Farhad

“Anytime in Berlin, I tell people I’m a student, because when you say ‘refugee’ they look at you differently,” said Farhad, an engineer from Iran. He speaks six languages (Farsi, English, German, Turkish, Russian, and Ukrainian) and, when we met, was still looking for work. The refugee shelter where he was staying was far outside the city, far from public transportation. But he still made the effort to come in regularly to look for work and to study. // “Our German class, we are all refugees from different countries, a lot from African countries. We had a conversation with German students and the first thing a German girl told us was, ‘You refugees are coming here and we have to pay for you. You are not working here and taking money. We have to work for you.’ We all started to talk about it. Maybe now we need help. We are not working until we learn the language, and until we find the job. Of course, we will work and pay taxes.” // Farhad follows coverage of the migration crisis closely, he said, for his own good. “I am reading about it to learn about my life. I heard in Germany that the laws are changing frequently, and you have to be up to date with all these laws and all these changes.” For now, he lives in this tension between feeling boxed in as an asylum seeker and having patience that, with time, doors will open. // “I have to get used to this word and that kind of life.” // I saw Farhad a few months after our first meeting. He’d been volunteering at a Red Cross summer camp, and he was hopeful that he’d soon have an appointment for his residency permit. He’d also befriended a German couple living near his shelter. He still didn’t have a job, nor was he able to enroll in a university. But he hadn’t given up trying.