Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: refugees

  • the Nazi airfield in summer

    I will tell you what Berlin is like in the summer. As I cycle home from a far-distant errand I cross over an overgrown field. Near the hangars, part of the largest manmade structure outside the Great Wall of China, a thicket of neatly rowed white demountable houses has bicycles parked and pot plants blooming. These are some of the one in two hundred Germans who are now Syrians escaping the war.

    Six police officers in flak jackets are guarding the asylum seekers, lounging in the afternoon sun. The other side of the wire fence a summer circus has set up its tents; then a rippled concrete path runs past and on the other side of that, a fake beach is lined with volleyball games.

    Behind the volleyball courts people have built themselves a tumble of pallet gardens. All of this takes place in the old Nazi airport, which also hosts Berlin’s emerging designer festival in its cavernous and sombre hangars.

    On an obsolete airplane bumper of concrete with fading scarlet stripes a woman in a beehive and three-inch stack silver heels is picnicking, with her shirtless golden boyfriend, silver-chested, with his skateboard lying by them. They are both in their sixties. Further into the field two young women are learning to kite surf on vast sails. The runways divide meadows filled with wild flowers and dredged by butterflies, because half the local taxes are paid by artists and the city can’t afford to mow.

  • refugee dinner

    This is the lunch I had today, in a Saturday cafe set up by a refugees welcome committee (one of the many) in Berlin. When I ordered, a smiling Syrian woman plump and beautiful in her brown scarf came out to me carrying this bowl: a dish I had never eaten before, and when I was done she came back for the plate and hovered anxiously, asking in English, “Did you like it?” I told her I liked it, and we smiled at each other. The food was noodles cooked with brown lentils, tamarind, lemon peel and pomegranate. It cost five euros, around eight Australian or American dollars.

    I was thinking of my lunch as I read a stranger’s post lambasting Muslims as universal terrorists and lauding Trump’s ban. Or as someone the other day brilliantly dubbed him: Crybaby-in-chief. Today I decided I would start calling him POUTUS, for his glorious petulance. I thought at first he was more of a misogynist, but now I feel sure pouting is his real superpower.

    This cafe was crowded and buzzy and I had come to concentrate and write. Much of the conversation was in German, which allowed me to tune it out and focus on my page. They played lazy, sunny, splashy sitar music. I stayed for three hours. Run on Saturdays to raise money to help house new arrivals, this is just one form of the pragmatic welcome given Muslims from Syria who have turned up here at Angela Merkel’s noble instigation, now comprising about one German in one hundred, and welcomed with Refugees Welcome stickers and t-shirts all over Berlin. I wish I could organise a roadshow of new arrivals who were not too traumatised to perform and travel, taking them through the so-called flyover states in the US where Trump has been hailed a saviour. I feel sure if people could just sit down with a Syrian person, or a Moroccan person like the many interesting and cultured individuals we got to know over Christmas this year, staying in Fez, the hatred that masks fear would begin to dissolve in curiosity, conversation, and ken.

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”

  • Department of Honour

    I just acquired the most beautiful new German word. We are discussing privilege and a new acquaintance says he has to do something ehrenamtlich – oh, how divine, can ‘ehrenamtlich’ mean ‘voluntary’? An ‘Amt’ is a bureau, government department or office. But ‘Ehre’ means honour.

    Germany is overrun with Amts. Ordinarily they sound faintly menacing: the Ordnungsamt, Department of Order, takes care of ticketing people’s unlicensed dogs, illegal parking &c: a histrionic graffito in the local drug park screeches, in orange, Ordungsamt = Terror!!. Online I find a website called Ehrenamt Deutschland, which offers a definition: honourable offices can be anything which is performed “freiwillig, gemeinwohlorientiert und unentgeltlich,” that is, anything that is pursued of one’s own free will, is oriented towards the common good, and is unpaid. The formality makes it sound almost stultifying but there is all this generosity and warmth beating away underneath.

