The journey on the completely overcrowded boat was a horror. In the sea between Turkey and Greece, 15-year-old Farzaneh Hassani saw the bodies of adults and children floating. She didn’t want her five-year-old sister on her lap to discover them. That’s why the young Afghan covered her eyes. Oula Mahfouz and her children also experienced terrible things on their flight from Syria via Egypt, Libya and the Mediterranean to Italy. She and her daughter Reem Kamel-Al Sagheer told 17 pupils and social studies teacher Anne Voykov about this at Tübingen’s Wildermuth-Gymnasium in mid-December.
Questions from the escape to the fall of Assad
The young people had carefully prepared the interviews with the three employees of the online medium tuenews INTERNATIONAL for the “Newspaper at school” project. Their questions ranged from fleeing to arriving in Germany to everyday experiences afterwards and reactions to the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Racist hostility on the rise
After arriving in Germany, many people helped Arabic teacher Oula Mahfouz and her five children. “But there were others right from the start,” she said: “They have no idea why we come all this way.” Racist hostility has increased rapidly since the uprising in Syria – especially on social media. The Mahfouz / Al Sagheer family are not the only ones experiencing this.
Homesick all the time
The Syrian woman and her daughter have also had a German passport for a long time. The students asked her about her plans to return. Reem Kamel-Al Sagheer is torn. “In my heart, I want to go back because I was homesick all the time.” But her head tells her that the situation in Syria will be difficult for at least a few more years. And: as a teenager, she fought for years to be able to study. The mother of a young daughter is now studying “Renewable Energies” at the University of Applied Forest Sciences in Rottenburg.
No return to the land of the Taliban
For Farzaneh Hassani, there is no prospect of returning to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Young women there are not allowed to study, work or the house alone. That is unthinkable for the Rottenburg woman. She spent three years studying for her degree as a dental assistant. She is also involved in the “Women without borders” initiative, where she supports other refugee women. Her greatest wish: “That my mother is proud of me.”
tun24122001