Sportallee

Sportallee

Sportallee? (Sport Avenue?) It sounds like a place where you could take a yoga or karate class, or play basketball with your friends. But no, Sportallee is the name of the asylum center where migrants and refugees register to begin the asylum process.  Often they have just arrived in Germany, or have been living here illegally and have nowhere to stay, so they receive a room in Sportallee, until their asylum application is complete and they can get a room in an Unterkunft. Our heavily pregnant guest from Kenya had registered at Sportallee, and had officially received a place to live there, although she still spent most of her time with us. One day I went with her to check it all out. Sportallee reminded me a little bit of a narrow-halled American high school, with its office at the entrance and its linoleum floors. You get a key to your room, but if you leave the building, you have to give it up at the office to the police that work there, and then pick it up when you return. Your passport is also taken away. You eat your meals in the cafeteria, and if you need to take a bus to an appointment, you need to ask for a bus ticket. Each resident gets forty euro a month spending money. I went with my friend to her room.  It was packed full with four cots, one card table and two wardrobes. Each woman in there was heavily pregnant, and soon enough the population of the room changed from four pregnant women to three pregnant women plus woman and baby. In the room, like in Sportallee itself, air didn’t move, didn’t circulate. It hung hot, heavy and stale in every room and hallway. Even with the window open in the room, the fresh air outside seemed to refuse to come in, as though if it did, its passport would be taken away too. In the immediate area around the building, there is nowhere to sit outside, to go for a walk. I’ve accompanied my friend to appointments within Sportallee.  The people who work there just don’t care. They don’t care to smile and be polite or patient, or slow to anger. They don’t care to be careful what date they stamp onto your bus ticket so you can avoid trouble with bus drivers. In the cramped and airless waiting room, they called out the names of people loudly, and wrongly, as though the effort of putting in effort was too much effort. My friend now has a room in an Unterkunft(lodgings) and is no longer there. But one of her roommates plus baby still is, with no hope in sight of leaving the four person room. Because at Sportallee, they notice who is friendless and who is not.  Who has support on the outside that might get pushy. And here at Brot und Rosen, we got your back.

The pregnancy rock

I will pick up the story from the last time I blogged again later, but have included the next two very informative stories in the meantime. 

Brot u. Rosen is full of intercultural moments of sharing and learning.  For example, in Kenya, pregnant women eat rocks.  But not just any rocks! A specific kind of soft rock chock full of calcium.  It doesn’t even have a name; it’s just referred to as that rock that pregnant women eat.  Our pregnant Kenyan woman had a visitor from Kenya over Easter who brought her one such rock. She was super excited, because here in the afro-shops you can buy pregnancy rocks, but they are all from West Africa, and just don’t taste the same. She had finished off her last rock long ago, and was craving one like other pregnant women crave pickles in their ice cream. She let everyone try the rock.  It didn’t taste bad….or good……or like anything at all. One of the community members concluded that it must only have a taste when one is pregnant.  When our Honduran woman witnessed the rock-eating, she was much dismayed (ay, no!!).  Apparently in Honduras, when one has the urge to eat dirt and other mineral-rich substances, it is because one has parasites and is suffering such a mineral deficiency that one seeks it at its source.  Anyway, we are expecting a happy calcium-rich baby any time now!

Cloistered in the Countryside

          In middle March our Brot u. Rosen core community (The Germans) plus me, and one of the refugee women plus a refugee child went on our “Gemeinschaftswochenende” or Community Weekend in Imshausen, a cloister in the countryside of the state of Hessen.  I don’t know if Imshausen really is a cloister or not; (for one, they are protestant), but the community is made up of a bunch of celibate singles living a pretty set-apart existence involving devotions/prayer four times a day.  (Lots of beautiful mantra-like singing.) So, that’s cloister enough for me. Farmland and forest surrounds Imshausen, which stands on a steep hill above the little village in the valley.  You could say it is almost Heidi-esque minus the Alps and plus the intentional Christian community. 
            I and some of my colleagues (the rest came later in the week) were there for the Ora-et-Labora, which in Latin means the Prayer and Work week. The majority of those who live in the community are elderly, and need a lot of help with the Labora so to speak. (They’ve got the Ora pretty down pat).  Work for the week included chopping firewood, collecting firewood, cooking, planting trees, cleaning buildings, canning honey and supervising the rambunctious Brot u. Rosen children who want to drive your tractor. About a dozen others came to this open work week to help out, including a man who had lived with Mennonites in the US, Canada, and South America!   
            Imshausen is made of of multiple wooden buildings with wooden staircases and lofts and wood-burning stoves.  Most of the buildings are dimly lit with those globe thingys that look like they’re from Ikea. The work that I myself took part in: planting trees, collecting pinecones and firewood, and cleaning buildings. I only helped for one afternoon with the trees (they were planting a hedge). The weather at the beginning of the week was soggy and gray (typical) and I seemed to be they only one who thought the little baby trees were adorable. After that experience, I spent about a half an hour scraping away at the mud caked into the bottom of my sneakers with a stick. Which broke, so I had to find another one.  Seriously, who thought that carving whole geographies into the bottom of a sneaker was a good idea?  However, I am happy to report that scampering around the landscape in the gorgeous 70-degree and sunny weather that followed later in the week ended up restoring my sneakers to something akin to their former glory. 
            We collected pinecones and firewood in the most beautiful weather of beautiful weathers, I didn’t even need my winter jacket, and that’s saying something! I was a bit unnerved by the fact that the children (ages 9-12) were all taking turns driving the tractor that I was riding on.  I was also asked if I wanted to drive the tractor. I did not.
          But mostly, I helped with the cleaning. The woman in charge of the operation was a nice elderly lady who had joined the community to help raise WWII orphans. We cleaned the upper floor of the big meeting building, one of the residential buildings, and the chapel, wherein I accidently bumped the hanging crucifix with a broom that I was using to destroy spider webs. But I figure Jesus suffered worse. Actually, I found that the broom for destroying spider webs was also excellent for killing flies.  I feel like there is some sort of irony in that somewhere.  

