Sunday, October 11, 2015

A refugee among the hillbillies

An afternoon in late winter, slow, heavy clouds crawl towards the East over the German hills. What had started as drizzle is now rain, small, cold raindrops that feel like needles on the skin, not the fat, warm summer time rain drops the size of gumballs that bounce off the pavement and make bubbles as they hit the ground.

The country road is pretty busy this time of the day but nobody stops for the lone pedestrian with the two supermarket plastic bags about a mile outside of town. He walks at a purposeful, measured pace, not the hurried hunched over pace of someone heading for nearby shelter in the rain.

Leaving the town behind, he gave up on shelter, and the next houses along the way are at least two more miles down the open road.

As the cars and trucks pass him, more water envelopes the shopping bags, and they create small transient puddles and waves that slosh over his sneakers.

Several cars slow down a bit as they pass, and it is unclear if the drivers are thinking about giving him a ride or if they simply try to not splash too much.

No one stops.

As I pass, I set the blinker, slow down, and pull on to the shoulder some twenty yards in front of him.

In the rear view mirror, I can see he picks up his pace. He opens the car down, bends his tall frame down and smiles.

Where do you need to go, I ask in English. It's the logical thing to do when you run into a black person walking along a country road in the rain around here.

His response in fluent but not native English confirms what I had figured. He is a refugee from North Africa. Somalia, as it turns out as we chat once he has stashed his bags and settled into the passenger seat for the ride.

I resist making a joke about how walking in the winter rain in Germany sucks but probably still beats any day in the Somali civil war.

He tells me a little about himself, about how he shares an old house in one of the small towns with three others, all from North Africa but only one fellow Somalian.

As I let him out in front of the house, we agree to meet up for tea some time soon, and he offers to teach a bit of Arabic. He smiles and says we'll start with the word sugar, which comes from Arabic, and he is actually impressed when I say, yes, Spanish azucar, right?

This was several years ago, before Germans decided that #refugeeswelcome was the way to do it. He and the others moved away to the city since, and the old house has been demolished.

No Germans would want to live in a one hundred fifty year old house without central heating and tired plaster coming off the walls and the ceilings. 

Oddly enough, the recent much bigger wave of refugees still has not arrived in the hills. And this despite the fact that, unlike back then, there are lots of empty houses and apartments in the small towns an villages.

It remains unclear why the authorities are building big new shelters like one for 300 people twenty miles away instead of putting refugees into the communities in smaller numbers.

Note: Hillbillies is a nod to time in the Ozarks as well as a tongue in cheek reference to what appear to be some universal traits of mountain folks in different cultures.

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