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Once Upon a Time I was 25 and in Beirut

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Once I was 25, once I was a master student in humanitarian assistance, finding myself in Beirut for the last semester. A friend asked me how I felt about the anniversary of the harbor explosion and the honest answer is this; whenever Lebanon pops up in the news, I wish the news would be better, and I also have ambiguous feelings about the country. May I share them?

It was the longest period of time I had spent in a foreign city. Beirut was a colorful postcard at a first glance, with its bright lights and turquoise beaches. But there were dark sides beneath. This was a year before the Israeli summer war, when many of the young people I had met left for Dubai; before the Arab spring; and way before the harbor explosion wounded an already wounded country.

The men I met all had blackberrys and wanted to drive nice cars. Topics among most of the girls were eyebrows and when to get married. I rarely felt a connection. Not that this would have been necessary; I experienced a fatigue among the young, educated population, with the foreign students coming to Lebanon to do their thing (“gender projects in the Palestinian camps!”; “photography and community development!”), and it was hard to blame them. There’s a self righteousness among many young, white activists that can be hard to digest.

I also found myself disappointed in the world of NGO, at least in Lebanon, where the influx of foreign funding seemed to do as much harm as it did good. Having been so passionate about my field, making it to a prestigious master program, I lost some hope in the role development aid had in supporting a society towards positive change. Yes, there was poverty and despair in the Palestinian camps and among the many very poor Lebanese. Yes, there were a number of internationally funded projects to improve the situation. And the equation between the two rarely made up. Corruption; different actors getting the most they could off inconsistent funding; donors with suspicious agendas – it was all news to a 25 year old idealist.

The autumn seemed to consist of electricity cuts; people who didn’t keep their promises; men I weren’t into who tried to ask me out or invite themselves to my flat; and corrupt NGOs contributing to the inflation that made it hard for most Lebanese people to make a living.

Beirut was as inconsistent in its appearance. The nightclubs, the breathtaking mountains, the hardcore religious preachers, the sectarian hatred that seemed to creep in anywhere. Well-off youngsters spent hundreds of dollars on vodka and cocaine in one night in Gemmayze street; while in the poor suburbs, people worked 12 hour shifts for ten dollars a day, cockroaches ruled the blocks and sewage water overflowed the streets.

I made friends with some Swedish-Lebanese families that had moved back to Lebanon, and the comfort was a relief (that, and a burned cd of Kanye West’s Late Registration, purchased in the black market in Cola bus station); I often found myself hanging out in their living rooms.

Then I was preparing to wrap up my field study for my master thesis; focusing on the outcomes of dialogues among university students from different sectarian groups, and head back home. And then, after months of ignoring men’s phone calls to my Nokia 1110, I fell head over heels, stumbling in to an unfamiliar feeling of anxiety and euphoria. One of the Swedish-Lebanese moms cautioned me; “There are many guys here, be careful who you choose. There will be differences, you know.” But this one, I was sure, was special.

Still I remember the details; the leather jacket, shiny black hair, spotless skin and a hoarse voice. I would have fallen for his type in any part of the world. I can still point out which table at the Hamra bar we once shared our secrets at.

We hung out as friends. He shared my values. He was educated, from a well off family – and a communist. He’d taken classes in domestic violence, even educated me on the subject. But most of all: he listened to me. Was interested in what I had to say. And he seemed to like me, too. He smoked a certain type of cigarettes that I liked but didn’t know where to get.

“I won’t tell you where I buy them”, he said with a grin, “so you’ll have to meet me every day before you go home.”

At the same time, my research among students who had taken part of coexistence dialogues, showed me a different side of Lebanon. Many of the students I interviewed were non prestigious and down to earth. It started to seem possible, what I had been longing for. People who spoke of things like coexistence, peace with Israel, staying in Lebanon, contributing to the positive development of the country. I started to regain trust in this beautiful country; that it was possible for it to heal and corruption to be fought by the young, enthusiastic people I had met; and I also regained hope in the fact that international funding could make a difference.

The night of my flight, he came over to the simple, overpriced studio I rented. We spent some hours talking before a car was going to pick me up at midnight. Having given most of my stuff to the Syrian janitor who lived with his wife and five kids in a single room at the bottom floor, the flat was bare, my bags packed. I asked him to read a short story of Hanan al-Shaykh and give me his opinion, and we discussed it. Neither one dared making the move. After we had hugged goodbye and he’d left, it took around 15 or 20 minutes of thoughts like it’s not necessary, just drop it – then I picked up the Nokia cellphone.

