It takes a village.

I have been hoping to be able to write a post with this title for over a year.

Several times, as things were dragging on, I started, trying to write a comprehensive and understandable report of what was and had been happening, and failed. And things weren’t finished yet… This all sounds mysterious, and I still don’t know whether I will be able to put this into coherent writing. But it was an imminent part of my (terrible) past year, and I feel the need to get it out of my system. In fact, it was the beginning of the series of catastrophes that made last year so awful, and as we have now reached a point where it looks like things may be on the mend, I will give it another try.

Over the years I have repeatedly written about my work helping refugees, and one Senegalese refugee in particular, trying to find ways to get them a visa, residence, work permit, job, whatever. A means to get on with their life which they had uprooted by leaving their country, either fleeing from a civil war (Syrians), catastrophic political conditions after years of foreign interference (Afghanistan), economic hardship (African countries). 

 

One of my posts was even titled ‘Victory’, because I had thought we had ‘won’. Little did I know…

In mid-February (last year, 2024) things shattered. A small mistake was made when my Senegalese protégé changed jobs – the HR person for the new employer did not notify the authorities of the fact that he was now working for this new firm. We had told her twice that it was necessary, but she ‘thought it wasn’t’. Of course, she didn’t have to pay the price… I did notify the authorities, but not within the two-week period prescribed, and it would have had to be a form filled out by the employer. The result was that my friend’s work permit was revoked, they wanted to deport him. Long negations with the immigration office followed – partly through my husband, who has a very good way of dealing with authorities, and without him it wouldn’t have been possible. My friend had to find a new job, fast. He was extremely fortunate in finding a small family-run business with a strong record of really caring for their people, and the owner has been fighting alongside me like a lioness, because she wanted to secure a qualified and reliable worker for her firm. Thank you, Julia, for employing L. and thank you for joining in the fight!

There followed several setbacks when oral agreements weren’t kept by the authorities, they kept pressuring my friend to get a date to apply for a working visa from Senegal - he would have had to leave the country and re-enter in a new status. This is a favorite scheme of Bavarian authorities, who are adamant that former asylum seekers should not (easily, if at all) get a work permit and qualify for residency from within the country. Once an asylum seeker, always an asylum seeker, it seems. There were several weird instances which I won’t go into detail about, but which stressed me beyond all possible limits - and all of this happening as my father was ailing, finally passed away, my job problems, my husband’s decision to change to a different congregation, my son leaving for university, my mother’s accident and broken hip, my mother-in-law slowly fading and then, too, dieing – until, in January of this year, we finally found a lawyer who agreed to take L.’s case.

Her entry on the stage has made life easier again. She found out some more atrocities that we didn’t even know about – for example, the embassy in Senegal had at least twice asked the Immigration authority to please just make it possible that he receive his visa from within the country (which is a possibility, called a “discretionary decision”) because they don’t know their head from their toes due to the number of visa applications from within Senegal. The authorities’ last demand that he leave the country to apply for a visa from Senegal, which finally caused us to decide to get a lawyer, was issued a couple of days after they had received the second suggestion from the embassy in Senegal to just give him a visa and let him stay.

It's a long story, and certainly my attempt to describe all the shit that was happening can’t give full credit to just how shitty it all was. It’s a tale of bureaucracy and hostility towards foreigners, turning against employers who are desperately searching for well-trained workers – which he is, and the Bavarian state paid for his education. What’s the point of doing that and then shipping him back, or making life difficult for him?

As somebody who has been banging her head against the walls of immigration office doors trying to achieve some positive results based on human intelligence, pragmatic dealing with situations and just basically smart moves I have come to an understanding of asylum seekers who radicalize themselves, pick up a weapon and just go and shoot or stab some people. I don’t approve, but I understand.

In any case – the current situation is that L. has received a temporary work- and residence permit, then had to go to Paris and get his passport renewed (including a bribe of €550 to get an quickly enough appointment before the other one expired) and has been able to officially change his address and thus his immigration office. Perhaps that helps? He now needs yet another application for a longer-term work and residence permit, which would allow him to participate in schooling and training the employer wants to send him to. And to travel and visit his sister, who has had her share of personal tragedies alongside all of this. It’s been a very hard year for him, too.

The African proverb of the title clearly fits L’s situation. I have been fighting for him for almost eight years – and I couldn’t have done it alone. My family helped a lot with their patience, and by taking him into their hearts and including him in many family activities, my husband with the recent negotiations, my son by calling him a ‘big brother’. Mr. G., former mechanical engineer, spent many hours helping L. with his studies for the mechanical school he went to. Friends helped find him a job, other friends let him live in their basement apartment when he was finally allowed to move out of refugee dormitory. Friends gave him a temporary job while looking for a job as mechanical worker. And now his new employer, who has taken over for accompanying him to immigration office appointments which I can’t do any more after my move north. Thank you all for your help, you have been a wonderful village team, I could not have done it with out you.

