To get your child out of Afghanistan costs 10,000 euro and it is naturally a gamble. First the child(in this case a son) must go to Greece, or another of the nations that rings Germany but is on the fringe of EU politics. In order to get into Greece the boy, no matter his age, must tell the authorities that he is 18 years old or they won't let him in. When two or perhaps three brothers go together, they are oftentimes split up while in Greece because either the parents don't have enough money for all of the boys to go at the same time so one has to wait behind, or because there is not enough room for both to travel together on to Germany. Without cell phones or forwarding addresses, once split up it is usually assumed that one will never see one's brother again.
Once a boy gets to Germany he needs to convince the authorities there that he is not actually 18 as he said in Greece or they will not allow him into the country. Germany has a policy which says that any child can stay until he is 18 years old but after that point they must either have finished highschool and have a job, be adopted by a German family, or return to their home country. Moreover, if someone comes as a refugee who is already 18 and they have first landed in another country(like Greece) Germany will refuse to take the person and instead tell them to go to Greece for asylum, however Greece being much less developed and having fewer social services is ill-equipped to deal with young refugees.
When B and J got to Greece with their brother they were split up. B and J made it to Trier safely, papers and all, but their brother did not. They assumed he was dead. Two days ago, they found him in Munich. However, because their brother came on a different boat and wasn't aware that he needed to tell the German authorities he wasn't actually 18, they are now threatening to send him back to Greece, or possibly even to Afghanistan. He is already 17(B is 15, J 16) so he has only a few months to get all of his paperwork straightened out before he will leave. The clock ticks. Because J and B have already been accepted into Germany as refugees, they have more time and will be able to stay. Moreover, because they have the same paperwork as their brother, if they can get to Munich it will be easier to convince the authorities their that their brother should be allowed to stay, but it is a gamble.
How much stress can a 15 year old take? What is his limit? For B it was this: having lost first his homeland and then his brother, to find his brother only to lose him again was intolerable. Death was better abandonment. He simply could not take the pressure, the idea that if he could not make it to Munich in time to show the Germans his paperwork so that they would allow his brother to stay in the country it would be his fault when his older brother was sent back to Greece or Afghanistan(a death sentence). People who have been working with young asyls for awhile will tell you that you get 3-4 months of strength, courage and optimism before everything crashes. 3-4 months to find them a stable home, get them learning german and in school, and find them some form of counseling before everything crashes. B had been in Germany almost exactly 4 months to the day when he found out about his brother.
Johanna is buying him a ticket to Munich but he is scared to go alone. His older brother J still has a few more weeks of school left. When I saw him in class on Thursday he smiled at me but his eyes were red. For him, the situation is especially hard because to lose first one brother to beaurocracy and then another to suicide would be a double blow. All of the boys are affected. Having lost or left their families, the family they create here in the student or foster housing is especially important. Regardless of language or religion they are brothers, and one brother's pain reminds them all how fragile their situation is.
Thankfully, there is hope for B, J, and their brother in Munich. There is not much time, but Johanna is optimistic that they will be reunited and able to complete school and then live as adults in Germany. For others the situation is not so good.
Many of the boys who escape to Germany end up in mental hospitals. The trauma is too much. One Iraqi boy saw his entire family killed by a car bomb; only he survived. He had to identify his father, sister, and mother, but was only able to find one of his mother's feet. In Islam, one is not allowed into heaven incomplete; all pieces must be present. Having been able to find only one foot, he was convinced that not only had he lost his mother in life, he had lost her in death as well. The responsibility of her loss--his guilt at not being able to find all of her, to put her back together(and in a sense, put himself back together) broke him down. He survived, but what is survival when one's mind is gone? He was only 16 when he came to Germany. That is too young to deal with such loss.
T has been cutting himself. He's stopped coming to class. He knows that he's going to die soon.He has an IQ of 141. T comes from Vietnam. He was smuggled out of the country by family friends after his entire family was murdered and their house burned, probably by the Vietnamese Mafia but he's not sure. His highschool in Vietnam has no record of him existing, and his old neighbors don't know his name. There is no official record of his parents' death. T is 17 years old. In 8 months he will be 18 but he won't finish school for at least another year. Because he has no school records from Vietnam he had to start at the beginning, but for the past two years he has been at the top of his class. Helpful, reliable, quiet and polite, T could be a posterchild for successful azyl integration. But when T turns 18, everything ends. Having not finished school he is unable to find a job. Without a record of his parent's death, he cannot legally be adopted. When the police come, pull him out of class, and take him to the airport to send him back to Vietnam he is going to die. The same people who killed his family will kill him, too. There is nothing to be done. T can speak for languages and fix any computer you put in front of him. His IQ score puts him in the genius category. When he smiles you can see a small gap in his teeth. The other boys who live with him have started saving their money, taking up a fund. They want to give him something so that when he leaves for Vietnam, maybe he will be able to buy himself some time. It is a futile but beautiful gesture; after all, they're brothers now.
If the boys are brothers, then their mothers are Johanna and Maria, the two language teachers. The call them each Mama. The office is always hectic because Johanna is constantly being interrupted by one or the other of them showing off a new haircut or complaining about a disagreement with another boy. They each have her personal cell phone number and she often gets calls at 3 in the morning. Drinking coffee during a break from class Thursday morning all of the boys are laughing and she tells me why: The other day a group of them were walking around downtown in the evening smoking shisha--flavored tobacco. A policeman came up to them(much like the states, it is not uncommon for groups of young immigrants to be hassled by the police) and asked them if they had any Marijuana. Of course! they said, Maria!Johanna! we know all about them. Of course the policeman freaked out, started searching all of them and when he found nothing asked them where their Marijuana was. MariaJohanna are at the school they said. This really made the policeman's eyes bulge. They were on the verge of being arrested when, in their broken german, they were able to explain that Maria and Johanna are their teachers. None of them knew what Marijauna was. In Afghanistan its called Hashish.
It is this mix of laughter and trauma that is the most overwhelming for me. It is impossible to step back, to disconnect, to see these boys as cases or issues or problems to be solved. They are inimitably, undeniably human. It is what makes their successes so exciting and their pain so heartbreaking. They are so young and there is so little hope or opportunity for successful integration.
Last year on Germany's version of American Idol it came down to two finalists--one a natural-born German, and the other an immigrant from Columbia. The Columbian man could play guitar beautifully. He sang and wrote all of his songs in german and had been living in Germany for years. When it came down to the final choice, the judges told him that although he was technically the more talented of the two, he simply wasn't german enough to represent Germany as their Pop Idol. They wanted someone white. Unfortunately most of these beautiful, funny, annoyingly goofy boys will never be german enough for germans. They will survive here, as they have survived in much worse, but is survival enough? Johanna is polish and a Catholic. Her husband is a Muslim from Algeria. Slowly the climate in Germany is changing. Intermarriage and tolerance are becoming more common, but it is such slow work.
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