Loading ...A place of dignity for refugees in Berlin
BERLIN — A few young teenage Arab boys line up loosely, side by side, in a concrete courtyard. They are concentrating hard on four big guys dressed in black, who are busting hip-hop moves to music blaring from an amplifier. The boys bounce a little with the beat, then follow after the big guys, giggling and shaking their legs and hips, executing jumps and turns. One wears sport pads over his knobby knees.
A girl of four or five runs by, curls flying, her face painted from the nose up with swirls of red and silver. A skinny boy tries to stand straight, his feet plunged deep inside bright pink plastic roller blades. A group of men gaze at a guitar player, clapping and filming on their phones.
In mid-August, German authorities began sending refugees here, with no infrastructure. The Arbeiter Samariter-Bund (Workers’ Samaritan Federation), an independent charity, got involved.
“When this place started,” said Holger Michel, one of the volunteers who is there every day, “there were 150 people, a security team that the municipality brought in, and nothing else.”
That was the situation when a young man named Philipp Bertram heard about it and came to see what he could do to help. He is 24 years old, with the blond boyishness of a surfer. He is originally from Saxony – an area with heavy anti-refugee sentiment, where the anti-Islamic movement Pegida was born. Philipp had worked with refugee projects in the past, and quickly developed “an idea” of the kind of place he wanted to be able to provide.
A few days later, Philipp established a Facebook group to recruit help. Within hours, 300 hundred people had “liked” the page. By that evening, there were one hundred actually volunteering, he says. One month later, there have been a thousand volunteers, some showing up just once, others working regularly. The number of refugees have swelled and since my visit, has reached capacity of 800 – some have had to be turned away. Syrians make up about 65 percent. Besides Arabic, some of the other languages include Urdu, Farsi, Albanian, Kurdish, and Tigrinya.
Holger is a 35-year-old freelance PR consultant who works largely for politicians. He had planned to be a one-timer. “I came for two hours and stayed.” That was weeks ago. His client aren’t thrilled with all the lost time and his friends tell me they are worried about his health. Philipp has been there for five weeks. He says he works 17 hours per day, and hasn’t taken a day off. Last Tuesday, the ASB formally hired him.
Philipp says that there is something addictive about being there. He recalls how, after helping one Syrian family deal with a range of needs, the man gave him a present. He digs into his slim jeans pocket to show me a small loop of red plastic prayer beads. “It was the only thing at all that he kept with him from Syria. He had nothing else. And he gave it to me.”
There is no mistaking his shy smile for self-gratification. Philipp had a fast and clear vision of what he wanted the shelter to be. “We always see them as refugees, poor victims. I wanted us to treat them like people, just people like us but from a different state, with a different history. So we try to make a place where they can be people.”
The values are in the details. Volunteers are scurrying around the rooms, busily arranging orange canvas cots. It is the only shelter, they tell me proudly, where people live three to a room, rather than communally in a large hall. Volunteer nametags bear the slogan “refugees welcome.”
A tight assembly line of young volunteers runs down a long hallway and they are shunting boxes along the smooth floors, hands slapping the boxes along. The contents are sorted with cliché precision. One room is stacked to the ceiling with boxes of shoes, each one marked by gender, adults or children, and size. A chart on the wall explains how to measure feet for European size numbers.
Source: 972mag.com