Topic: Refugees

Forced to relocate miles from her children’s Berlin kindergarten, Halima Farah has been working to find a solution for her family. But she faces a lack of support from those entrusted with her welfare, bureaucratic delays violence and intimidation from building management.

Amer Khlil is a regular at our weekly Sprachcafé, where our community gathers to practice their German skills. Amer has written this moving story about his journey from Syria to Germany, in German, after just a year of living in Germany.

Although we are yet to find out who was responsible for Monday night’s horrific attack on the Breitscheidplatz Christmas market in Berlin, some German politicians are already giving ISIS exactly what it wants.

Interviewer Shima Vezvaei met Kinan Harrouk on a rainy Berliner summer afternoon. "We took a long walk just before he went to join the German Sprachcafé with GSBTB at Sharehouse Refugio. We managed to have a German-Arabic-English fusion interview! He told me about his love for football, passion for poetry and his dream of becoming a writer."

GSBTBers Hania Hakiel, Mohammad Othman and Waael Alafandy visited Wroclaw in April on invitation from the Goethe Institute, to attend an evening of connection-building between refugees and Polish locals as part of the European Capital of Culture Wroclaw 2016.

You might be surprised to hear that Afghanistan's first female rapper is counted among GSBTB's community members.

Iconic German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has dedicated his Berlin project space, Between Bridges, to addressing the refugee situation in Europe.

For the first few hours of Christmas day I really regretted my decision to have a Berlin Christmas. Luckily, I had kept one tradition – the stress of trying to cook Christmas dinner.

"I heard of the attacks on your people on Friday. I'm so sorry for that. I think of your people." His condolences are the most touching I have received, because they come from someone who has lived every day with the horror I experienced on January 7th and November 13th.

Once dubbed the “mother of all airports”, Tempelhof Airport is now welcoming refugees into its bosom.

I spent last Wednesday serving lunch to refugees with the volunteer group Moabit Hilft. The unmistakable sound of chanting protestors boomed towards us from the main street while my friend Lisa and I carted our tray of minestrone soups and schrippen around the park.

I’ve never quite understood the human reaction to crises. I often wonder what makes one tragedy more appalling to people than another.