Melissa Dalton-Bradford is the YW president of the ward we attend in Frankfurt. I travelled with her to the refugee center last Wednesday. This is a piece she has written and shared.
Don’t Shut Doors to Refugees
Once We Open Them
By Melissa Dalton-Bradford - http://inspirelle.com/dont-shut-doors-refugees-open/
January 13, 2016
©Shannon Ashton/www.shannonashtonphotography.com
We stand at the crux of history in the making. Under our feet,
the ground is groaning, convulsing under the weight and roil of a crisis— or
better yet, a quaking pileup of crises — unparalleled in recent history.
What is our moral responsibility? Should we aid the growing
millions of our displaced and distressed brothers and sisters? If so, how? Who,
as winter encases this saga in ice, should generate the needed human heat that
could save the exiled? And how can we keep our and others’ hearts from freezing
over with fear or suspicion, especially given the chaos, premeditated violence
and sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany?
Refugees in Germany
I live in Frankfurt.
Thousands of kilometers removed from the blood-spattered drama raging on the
frontlines in Syria, Greece and neighboring
countries, Germany is a
center – though not the epicenter – of the current disaster. Here, a tense but
seemingly manageable drama began when Chancellor
Angela Merkel opened wide the borders to welcome a flood of asylum-seekers. In
an instant, fissures began splitting public opinion right down the middle.
The situation has evolved into the current high-pitched cultural
conflict that is slicing a sharp divide between the far-right (Pegida, or “Patriotic
Europeans Against the Islamization of the West” and
other hate-filled, fear-mongering, xenophobic affiliates like Hogesa, “Hooligans against Salafists”) and the left, with its
numerous relief organizations, both governmental and grass-roots.
Unsurprisingly, the situation is also splintering at the fastest rate and in
all directions among the perplexed middle-ground.
Lately,
and as many predicted early on, the divisions and violence seem to also be
spreading among the over 1.1 million newly arrived refugees and long-time
resident immigrants themselves, all of whom come from multiple (and often
conflicting) cultural and political ideologies.
All are crowded along Germany’s
doorstep. All are pressing against the threshold of tomorrow.
Iraqi child in refugee convoy crossing Balkans heading north to
Europe. © UNHCR/Daniel Etter
Some
months ago, in my leafy middle class suburb with its ancient wall, historic
cathedral and stately castle turret, a local high school sport hall was
converted into a shelter for refugees. I pass this sport-hall-cum-refugee-camp
every day. I have sought out refugees in the camp parking lots, public
buildings, and in the streets. They are often men in twos and threes, or
mothers carrying small children in their arms wrapped in old blankets, the
youth walking a bit more tentatively than teens normally do, dressed in
sometimes mismatched clothing too thin and worn for a German winter.
Like you, I have been glued to their stories while scouring the
media. I wonder if any one of these women lost her eldest son to a bomb in her
village. Or did this one lose her toddler on the night road in Turkey? Or this one her baby on
the infamous raft-crossing to Lesbos? And
has this one been sexually abused during the unrest in her country? While
fleeing? Or in this camp itself?
I
search every face for tell-tale signs of grief.
Young girl with elderly woman disembark from boat at Lesvos,
Greece ©UNHCR/Hereward Holland
Truth is, I see nothing but grief.
Loss in all its iterations lines their faces framed in headscarves tucked
tightly at the jawline. Their eyes are sharp with anxiety or worn with days and
weeks, years, of exhaustion. Or with grit. They have survived more than most
can possibly fathom. It’s a wonder they don’t all look like they have just
crawled out from under a landscape of debris. Some literally have.
Serving Right Where You
Stand
With
the teenagers in my international church community where I volunteer as a
leader here in the greater Frankfurt area, we have talked at length about these
refugees.
We can’t do everything, they have
said. But we can do
something.
So our
church is the logical place to begin our service. My friends throughout Europe
and the US are mobilizing elsewhere, at their work place, in their own or their
children’s schools, sports and arts and music and other community groups, book
clubs and, of course, through their social media platforms.
Dovetailing our church community’s resources with those of local
German relief organizations, we spent several hours in a warehouse in Darmstadt, just south ofFrankfurt, sorting and classifying donations into boxes
to be given to refugees housed in a nearby barrack.
Melissa
with refugees at camp in Frankfurt.
We also gained permission to visit the Ginnheimerlandstrasse Sport Zentrum, one of
a number of refugee camps in and around Frankfurt where hundreds live, packed
cot-to-cot. These drafty, utilitarian halls were intended as temporary shelters
while Germany’s government machinery shifted into high gear to catch up with
the overwhelming demand for shelter. Now, with refugee numbers still on the
rise and integration looming as the greatest challenge, the camps (former
military barracks and hospitals, or rudely erected tent communities) are slated
to serve indefinitely.
As we approached the sport complex, I was struck by its
massiveness. How many like these are there in Germany, each
housing multiple hundreds under one roof? And when the people spilled out to
meet our families in the parking lot, I wondered what good our scrappy cluster
could do for hundreds of thousands in desperate need. I tried not to slump in
resignation.
We
emptied our cars packed with games and toys for children, clementines,
chocolate treats, and winter outerwear and drove away empty-handed, yet oddly
full-hearted, but still sobered by what we left in our rear view mirror.
Refugee woman sits with child waiting for assistance ©UNHCR/
Hereward Holland
Love Without Borders
Such visits are facilitated by a contact person. Ours was Kayra Martinez, founder ofLove Without Borders, which
she runs single-handedly from a suitcase, her Frankfurtapartment,
and social media.