“I forgot to tell you something. Can you come back?”

Within a few minutes he was at my door and before I knew it, I was in his arms. We kissed, carefully, for what felt like an eternity, while the clock was ticking fast towards midnight.

From the view of my balcony, I watched him disappear down the Hamra street, into the foggy December night. He smoked a cigarette and his leather jacket was open. He raised his face towards the sky and the rain, closing his eyes as if he was in a dream. I felt I was in one, too. All the disappointment that had gathered inside of me had seemed to vanish.

Tears started flowing when on the airplane. It wasn’t the first or last time a man made me cry from one airport to another (and this man would make me cry on flights again, which I didn’t know at the time); but this one felt different. It was like soulmates meeting each other in a lost place. I wondered if I would ever see him again. And I would, even though it would take several years.

I still believed in love; love as a force greater than long distances, cultural differences – and that the fast money and lifestyle of Dubai wouldn’t change someone for the worse.

That was a beautiful, childlike belief. Whenever Lebanon pops up in the news today, I wish I hadn’t heard the bad news. I wish that memory could have been my very last memory of him, and of Lebanon. I wish I could have had that belief forever.

I Hope That The New IS Members are Not Any of My Former Students. Each and Every Time I Hope.

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All the time reports on new Islamic State members from Europe pop up in the news, and all the time I hope that they are not any of my former students from my time as a substitute teacher in the projects in Sweden. I try to see the positive in things and I have previously shared sunny stories from my time as a teacher, but when I read about a new young Swede having joined IS I always feel a sting of despair and I go online try to see if it’s one of my former students. This frustration of how we in my own country – the best country in the world, in my opinion – are now losing our young ones to IS sometimes spills over, and today I need to vent.

Teaching Swedish as a second language to children in the underprivileged parts of the city years ago, I knew we would lose most of the kids to poverty and drugs, it was an equation almost impossible to battle. Children should be the society’s main priority; our pride and joy; we should invest each and every penny in their well-being, but the case was the opposite. The area where I taught was the kind of area where buildings are falling apart in the hands of slumlords, infested with cockroaches, where gangs are ruling the blocks; the kind of area white hipsters move into because it’s cool to show solidarity with underprivileged people, then quickly move out of after their first robbery or the first homicide nearby.

The vast majority of the children were immigrants living under unfair conditions. They were often children of refugees with untreated traumas – several of them had themselves survived or had parents who had survived massacres in certain countries. The majority of the parents were on welfare. Some of them were violent to their kids. Me and most of my colleagues did what we could, but we had very little instructions from the management on how to deal with the social problems we encountered, and we had to try our own ways. Some became overly personal, gave the kids their private number and let them call at any time of the day. Others took on an authoritarian approach and cracked down on every single misconduct.

For me my work was not facilitated by the fact that I was myself a working poor, paid by the hour as a sub and therefore having to work evening shifts teaching adult classes just to pay my bills. Maybe needless to say, I was myself often running on empty, distressed by the inability of not being able to give the children what they needed, because they needed so much. This was at the time hard to verbalise since I, just like my colleagues, was trying to keep up hope, keeping my successes close to my heart. So instead of touching base with these feelings I usually put on a pair of hand-me-down heels, mixed water with my mascara to make it last longer, and hit one of the clubs where I knocked back the feelings of powerlessness with a cheap drink, trying to forget that the society that I represented as a white, Swedish teacher had nothing, often absolutely nothing, to offer these kids, my kids.

And here we are, several years later, with the murder machine of IS showing us how desperately we have failed some of our young immigrant kids, my kids.

A new news is coming up about a Swedish IS member, this time it’s a young man in his early 20s from the project were I taught, and I search on Facebook to see if it’s one of my former students. I hold my breath. I google. No, it’s not one of them. Not this time. I can breathe. Until next time, next news. Next battle about a precious young person that we have lost.

My Own Private Light in the Global Darkness

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The last weeks were bad weeks for all of us who believe in peace and coexistence. Hell, it’s been a bad year so far. There was the terrorist attack in Tunisia and new reports of young people from Europe being groomed to join IS. A new IS member highlighted in the Swedish news supposedly comes from the projects in Malmö in Sweden, where I once worked as a substitute teacher. Maybe he is one of my former students?