          So, while the B and R kids played ping pong and drove tractors, the core members met together to discuss finances and other communal issues (all money, donated and earned, is shared in a communistic kind of way). In this, they sought advice from the Imshausen community, which I learned is B and R’s mother community. Brot und Rosen may not have been conceived in Imshausen, but the idea was fleshed out and the structure built by the original B and R crew while meeting in Imshausen.   Eventually, however, we had to pack up all of our woodsmoke-smelling things and head on back to Hamburg, where a sad reality awaited us; but that’s a topic for another blog. 

New Guests

Cafe Exile gives free advice to refugees

      A couple weeks ago Café Exil brought a kid from Guinea to us in the form or an emergency case for our “emergency room,” the bedroom that people in difficult situations that can be taken care of in a few days to a week, stay in.  He told the foreign bureau he was 16 years old, and by law should be put in a group home for minors where he would start school right away and be integrated into society.  Cool, no sweat, right?  Wrong.  With the Ausländerbehörde (foreign bureau) you are guilty until proven innocent.   The Behörde of course, did not believe he was 16, but rather 18, a nice age where one can be easily dumped on the street. In their defense he was very tall.  So we took him in until he could go to the doctor and get a bone test proving his true age. 
            He only spoke French and was illiterate. Luckily, in the multilingual community of Brot u. Rosen there are three French-speaking Germans and one French-speaking volunteer who does not happen to be me.  The poor kid was scared to death of us.  He barely ate and hid in his room until we dragged him out for food and board games and movies.  Then he began to smile and laugh and hopefully feel a bit better. I myself did not communicate very much with him. I managed “Hello, my name is Katarina” before my French sputtered and died. Sometimes when only I was around, he would ask me if he could use the telephone.  Or at least that is how I interpreted “French French French French French telephone French French French?”
          It was extremely impressive how some of our Mitbewohners (housemates), who also don’t speak a word of French, still managed to talk to the kid and hung out with him.  It is a talent that would be nice to pick up in my time here!  I think it helped that both of them have kids of their own, and found it easier to take this lost soul under their wing. 
            For example our Somali Mitbewohner, (a real jokester at heart), upon being introduced to the kid, pointed out myself and the  Honduran woman who also lives here, saying, “My friend, don’t listen to anything those two say, they’re crazy!”  Merci!
          The kid had his doctor’s appointment after staying the weekend with us, and lo and behold he was a tall 16 years old! No way, right?  The same day he headed out for his new home with other kids his age, and the chance to go to school for the very first time.  So, all in all, a happy ending, and hopefully a happy beginning for the Guinean kid! 
           The next Sunday, I came down from my room after breakfast with coat and scarf in hand ready to throw the coat over a kitchen chair and relax until the bus came that would take me to church.  And so I entered the kitchen and almost threw my coat on a family of Somalis who I swear were not there before.  This is not all that weird if you live at Brot u. Rosen, but not completely normal either.  People always seem to pop in through our often unlocked terrace door, however, the difference being that we usually know them. (Interestingly, one day a man turned up out of the blue who had lived in at B. und R. twelve years ago!) Apparently the exhausted young refugee and her toddler and baby were relatives of our Somali Mitbewohner, and were here to stay for……days?......weeks?......  The surprise and dismay in the room were almost palpable as everyone wondered where on earth to put them.  But of course room was found, and they ended up staying for about four or five days.

Weekly human rights protest at Foreign Bureau

          Brot and Rosen doesn’t just take people out of blue, although they have been known to do so in the past in desperate situations. People are referred to B. and R. through pastors and nonprofits which are known to Brot and Rosen and also work with refugees. Then the request or “Gastanfrage” is discussed among the entire group weighing the need against the possibility of having room for one more. We often have to say no.  We don’t have the room, or the person doesn’t fit the criteria of utterly paperless and homeless, or the impression from a first meeting with them is that they would not be a good fit for the kind of community we live in, or the family is too big, the house too full.  During their sabbatical last spring and summer, Brot and Rosen, its members frazzled and exhausted, came to the conclusion that as much as they wanted to, they could not save the world, but could only take in so many. They noticed that trying to stuff as many people as possible into our house was wringing them dry and hurting the community more than helping it. Now they are more cautious and try to take better care of themselves so they can continue to help others.