Kayra, a flight attendant, travels globally from her German home
base. That’s her day job. Her real passion, however, is compassion. She
established Love Without
Bordersafter witnessing the raft arrivals on Lesbos, which grisly reality —
drownings, hypothermic parents holding flaccid babies above water, huddled
bodies wrapped in foil blankets, raw desperation in countless eyes — gripped
her and rerouted her destiny.
“After seeing what I saw,” Kayra told me, “my life was changed
forever.”
Since
then, Kayra has been flying around the world, carrying donated goods on every
trip, and bringing numbers of volunteers together to work in unison.
Melissa and Kayra
Germany’s Refugee Future
And the struggle intensifies. Even before Cologne, Chancellor Merkel was
under increasing pressure to put a cap on the number of incoming refugees. Just
this week, however, she still refused one fellow politician’s demand that
Germany set that annual limit at 200,000. In the same speech, she reiterated
that closing borders would be disastrous (besides compromising Europe’s Schengen free-travel
zone), but admitted, “Now all of a sudden we are facing the challenge that
refugees are coming to Europe and we are vulnerable.”
Merkel’s
next steps will be decisive, even world-tipping. And Kayra and volunteers like
her have their work cut out for years to come. There is no doubt it will take
an ever-evolving response, since the face of this crisis is changing
relentlessly, rapidly and radically.
While
that change occurs, and while members of my immediate community mourn the death
of nine Germans killed in a suicide bombing in Istanbul, I am stacking bags of
donations in my garage. My friend Trisha has collected yarn for knitting for
the women at another camp. Her bright daughter is teaching German lessons to
packed audiences, men and women crowded on the former sport hall’s bleachers.
Another friend, Diana, seeing the refugee needs in Dunkerque, started a collection of
winter clothing and blankets in her children’s Parisian school, and the parents
drive them the three hours north to hand deliver at camps there. Jennifer,
who with her husband Patrick has been on site in several refugee camps in
Greece and surrounding points of entry, gave our youth group a multimedia
presentation detailing what she saw, educating our youth about this widespread,
multifaceted catastrophe.
And
last week parents, youth leaders and youth from my church spent an evening
brainstorming on how to serve. The next Sunday, Abdul, a Pakistani Muslim who
cooks two meals weekly for up to 1600 refugees, came with Kayra to our worship
service to interface and plan how our youth and leaders can exercise their
compassion in this crisis.
Newly arrived refugees struggle to make it ashore in Greece ©
UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis
Anti-Refugee Rhetoric vs.
We Can Handle This
In the
same hour as that multicultural gathering was taking place, a spew of
exaggerated rhetoric was streaking across the global mediascape, inaccurately
linking all refugees to violence, and stirring up anti-foreigner, anti-Muslim,
and even anti-humanitarian sentiment. By blaming a majority (who had no
involvement in a criminal act) for a minority’s behavior is nothing more than
stigmatization and racism, and feeds into extremists’ desires.
A
moderate, experienced, wise voice is needed. Some of us are responding with
local, cautious echoes of Merkel’s New Year’s address.
“Wir können das schaffen,” Merkel
said, “Und wir schaffen
das,” or, “We can handle this, and we’re going to handle this.”
As a
qualifier, she warned that in order to “handle this,” 2016 must be a year of
cohesion, that “we don’t allow ourselves to be divided,” and that we not
“follow those who, with coldness or even hate in their hearts, want to claim
Germanness solely for themselves and exclude others.”
This
will require a redefining – from everyone and every country, from the highest
offices of government to grass-roots levels – of who the “we” and what the
“this” in fact are. “Handling this” right now means caring for a continuing
flow of exiled peoples and helping them integrate once they are in safe
territory. It will mean a broad distribution of refugees, and limits of some
sort, quantitative or otherwise. (Canada’s model is one to consider.) It will
also demand tighter initial screening and a significantly increased focus on
integration, beginning with intensive cultural and language training from the
moment of arrival in a new land.
What remains to be seen, though, and what calls for a response
from each of us, is the definition of “we.” Will you figure into that
definition? And will I? And if so, how
will our intelligence, creativity and compassion influence the narrative of
history yet to be written? Is it too much to say that not only do
refugees’ lives depend on such compassion, but so do ours.
How You Can Help, From Wherever You Live
LOVE WITHOUT BORDERS
Kayra’s
group is collecting funds for volunteers to purchase clothes, shoes, basic
health supplies, baby items, food and school supplies for refugees in Germany, Austria and Hungary.
EVERY CHILD IS A GEM
Paris-based
volunteers are collecting clothing, shoes, blankets, food and sanitary
items as well as online and check donations to buy essential items
needed to bring to the refugee camps in Dunkerque (northern France) and in Germany.
Contact: info@everychildisagem.com
Visit their WEBSITE, or FACEBOOK page for more information;
Or go to their GoFundMe page to make a donation
Visit their WEBSITE, or FACEBOOK page for more information;
Or go to their GoFundMe page to make a donation
Melissa
Dalton-Bradford is an award-winning author, (Global Mom: A Memoir, named AML’s
Best Memoir of 2013, and On Loss & Living Onward), poet, essayist, blogger,
polyglot, soprano, popular public speaker, and mother of four. Former long-time
residents of Paris, Melissa and her husband have built their family in Vienna,
Hong Kong, the greater New York City area, Oslo, Munich, Singapore, Geneva, and
Frankfurt. Her work explores the peculiar delights and particular demands of
the globally mobile life, and delves into the role of community – especially
the community of women --- in providing stabilizing strength when “globility”
and major loss collide. The tragic death of her 18-year-old firstborn, Parker,
undergirds her writing and speaking, and inspires her joyful investment in this
miraculous and fragile life we share. She is grateful to join her voice with
the stirring chorus at Inspirelle.
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