My eagerness to help immigrants that was once abundant (and brought me many many interesting and wonderful experiences and friendships) has evaporated to just close over zero. I will make sure the L. gets settled, and I will always be there for any of his needs in that realm. But the Bavarian state has managed to break my momentum in this area. I know we need immigration, I think we could have achieved what Angela Merkel meant when she said “We can do this!” 

 

But too many people did not agree, and …

I won’t write about my involvement with refugees again, I think. It’s too frustrating.

 

2, 5, 33 and 100 years…

 

Every once in a while I like taking a look at my photos from the cloud, with a curiosity for those they will show me as ‘on this day x years ago’. A few days ago I was shown this one:

 

Two years ago I was visiting Berlin for a couple of days, meeting with patchwork friends mostly, but doing a little bit of sightseeing, too, of course. My birthplace, and sometimes I wonder what would have happened with my life if my parents hadn’t left the city when I was 4 years old? The Brandenburg Gate figures prominently in the images that are in the public mind when it comes to Berlin, most likely so because it was behind the wall for so many years.

 

Picture taken via this link, where you can find many
more photos of the Wall:
https://www.tip-berlin.de/stadtleben/geschichte/berliner-mauer-frueher-heute-fotos/

And because it was the place where people partied on November 9, 1989, when the Wall was opened for the first time in 28 years. Find a picture here.

A few days earlier, the picture I was shown was this one.

It showed me that at that time I was working on the quilt "Everyone has the right", inspired by this newspaper picture.

 

It has since traveled with SAQA’s exhibition “Forced to Flee” through several countries.

 

A detail from my quilt appeared on the front cover of the catalogue.

And it gave me a hard time getting it back from the States: the carrier would not deliver it to me because they claimed I could not prove it was mine, and I would have to pay customs to retrieve it, contrary to SAQA’s agreement with the US side of this particular carrier. Clandestine ways have since brought it back home. When I saw this picture from five years ago, I thought how very unfortunate it is that pictures like the one that originally inspired me to work on this quilt are still everyday matter – except that they are not really being shown in the media anymore. Because so many Europeans are sick and tired of seeing pictures like this, hearing stories of hundreds of people a day arriving on Lampedusa Island and other islands further east in Greece, having crossed the Mediterranean on skimpy boats, and who are now being put into camps already full to the brim. Right now there is no such thing as the 2015 “Welcome Culture” to be seen, Germany has turned xenophobic and anti-refugees to a degree that is frightening. Instead, elections are being won by talking about the 'refugee crisis'.

Also this past week, but not through a photo from my cloud, we celebrated the 33th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, just a little over a year after the party at Brandenburg gate mentioned above. On that day, October 3, I was in Canada, traveling with the Student Orchestra of Freiburg University. I remember that clearly because there was a lively discussion whether on this particular day the concert program should be preceded by a select four members of the orchestra playing Haydn’s slow movement from String Quartet op 76 no. 3, the variations on the tune that nowadays constitutes the German national anthem. Opinions were very divided – I, too, thought political reunification at that time was not the right thing to do. And I still think many things should have been done differently. Perhaps the high rates of agreement with the extremist right wing party in large areas of former East Germany could have been prevented if reunification had been less traumatic for citizens in that part of the country? It is the year 2023 now – and one hundred years ago, 1923, is often called the beginning of the rise of Nazi Germany, with political developments and inflation that caused the complete psychological destabilization of the population. Recent German federal states elections have brought terrifying results – from a viewpoint of a deeply felt democrat – for extreme right wing parties, and not only in what used to be the Eastern Part. What have we learned? Are we really repeating it all, have one hundred years been enough to let us forget?

And Israel and Palestine... I lack words for that. My heart breaks, because violence and shelling is only going to cause retaliation. And more victims on both sides.

Thinking of Nasrin

 We never learned a whole lot of history about Asian states in school. Before the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan in 1979 I might not have known this country existed, but the following discussions about a boycott of Olympic Games in Moscow certainly showed that this was not a country without significance. I still don’t know enough about Afghan history before, during or after the World Wars, or about developments that led to the war-torn situation we have now, and trying to find out something about it with the help of a traditional encyclopedia is not helping me in this. I don’t think I will try, either. But yesterday’s picture of advancement of Taliban control of the country in the paper, the news we have been hearing ever since the US decided to pull out, and other NATO troops followed suit, and the stories I have heard told by my refugee friends from Afghanistan are heart breaking.

 

Graphics taken from front page of Süddeutsche Zeitung,
Saturday, August 14, 2021 edition.