    As Australia turns itself into a vast gulag for imprisoning children, and other countries up and down the escape corridor into Europe close and razor wire their borders, Berliners are opening refugee cafes, holding garage sales and donating food, organising ‘Asylum Seeker Airbnb’ to help match people’s spare rooms with exhausted new arrivals. I find it so moving to think that by teaching German once a week in the giant refugee camp that was once the old Tempelhof airport, this Berliner becomes part of the Department of Honour.

  • calvados, ahoy

    Miserable with flu I staggered down to the markets in search of star anise, lemons, and fresh coriander. There was a golden-lit stall with a radio blaring which sells raclette, a stinky, melty, fondue-like cheese, and “hot apple punch.” Hot apple punch! Irresistible. I came round the front of the stall and presented myself; moments later the bloke, who had been sneaking a quick durry out the back, lifted the flap of his tent and introduced himself with the flourish of a magician: “You see? I am already there.”

    I’d like an apple punch, I said, and he said, lifting a golden bottle and tilting it towards me, would you like a shot of calvados in it? Good on a chilly night. In German they say, ein Schluck: a swallow. Oh yes, I said, absolutely: I am wanting it against the flu and I think with the calvados it will be just… “Hervorragend,” he finished for me. Capital, tremendous, outstanding.

    Carrying my steaming cup I went around the vegetable stalls, gathering a bunch of coriander, a quiver of cinnamon quills. At the cheese stall where she cuts slabs of butter fresh from a giant block I bought eggs for the weekend, waiting til she had served the family of Syrian refugees whose host, a Berlin woman in her fifties, hastily appeared to translate for them. “These are really good eggs,” she said, using gesture: “they’re organic.” The Syrian man wanted the eggs but he and his three children screwed up their faces at the pervasive stench of over-mature German cheeses, something they have perhaps never encountered before. The stallholder met my eye and very gently we started laughing. “Stinks, hey?” she said cheerfully to the youngest child, holding out the swinging plastic bag of eggs invitingly. When I got home I put my stock pot on the stove and have added to it the following ingredients, a witches’ brew for colds and flu that I have sworn on for twenty years: it deals with aching bones, the twitching burning skin, the sore throat and feeling of lassitude: heat in a pot full of water for an hour or two, slowly, then serve each cupful with honey and the juice of half a lemon. You’re welcome.

    Witches Brew

    6 cloves garlic, split in half
    5-6 chilies
    half-thumb chunk of ginger, sliced
    6 anise stars
    5-6 quills cinnamon
    rind of a lemon or a lime
    bunch of fresh coriander

    Simmer one hour in 8-10 cups of water. Let stand one hour. Serve each cupful with honey and juice of half a lemon.

  • what Jesus did

    Christmas edition of the local paper, West Germany. Four pages of articles welcoming the first couple of hundred asylum seekers into the area. Photos of Syrian and Pakistani families lugging their suitcases off the bus and of all the local dignitaries who turned out to smilingly shake their hands and welcome them; photos of the Christmas feast that was put on to welcome the new arrivals: a little Afghan boy says gleefully, “We are famous!” Editorial reminding everybody of the story of pregnant Mary and her husband Joseph searching for a shelter in which their baby, Jesus, could be born, and how this is no different to our communal obligation to offer shelter and a welcome to people currently seeking asylum. I’d like to send a copy to Canberra.

  • stop stopping the boats

    Could our fear of brown-skinned asylum seekers with unfamiliar cultural origins actually be self-hatred? Years ago it was embarrassing in Australia to confess to “the taint” of convict ancestors. Then it came to carry a cachet. It’s true we would undoubtedly respond with more compassion as a nation if boatloads of stricken Finns, Belgians and Scots were finding their way to our shores. But I also think we are not a confident nation and this reflects in a kind of arrogance-paired-with-self-loathing. It is sad to hate boat people when we are boat people. More than 90% of us are descended from recent migrants – that is, arrived within the last two centuries. And the waxy hysteria over a few hundred vessels reminds me of the hatred of sexuality which infests certain fundamentalist churches: the Catholic Church, for example. No hatred is more personal, more poisonous, than the mother of them all: self-loathing.