Even though my teaching job was several years ago, I remember my students well and still run in to them downtown sometimes. Unfortunately very few of them have been able to break the cycle of poverty and alienation. I know some of the boys I used to teach are now in jail, and the girls, now young women, I often see pushing strollers outside the discount store, married early and on welfare. And now we are starting to loose some of our young ones to the terror machine of IS. If the new Swedish recruit is one of my former students, this would be almost unbearable to know.

But then last week something happened in my own life, something surprising, that turned things around. Since it’s been a bad year for most of us believers this year, I decided to share the story with you.

On the evening train a young woman sat herself opposite of me. A classy girl, one of those I always envy: nice jacket, glossy hair, carrying a trendy, cream-colored bag full of books and papers. She kept peeking at me from her side of the small table. Suddenly she spoke to me, asked something about a school.

“What?” I unplugged my headphones.

“Were you a teacher in… (the school were I used to teach)?”

“Yeah, I was”, I answered, surprised. “Why?”

“You were my teacher.”

“Your teacher?”

When she said her name, I couldn’t believe it. Was this really she, the young and angry girl that had once been one of my students? I remembered her well: a girl that had possessed the mix of sharp intelligence and inability to make use of her talent. She had confidence, I remember how she in an essay called “My Dream Job” wrote that she wanted to be the Prime Minister of Sweden, whilst other girls wrote that they wanted to marry a football player. But most of her energy she put into fighting with other students and bullying teachers, instead of her schoolwork.

We leaned over the small table between us and hugged. I asked where she was going on the train.

“I’ve been to uni, I commute.”

“You’re at university?”

“Yeah, I study engineering, first year.”

Within seconds, words spilled out. She was studying a bachelor’s engineering program in another city. It was long hours and hard work but she really liked it. After junior high school where I had taught her, she had wanted to get away from the projects and applied to a new high school in the other end of the city. She had coerced her mom to sign the school application.

“My mom didn’t realize why it was better there. You know, she didn’t go to school herself.”

The daughter of uneducated refugees from Kurdistan, she had started a school where everyone else had well-off parents. She had to study more than full time in order to keep up with the other students. Her grammar, vocabulary, everything had been at a much lower level than her peers’. It had been three years of tears and hard studying, and from her family she couldn’t receive any help, but she didn’t cave in. When graduating high school she had the grades to enter university. She stilled lived with her family in the projects, they hadn’t been able to move out, but she wasn’t in touch with anyone of her old classmates. When I asked about the kids that had been in her class – I was curious to know about them – she didn’t know.

“But what about Mohammed?” (one of her best friends, not his real name)

She shrugged.

“I stopped hanging out with all of them. They drained me on my energy. Most of them didn’t finish high school and… I wanted to move on with my life.”

We spoke of politics and she delivered her own opinion about IS and the women’s rights situation in Kurdistan. She asked about me and I said where I have been working – she was thrilled to hear I have been working in Kurdistan. She told of her own plans for the future:

“I might go for a master directly after my program. As a women they’ll always regard me as less than men in this business, you know what engineering is like, so I need to have twice the competence of the men who apply for the same jobs.”

When the train stopped and we went off, she hugged me and wished me good luck for the future. Soon she had disappeared in the early darkness of the March evening, I watched her bouncy ponytail as she disappeared. She, the girl with so little chances who had made it so far, had wished me good luck for the future. It used to be the other way around.

Of course I didn’t tell her, but that evening, she was my light in the global darkness. No matter how far IS will advance, or where European terrorists will strike next time, my former student will still be my light, a hope to hang on to. One million dollars couldn’t beat that feeling.

Sahab – Swedish-Iraqi Counselor with a Different Approach

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When Sahab Saheb started her therapy service Authentic Dialogues she had decided that she wanted to offer counseling in three languages: Swedish, Arabic and English. At 32 years old with a master’s degree in social work and sexology, she wanted to offer her counseling services to such a wide range of clients as possible.

“There’s a challenge in working in different languages,” she says. “But I wanted to use my full potential.”

I wanted to write about Sahab not only because of her interesting character as a Swedish-Iraqi woman, but also since her approach to counseling seemed different. According to her, psychological counseling should be accessible and of low cost. Based in Malmö, Sweden, she also offers counseling via Skype, and on her website, under description of fees, it states: “Fee reductions are available for people on low incomes and this can be negotiated on an individual basis”.