I have made two quilts with Afghanistan as a topic. One is called “Imagined Dialogue” and was the quilt I would have entered at Ste. Marie-aux-Mines if I had managed to keep track of entry deadlines. As I checked back through my blog on the entries with ‘text messages’ it seems I have never shown it here, although I had notecards printed with it. It is a combined text, based on a few lines from John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, and a few lines from a poem by German playwriter and poet Bertold Brecht. I edited the lines slightly, and juxtaposed them, turning it into a kind of dialogue between the two voices. Brechts’s famous poem starts with the line “Imagine there is a war and nobody goes there”, and was frequently and wrongly cited by peace demonstrations in Germany in the Eighties. Cited wrongly, because the second line continues as “then war will come to you”. In fact, the whole poem is a call to action, though not necessarily to military action – if you don’t do anything about a situation, that situation will manifest itself and take control, instead of you taking control.

 

Imagined Dialogue

The second quilt with Afghanistan as a topic is called “Thinking of Nasrin”. It is based on a piece of cloth I had bought from Pascale Goldenberg which she had brought back from Afghanistan on one of her trips there to keep the Guldusi project going, and three of the embroidered squares that Afghan women in a particular village embroider. All three of these squares were made by a woman called Nasrin, which led to the title.

 

Thinking of Nasrin

Of course, I never met Nasrin, or saw a picture of her, as she is not mentioned in the book that Pascale Goldenberg published about the project. But I was thinking about her a lot while making the quilt. And I am thinking about her, and all the other women in that project, and the mothers and sisters of my Afghan refugee friends here who stayed behind – what will happen to them now? How will their life change?

For a while I had thought that these quilts had been left behind by history, they did not seem of current interest anymore. That has changed significantly.

I don’t understand what is going on there – but somehow it seems that the Western troops have deeply wronged the people whose country they were supposedly liberating for the last 20 years. I never thought it was right the way it was happening, but certainly this recent deal in the whole story seems even more wrong than anything that went on before. The troops are leaving behind many helpers who worked for them during the past 20 years, and they will not be protected. Germany even still deported Afghan refugees until a couple of weeks ago – it was only last week that deportations to Afghanistan were stopped. Perhaps another quilt with an Afghan topic may be brewing. I still have some eye-formed embroideries by Guldusi women, hanging on my design wall, biding their time.

What a sad sad situation. (Not to even start thinking about the many people who will flee the country, increasing the numbers of refugees whom the EU didn't want to have...)

Berry Meditation ...

It is that time of the year – berries in abundance. Despite the fact that I have been shamefully neglectant towards my garden (“I will start doing it all when my exams are over!”) it is offering me a bounty of berries harvest. 

 

I started working on it last week with white and black currants, gooseberries, the first, early red currants bush. 

 

I even had some helpers, one completely voluntary and eager, the other had to be enlisted but has been attentive about this since.

 

Now the other reds are very ready to be picked and although I would have preferred to be able to defer it for another ten days – which isn’t possible at all, and they are clearly later this year anyway – I got started on them yesterday. The abundance makes it necessary to spend hours, and I don’t really have that time right now... but at least I got started. And found myself meditating over the berries, the past year, developments, options.

This past Tuesday was a weird day. And a good day. I am not going to talk about the weird part. But I want to mention the good part. Over one year ago I posted about the Senegalese whom I have been fostering for almost five years, and who had won a seemingly small but very important victory in terms of his status of residence in this country. (One of the helpers above.) The story of course continued, because he had to procure a passport, which he then needed to hand over to the authorities. Several months later he did just that, and now, a few months later still, he has passed his final exams in the technical school that he is attending. This was not his first choice in terms of professional orientation, but the only option to take – a purely vocational school, for this he did not need a work permit to be allowed to attend. Germany typically has a dual combination of vocational school with a section of professional qualification in a business. For this, however, a work permit is required, and his status of residence prevented him from getting that permit. That was the reason why he was not allowed to start training as a hospital caretaker four years ago at the end of the one-year preparatory class in which I taught German, and where I first got to know him closer.

Imagine yourself, in a strange country, having to learn the language, and authorities are constantly trying to demonstrate to you that you are not really wanted here. Going to school under these circumstances is hard, going to school in a field that wasn’t your personal choice, is even harder. And it is a tough school, as it competes with the dual mode of training and has to prove that the students are equally qualified at the end of the course. I admit, there were times when I was afraid it might have been too difficult a school, but there were good times when I was confident he would pass. I enlisted another helper for the technical lessons, I covered tutoring for German, English, social sciences. The exams started at the end of June. And the results were given out on Tuesday. I am so proud to say that he passed all the written exams, it is not necessary to take an oral to make up for a bad result. He is in fact going to take a voluntary oral exam to try to improve one particular subject, but it will not be counted against him, he has passed his exams. Now we need is to get the written work permit, and then there are options for him to find work. These are almost five long years of ups and downs coming to a good conclusion. We are almost there.