A Leap into the Void
By Marina Wieland
Bremen, Germany — This week I went to Brandenburg to visit friends and former colleagues. I also wanted to know what had happened to the residents of a centre for asylum seekers since I left after having been the social worker assigned to them for a year and a half.
The centre accommodates 25 people in a small village in the Berlin region. When I worked there, Syrians, Palestinians, and a group of Chadians were living together in the house. The young Chadians had been living in Germany for several years, but had not yet obtained legal status; whereas the situation of the Syrians was quickly sorted out, and they moved elsewhere.
On my recent visit, I was astonished and saddened to hear that two of the Chadian nationals, Khalid and Adam, had been sent back to Italy. Khalid had told me that he had lived in Italy for two years and could have stayed there; but he decided to come to Germany because, as an African national, he couldn’t find work there, and he wanted to work.
Adam had been living in Germany for four years. He was a happy, optimistic young man, full of energy and always ready to lend a hand. He would get up at five in the morning several days a week to catch a bus to a nearby town, so as to arrive on time for his language lessons. It was difficult because of the poor public transport connections from the isolated village where the asylum seekers are housed. He forced himself to make the effort so that he would have a chance of staying in the country.
He had left home when he was 15, and made his way across the Libyan desert, the Mediterranean Sea, and then Europe, before arriving in this village hidden away in northeastern Germany. He never went to school in Chad. He was illiterate. But he attended his language classes assiduously and had already made great progress in learning German.
Then Adam found a job. To get to work, he had to travel for three hours every day. He didn’t mind, because he was earning enough not to have to depend on the German state’s financial aid. He was proving that he was capable of looking after himself alone. He thought this was a good thing.
After a few months he started to suffer from pains, and I sent him to see a doctor. He was diagnosed with bone tuberculosis and immediately admitted to a hospital where he remained for two months. I often visited him during his illness. He was frightened and felt very alone with his disease, afraid of death.
Then, as soon as he was sent home from the hospital, he began working again. He didn’t want to give in. When I left my job there, Adam had great hopes of finding his own home and finally leading a normal life, thanks to his own hard work.
It was at this point that he was the subject of a removal order — “return to Italy” as it is called in administrative parlance — because officially he was attached to the first European country he entered. Now back in Italy, he has nothing: no language skills, nowhere to live, no job — just the terrible uncertainty of a future where he has to start all over again.
I remember something that happened to Yahia, one of his house-mates, also from Chad. This young man spent only a few months with us. We were all impressed by his politeness and kindness. He too had arrived in Germany from Italy, and so was subject to the Dublin Agreement; that is, the authorities could send him back to Italy at any time if the bureaucratic procedures between the two countries were not completed within six months.
When Yahia visited a home for the elderly and mentally disabled, he discovered his vocation. He wanted to train as a nurse for the elderly, and later return to Africa to make himself useful in this field. Everybody liked him at the centre and so helped him find a job at this home. The day before his first day at work, very early in the morning when it was still dark, immigration officers rang at the door of the centre. Most of the residents were still asleep, but Adam was already showering before setting off for work. He opened the door without suspecting anything.
The immigration officers had come to deport another Chadian national, not Yahia. But Yahia was awakened suddenly by this intrusion and thought they had come for him. He saw all his hopes vanish at a stroke. In a state of panic, he jumped out of the window and fell onto a glass panel covering the stairs down to the cellar. In the darkness and in his haste, he hadn’t seen it. The glass panel broke and seriously injured his hands. Fortunately he didn’t fall right through into the cellar.
At the hospital I asked him why he had leapt into the void like that. He answered that he would do it again without hesitating. He said he preferred to die rather than return to Italy. He had had the worst experiences of his life in Italy: starving, homeless, with hundreds of other men like him, stranded without any hope of a decent future.
A Somali friend of mine who saved himself by fleeing in a state of complete deprivation said to me one day, “For me, peace means that each human being can have a home, a piece of land, enough to eat, and a family”.
