquaintances to get involved. Now they issue donated clothing every Monday to Friday between 11am and 1pm. Because Essen is only an intermediate stop for the hostel residents, the stream of customers for the social department store never stops. “It wasn’t clear to me at the beginning how big it would become,” says Melzer.

Barbara Scherer in Munich has had a 
similar experience. When she visited the Bayernkaserne building for the first time, the paediatrician only brought the bare essentials: cough mixture, suppositories and antibiotics. Scherer’s practice is not far from the former Bundeswehr barracks, which is now one of the largest reception centres in Bavaria. There is room for 1,200 refugees. Many of the people 
who flee across the Mediterranean to 
Europe and make their way to Germany from Italy, Spain or Greece arrive here: in 2014, at times they numbered over 400 a day. Because more and more refugee families were coming to Scherer’s practice, the doctor decided to go to Bayernkaserne herself.

The yellow box still stands in the corner of the treatment room that she is now allowed to use there. On the stretcher sits Alexandra from Nigeria, who is five years old. “Shall we look into your ears?” asks the doctor as she bends over the child with her otoscope. Scherer is a cheerful woman with sandy hair and an engaging smile that immediately puts children at their ease. The examination is soon over – Scherer has only discovered an umbilical hernia, nothing very serious. During her visits she also sees children with dangerous infectious diseases like tuberculosis, deaf and mute children as well as children with the most serious disabilities who have never seen a doctor before. “Working here is wonderful, but terrible,” says Scherer.

Meanwhile, like her, many local doctors regularly leave their practices and help 
in Bayernkaserne. They have founded 
an association called Refudocs and work closely with the government of Upper Bavaria, which is responsible for the refugees. Refudocs is just one example of how spontaneous assistance grows stronger and broadens its scope. Duty rosters have long been established, and the doctors have set up a treatment centre with its own reception and waiting room immediately behind the entrance. Colleagues from other towns are already enquiring about how their model works.

“Why shouldn’t what works here also be equally successful elsewhere?” asks Mareike Geiling too. “Here” means the shared apartment where the 28-year-old researcher lives. When Geiling went to Cairo with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), her room in Berlin became free for nine months. She and her fellow tenants decided to take in a refugee. They pay the rent for the 39-year-old from Mali with 
donations from friends and relatives.

After she publicised her idea on the Internet and other groups offered help in placing refugees, hundreds of interested people got in touch. However, it is not easy to match refugees and free rooms, also because the regulations differ from town to town. In the meantime twelve refugees have found rooms. On visits home Geiling has discovered that life in her apartment is hardly any different from that in “normal” shared accommodation. “We sit in the kitchen and talk, go for a drink and party together.” The project offers interchange more than help, an encounter between equals – and that is how many of the new projects see their work.

In the case of Ines Gebert and Kahsay Berhane things are similar, but also different. In a better world, Berhane, the pharmaceutical technology graduate with four years of experience as a pharmacist, would even be a few steps ahead of Gerbert. But the 30-year-old does not come from a better world, he comes from Eritrea. When he speaks about his country, he becomes quiet – you have to lean over close to understand what he is saying. He talks about the overbearing power of the military, the arbitrary arrests and the unexplained death of his sister. In 2011 he fled to Ethiopia, then to Sudan, later to Libya and then on to Europe. He spent two years travelling and paid people smugglers 8,000 dollars.

Ines Gebert comes from Freudenstadt in the Black Forest. The 21-year-old student is in her first semester of a pharmacy course at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. She speaks a broad, friendly 
dialect. They became acquainted through Academic Experience Worldwide. The reason for the project is simple: many asylum seekers are highly qualified and worked as doctors or lawyers in their native countries. This potential should not go to waste, say the organisers, two female students at Goethe University. They had the idea of bringing together refugees with university degrees and German students of the same subject.

Gebert and Berhane form one of 15 “tandems” that have been organised so far. Berhane is “pedalling” hard. He wants to improve his knowledge of German – as fast as possible. He introduced the rule that only German should be spoken during their weekly meetings. Gebert has 
taken hold of the handlebars for now. She helped to revise Berhane’s curriculum 
vitae and phoned hospitals that were 
looking for pharmaceutical technicians. The feedback has almost always been the same: Berhane’s qualifications are good, but his German is not yet good enough.

Gebert’s university schedule is jam-packed and her workload high. Nevertheless, she definitely wanted to participate in the tandem project and makes the effort to free up the necessary time – like many young people who get involved in similar initiatives. The generation of whom it is often said that they are primarily interested in self-realisation and their political and social engagement barely reaches beyond clicking the like button on Facebook are actually an important driving force behind refugee support.

Yet it not only younger people who get involved. The helper movement and its participants’ motives are almost impossible to tie down. Some act as they do because of their medical vocation, others become active because a refugee family moved 
into their street. Political beliefs or religious faith can also be motives. In addition to grassroots initiatives, church support programmes have existed for decades. Human rights organisations have also always stood up for asylum seekers and their rights. The framework has to be 
appropriate, because obviously not every refugee will find a personal helper. Nevertheless, Günter Burkhardt, Managing 
Director of Pro Asyl, believes the new initiatives make a valuable contribution. “Private engagement can play an important, positive role in the successful acceptance of refugees.” The “old” and “new” helpers often support one another. The Sozialkaufhaus in Essen, for example, works with Pro Asyl, making contact when issues arise.

Whether in informal groups or perman­ent organisations, many helpers have an additional motive: their own experience of flight or expulsion. It is part of the history of innumerable families in Germany. After the Second World War millions of Germans had to leave their homes. That is why the images of refugees have aroused the desire to help among older people too. This help is an intergenerational project. And it is one in which people with different backgrounds are taking part.

Bassam El Aydi still remembers his own start in Germany more than 21 years ago. On the very second day the Palestinian lost his way in the streets of Ludwigs­hafen. When it got dark, he stopped the very first car. It was a police car. El Aydi showed the officers a piece of paper with his address. The policemen told him the way, but he didn’t understand a word. Eventually they simply took him home.

Bassam El Aydi had good luck; the Abbara family have Bassam El Aydi. Tidily dressed with a neatly trimmed beard, the 50-year-old sits at the family’s table in Schriesheim near Heidelberg, making phone calls. He phones a lot. After all, there’s a lot to sort out – with authorities, schools, the municipality. El Aydi, who is active in a local support group, asks questions and follows them up with more. Sometimes he pushes his glasses onto his bald head and stares carefully, full of concentration, at one of the papers in front of him – Akram Abbara then knows it’s something important. He doesn’t understand much, because he only speaks Arabic. Then El Aydi is his voice and ears. The Abbara family come from Homs in Syria. At the very beginning of the civil war they fled to Libya. “We had to go,” says father Akram almost apologet­ically, “because of the children.” Aya, the youngest, is nine. Despite this she has to start in the first year at the school in Schriesheim. Her brother Mohamad Oday, 12, and Maya, 14, are still learning the new language.

They spent four months in Libya, always hoping they would be able to return home. When they no longer found any protection there either, they continued their flight 
to Europe. At home, explains Abbara, he worked for his living as an artisan, but here he has to wait and rely on others. You can see that he has trouble sleeping. His wife is restless, too, often standing up and bringing more tea. She hopes that El Aydi’s telephone call is about a larger apartment. The one they have now is much too small for the family of five.

Bassam El Aydi is translator, adviser – and sometimes consoler. The family will have to wait a while for a new apartment, he 
explains, when he puts down the phone. Shortly afterwards the doorbell rings. An elderly man from the neighbourhood is there. He wants to take the children ice-skating. ▪