Alone in a New World
Refugee Kids Build New Lives in Europe
It was bombs that caused a young Iraqi to lose his home. It was an earthquake in the case of a Chinese teenager who is now no longer certain where he belongs. It was war in the case of a former child soldier from Sierra Leone who is plagued by recurrent nightmares.
This is the story of three boys who made it to Germany on their own in a physical sense but in many ways took longer to get here in mental and emotional terms.
Ibrahim*, 16, flew to Germany from Sierra Leone, armed with a fake passport. Jihua, 14, came by ship -- a trip that took several weeks to complete and took him from his former home in China to a country he knew absolutely nothing about. Hassan, 15, from Iraq, was brought here in a truck by a band of human traffickers.
When Hassan finally arrived on German soil, he didn't know whether his long and arduous journey would end in vain. He remembers being awakened at night by a sharp jab in the ribs. The smugglers shooed their human cargo off the bed of the truck they had used to transport them. Hassan and the other refugees in his group were left standing in the dark. The steady rattle of the truck's diesel engine, a sound that had been pounded into their heads for days, gradually faded away in the distance. All Hassan knew was that he was somewhere in a forest in Germany. It was night, it was cold, and he had no choice but to wait there until it was light enough to continue his journey.
At dawn he and the other refugees made their way to a train station. He got on a train and rode it for two hours before the police came and asked for his papers. He didn't have any.
Last year, the number of refugees below the age of 18 who came to Germany rose. The majority of these unaccompanied minors came from Iraq, but there are also others from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Guinea and Afghanistan. No one can say for sure how many of these young refugees are currently living here, but refugee organizations estimate the number at somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000, including both legal and illegal arrivals.
Hassan ended up in a suburb of Munich, in a receiving center for child refugees where he was placed together with boys and girls from Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, China and a number of fellow Iraqis, the youngest of them just 10 years old.
Three months later, he is sitting here on the blue couch at Chevalier House, the home he is staying in together with a group of 11 youths who were brought together randomly by the vicissitudes of global refugee flows and others who were sent by their parents to find a better life in this far-away country.
One day, while still living in northern Iraq, Hassan was taken aside by his father, who told him he had something important to discuss. His tone of voice was serious. He said: "You're my eldest son. You have to get out of here. There's no work, only fear. You are going to leave Iraq." His father didn't ask him for his opinion. He gave him a clear order, and disobeying was out of the question.
Hassan is tall and slender. Under his cap he wears his hair in a carefully gelled fauxhawk -- like the one David Beckham used to sport.
"Could you please translate so that the newcomers will understand what I just said," a worker at the home asks him. Hassan pulls the bill of his baseball cap to one side, leans forward and begins to formulate the rules of this new and unfamiliar world in the more familiar sounds of the Kurdish language. The staff worker wants to remind them to adhere to the home's rules about separating trash. The Kurdish kids look at each other a bit perplexed, but recycling is a part of everyday life in Germany they will have to get used to.
Hassan's father had instructed him to "learn German and work hard." The hopes of an entire family now rested on Hassan's shoulders, a family whose existence was threatened in their homeland. Hassan was sent here with a mission to fulfill.
Fourteen-year-old Jihua, for his part, isn't quite sure why he is in Germany. While the Iraqis play pool and chat inside, the Chinese boy prefers to stand outside in front of a glass door.
"The Iraqis are pretty noisy," Jihua says, shrugging his shoulders. A quiet kid, Jihua smiles when he says something and tends to look away shyly when spoken to.
The first impressions he had when he arrived in Germany over three months ago were a bit frightening. The country was full of people who were either white or black, he recalls. They were very big, had long noses, spoke loudly, and what they said sounded threatening. Even worse for him was the fact that the moment he arrived here he was no longer able to communicate verbally with others.
In the first few weeks he slept a lot. After all, sleep meant not having to talk to anyone. Why, he asked himself, should he get up? For who? And for what?
One time he was sitting with the others, watching a live television broadcast of the Olympic Games from Beijing. The other boys in the home marveled at the colorful robes and cheerful people. "China is great," they said. "Why in the world did you come here?"
Jihua's story is confusing and tragic. But in contrast to that of most other refugees, it is not based on war, poverty or persecution. It is a tale of being caught in the maelstrom caused by a natural disaster and of a refugee flow that swept him up and carried him to Germany.
Like Hassan, he has been placed at Chevalier House. In the course of the average period of six months that these young people are kept here the facts behind their individual cases are examined and an application filed for asylum or at least for a temporary residency permit to allow them to stay. They are also provided with medical examinations. Some need treatment for intestinal parasites or tuberculosis. And, in the past, some have even tested HIV positive. Social workers are here to provide support for these youth, and they are given German language lessons starting the first day.
Young people under the age of 18 have a legal right to be cared for and provided with support in Germany. Ideally, this would be provided by an institution like Chevalier House, one of eight receiving centers for child refugees in Germany. Those who are 18 or older are sent to receiving centers for adult asylum seekers and are left to their own devices in dealing with their asylum applications.
Ibrahim, the boy from Sierra Leone, claims to be 16, but the authorities don't believe him. He says he is plagued day and night by memories of the war and the victims he saw, victims of his own actions. His cheeks are hollow, his eyes directed towards the ground, his shoulders slumped. Ibrahim is present physically but not mentally.
He sits on his bed, wrapped in a thick jacket, slouching with his face buried in his hands. He has taken wool blankets, stuffed their edges under the mattress in the bunk above him so that they hang down and form a kind of tent he can withdraw into in the room he has been assigned to at the receiving center for adult asylum seekers in Munich. The room is filled with three bunk beds, six metal lockers, scribbled-on walls, a table and chairs. On the door there is a picture of the German national soccer team, an image of one of the country's more positive aspects. Out in the corridor beyond the door there is a pervasive odor of stale urine. There's trash in the stairwell.
"This boy is crying all the time, it's a pity," says one of his roommates. At night, he says, Ibrahim gets out of bed, sits at the table, and sobs incessantly, and that this has been going on for months now. It has gotten to the point, he says, that the others in the room want to grab him and give him a good shaking to make him come to his senses.
He says Ibrahim is struggling with the memories he has of his parents, his sister and his homeland, Sierra Leone. But first and foremost he is having to cope with memories of hands getting chopped off. Memories of a woman and her child, and memories of the weapon he carried in his hand.
He is also struggling to deal with the officials at the foreign resident registration office who don't believe that he is 16 years old.