Interactions

In addition to being present at the Fürstenfeldbruck Caritas camp, our group also worked with the related Fürstenfeldbruck field office. At this office, migrants who were granted their rights to stay in Germany are provided the opportunity for assistance with counselors. These counselors help in similar ways to those at the Caritas camp, such as reading mail and providing contacts to various services in Germany, but also help with coordinating things like job searching.  

A poignant aspect I noticed while listening to the staff talk and introduce themselves is that a few of them were migrants at one point too. Furthermore, listening to them interact with clients with their own migration backgrounds in mind made me feel a strange mix of pride and sadness FOR them. The only way I can explain how it looked and felt to watch someone who was at one point helpless now helping others fight for the same help is by saying the catch-all phrase that encompasses an indescribable moment: you had to be there.  

Some of the information divulged by the clients I was able to sit in with was stomach-churning. These men and women are often escaping violence that we could never fathom happening to us. Many women uprooted their entire lives, with their children, alone, to make the dangerous attempt of escaping their native country in hope for a better life. Many of them are uneducated and previously dependent on a male; yet still, they made the uncertain journey into a foreign country to save their children.  

Perhaps the most memorable experience of the entire trip for me was when sitting in on an appointment with a single mother and her two young boys. In a matter of half an hour, these two twin boys went from playing with themselves in the corner to openly baiting me to play with them. Without language or sense of who each other was, we spent 10 minutes connected as nothing more than human beings playing tag and laughing. These two boys had no sense of how we were different—perhaps only that I looked three times their size; however, they treated me just as they treated their mother and how their mother treated them. By the end they beckoned for hugs, and then another round of hugs, and then another.  

It was the purest example of raw love for another human being I have ever experienced. Meanwhile, their mother was sitting a couple feet away with tired eyes, working tirelessly with her counselor to get her third child back from a place she didn’t know.