The aspect of wanting to reach out to the many Arabic speaking people in Sweden is not a coincidence. In her master thesis Sahab researched an integration project for Arab immigrants, where she examined factors that determined the effectiveness of the program. The thesis published this year and is titled “Transformation of newcomers, responsibilities and consequences. An evaluation of the project ‘Newcomers, Shortest path’” (Malmö University, Faculty of Health and Society, Department of Social Work). The research gave her new insights in the world of social work and psychological assistance. Through the research she met many immigrants who tried to integrate themselves in Sweden and learned about the challenges they faced.

“The most important aspect is the gap between the experience from the home country and Sweden. The main difference between the two countries is the role that the state plays. People from the Middle East, Syria for example, come from a society where the state has a very negative reputation. People associate the state with fear and betrayal, and it’s not responsible for the individual’s welfare and personal development. Here in Sweden, the state is in charge of everything and a lot of mistrust is going on (from the newly arrived immigrants, my comment) that the Swedish authorities have no clue about.”

In contrast with some other Western countries, where immigrants that have received asylum are left on their own to find housing and work, sometimes with help from voluntary organizations, Swedish authorities offer a roof-over-the-head-guarantee and financial assistance until the person is able to provide for him. However, the choices of where to live or what to do (financial assistance requires the person to take part of mandatory Swedish classes or work programs in return) become reduced to a minimum when being dependent on the system, which many are until they have learned enough Swedish to manage on their own.

Having seen the clash between the Swedish society and the newly arrived immigrants and how the society sometimes fails to help people who suffer from traumas and psychological illnesses, Sahab wanted to create her own service instead of being part of the system.

“The professionalism of the Swedish bureaucracy has a distanced approach to people, and this approach is by many immigrants perceived as something personal against them, it becomes the only thing that the immigrant experience during the first years in Sweden. Even if we have to carry out the integration aspect through the institutions, since this is the way it works in Sweden, we have to implement more of a personal reception since these persons come from a society where there are stronger bonds between people. We shouldn’t dehumanize people the way the system sometimes does now.”

Still, the failures of the system served as an incentive for her to contribute with what she believed would be the best way to help people with psychological problems from experiences of war and terror.

“Instead of being bitter over the fact that I can’t implement what I think is right, I wanted to start my own thing to help people in a way that I believe in”, she says. “If we learn how to be more empathetic we’ll have better dialogues and a stronger society.”

The therapy Sahab offers is based on the existential humanistic psychology, which she says pays respect to people’s own inner potential and responsibility for their actions.

“I wanted to work with counselling that derives from an equal dialogue between the therapist and the patient. I believe that an illness in the society is that we don’t communicate between each other. I believe that this therapy is very helpful since you can carry it with you the whole life and apply it to new relationships. In the therapy you help people to have more confidence in themselves so that they can take more initiative and thereby enhance their own self-esteem.”

She emphasizes that it’s still important not to see people as solely traumatized and damaged individuals, since people have a lot to offer that you can encourage and build on.

“You also have to be very careful in how you create a dialogue with people who come from traumatized societies,” she says. “This therapy is non-directive, there is no right or wrong, it’s up to the client how he or she thinks. I believe this is very important in a multi-cultural society where people have different values. This will create less guilt and insecurity.”

I ask her how she deals with people that might have twisted or reversed values as they come from countries where war or a repressive state have been prevailing for so long that it affects the persons and their personal values. What does she say to them if they have internalized what they have seen and for example believe that violence is justified?

“Even if I tell this person that this and that is wrong it won’t help him if he doesn’t realize this himself.  We need to understand why the person has chosen to believe in this, because it’s a defense mechanism. And the less we use our defense mechanisms, the more we get out of life.”

She adds:

“I believe in this small effect. If we help one person, we will also help many others that will exist down that person’s road.”

So what is her dream with her service, which she recently started earlier this year? She laughs when I ask the question.

“I don’t believe that much in dreams, I believe in being present in the moment and enjoy that. I try not to be too much in the future, my challenge right now is to be able to assist people in need of help. And well… maybe sometime in the future I’ll be able to work together with other people, who want to work in the same way I do.”

Photo copyright: Sahab Saber

To get in touch with Sahab please visit her website: authenticdialogues.com

Nazis Attempting Murder on Leftist Activists in Sweden

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http://www.sydsvenskan.se/malmo/fjarde-misstankt-pekas-ut-for-mordforsoken/The morning of yesterday, March 9, us Swedes woke up to horrible news. The celebrations of the international women’s day in Malmö had ended with demonstrators being attacked and stabbed by Swedish nazis in my city of Malmö. That’s right, my city. The news made it as far as to Al Jazeera.

