What’s important to refugees
We all know what we think the story is. But sometimes it’s best just to let them talk.
BERLIN
With some difficulty, I found the entrance to the refugee shelter inside Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, a decommissioned hub in the middle of the city that’s been turned into a gigantic public park.
Tempelhof park is lovely, an eclectic gathering place where Turks grill kebabs beside Russians drinking beer next to an American baseball field, and people from all over are rollerblading, cycling or even windsurfing on wheels down the runway. Looming over all of this is Tempelhof Airport’s terminal. It’s a bit haunted-looking, not least of all because its architecture has a particular Third Reich-style to it.
The city of Berlin (all of Germany really, but especially Berlin) was so overwhelmed trying to find housing for the influx of asylum seekers last year, they placed what is reported in the media to be anywhere between 1,300 to 2,300 (or more) people inside Tempelhof Airport. The shelter has a reputation of being one of the more cramped refugee dwellings.
Outside its guarded gates, in what used to be the front lawn of an airport, asylum seekers and refugees socialize. Last summer, when I wanted to find some asylum seekers who were involved in a federally run, low-wage job scheme, I thought the area outside Tempelhof Airport would be a good place to start.
Sitting in a strip of grass were people from Syria, Afghanistan, Albania and other countries, and I looked around for someone who might be an Arabic speaker. There was a group of teenage boys from Syria, who had all met here in Germany and were now friends.
At that point, many of the Syrians who came last Fall, who know they will be granted asylum and be able to stay in Germany, unlike some other nationalities, were speaking German quite well. Especially younger people. It’s often a struggle trying to encourage them to speak to me in Arabic, and not German. They seem confused at why I speak the former, but not the latter. (It’s a prejudiced system: White Americans can get away more easily with not speaking German in Berlin, especially more so than an Arab whom Germans may blame for burdening the welfare system.)
After we resolved the language confusion, I wanted to get down to business. I had come to ask the Syrian teenagers if they knew anyone involved in a low-wage job program for asylums seekers. I had come with an agenda.
One thing I love about reporting — but more so after the fact — is when I go into an interview assuming everything will work out smoothly in one direction, and then the interviewee doesn’t tell me what I’m expecting at all. They take the objective of the interview and run with it in another direction. When this happens, people reveal what’s really pertinent to them, not some detached concept of what I think should be written about.
“Why do you want to know about the jobs?” one teenager asked me after we had gotten through the pleasantries.
“I’m going to write an article about it,” I said.
“Why don’t you write an article about how we’re not allowed to bring food into our shelter?” the same one replied.
“Huh?” I asked.
The teenagers said they had to eat cafeteria food at the shelter and couldn’t bring in any outside food, even from the grocery store. This was a major problem in their lives, they said, because they hated the cafeteria food (though one boy admitted it wasn’t so bad), and it was too expensive to eat out in restaurants. So why don’t I write about that! Why weren’t the journalists writing about that!
Please note, I have not confirmed that the food ban is true, and sometimes there are so many rules dictating the lives of refugees that it’s hard to work out what one can and can’t do in a given context. That said, I’ve seen in other shelters strict rules about keeping food in dorm rooms, so they were probably reporting correctly.
Most of all, this encounter with the teeangers taught me how the day-to-day concerns of people’s lives — and let’s be honest, not having basic freedoms in your home is tough, even dehumanizing — often are not the stories that are told.
Sometimes the unexpected isn’t quite so serious. An older Syrian man from outside Idlib who is living as a refugee in Berlin along with his family told me he has no problems with German culture, except for one thing: the dogs. There are a lot of dogs in Berlin, as there are in many European cities. Moreover, in Berlin at least, there are no leash laws like those that exist in the United States. The untethered canines are notably well-behaved, but still they are everywhere — often in restaurants, which was Najy’s major complaint. He has told me on two occasions that he loves all of God’s creatures, but to eat with your dog? That’s where Najy draws the line.
Yet on other occasions, the problems people bring up are quite grave. Many asylum seekers and refugees in Germany are separated from family members. Either they have been placed at another shelter in Germany because there was no room left at family shelters, or they are stuck in another European country for one reason or another. Two of the teenaged boys from the shelter at Tempelhof said they have immediate family members trying to figure out how to get out of Greece after the borders of the Balkan route closed. Of course, there are times when family never even made it to Europe. Often during interviews about other topics, the refugees’ concerns come back to their family. And why shouldn’t it?
Journalists come in — just like me — and try to direct the interview toward the angle that fits the story they’re writing. Many times these angles are worthy endeavors. Yet sometimes it’s best just to ask: How’s it going?