Having held a legal demonstration around midnight to manifest women’s right to security, six activists were jumped by nazis when the former reportedly (note that details might vary in different media right now) went out from a pub and accidently stumbled upon the activists.

One of the activists, Showan Shattak, had been active in the supporter club of Malmö’s football league MFF. I knew who Showan was, I was once introduced to him by his brother, and he struck me as a quiet and serious guy. I didn’t know that he became a public person by speaking up against racism and homophobia within the supporter club. According to the vice president of MFF, Jonas Nirfalk, Showan was well known by the nazis and Nirfalk believes they took the chance to stab him when they ran into him. Among the activists Showan was the one being subject to the most brutal abuse; he is now anesthetized in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Time will tell if he will survive.

Thousands of people have gathered to show support for Showan, demonstrations has been held against racism and hate crimes. But a young man is still in the intensive care unit, with no guarantee of survival, because of his fight against racism. Maybe his immigrant background mattered, too?

I love my country, I will always stick with that, but this is not good. This is bad. Really bad.

Photocredit: sydsvenskan.se

Our Absolutely Amazing Arabic-Swedish Network

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I’ve been volunteering for NGOs since my university years but I never thought I would start one myself one day; starting NGOs are for career driven young people, not the former high school dropout whose best day is spent tanning at the beach. But sometimes life takes you crazy places.

Back in 2010 I wanted people to practice my Arabic skills with and I found myself with no close Arab friends in my city of Malmö. Around the world language exchange meetings is a big thing and in Malmö you can for example practice French every other week, but Arabic seemed not to be on the agenda – despite the many Arab inhabitants of Malmö and the huge possibility of exchange. Complaining to a friend, she told me about an Arabic speaking girl she had met.

“I think she would be up for it,” my friend said. “Why don’t you send a message?”

This other girl was up for the idea and slowly me and her started to scrape together people to our language exchange meetings, held in Sunday afternoons in different coffee shops. Sometimes it was just her and I, waiting for people who didn’t show up.  But we stayed put, spread the word among our friends, posted online, and by time more people dropped in. When all the emails and text messages got too much we finally decided to start a Facebook page to coordinate the activities. The Arabic-Swedish Network was born.

We are now more than 240 members in the Facebook group and new people join every week. We have no rules for membership other than that you have to be nice to each other; you don’t need to have speak certain level of Arabic or Swedish to join, if you speak none of the languages you can just join in and start from scratch (hey,  there’s too many rules in the Swedish society anyways). New people who has arrived in Sweden and found the group online, takes the opportunity to introduce themselves on the wall and then shows up on the next meeting. As we are so many members nowadays people set up their own events: poetry and sheesha nights, dinner parties, breakfast meetings. I know of many who think Sweden is a difficult place to make new friends and getting in touch with Swedish people – our network is an exception.

Since November this year the Arabic-Swedish network is a registered NGO, we figured it was a good idea since we spend most of our free time on the network anyways; our homepage you’ll find here. Now where will this unplanned NGO go next? I don’t know, but if you’re around, drop in on any of our events – I guarantee you’ll have a good time.

Photo: Copyright Sweden and the Middle East Views Blog

Workshop for Young Female Filmmakers from Egypt and Sweden

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MAFF

Malmö Arab Film Festival, (MAFF) that I have previously blogged about, is now launching a workshop for young female filmmakers from Sweden and Egypt on the theme “Women in Egypt During and After the Revolution“. During September 2-8 the workshop is held in Malmö, Sweden for the ten chosen film makers; five from each country.

The mix of film makers from both country will be a very special opportunity – both countries has a tradition of theatre and movie making and in Egypt young women has made their way onto the international stage through movies such as “Cairo Six, Seven, Eight“, a controversial movie about sexual harassments of women in Egypt, who’s lead actor Nelly Karim presented the movie at last year’s MAFF.

Are you interested or do you know anyone that is? Apply or share the information! For more information on criterias to apply click here.

Two White Women Buying a Table from an Iraqi Family

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On a rainy November evening a few years ago, me and my flatmate took a bus to the other end of our city to buy a second hand couch table we had seen an ad for online. We were scraping together to buy things to furnish our flat going all over the city to collect second hand furniture from richer people that traded off their old stuff, and we were happy to finally afford a table for our living room. It was a long way to go to this neighborhood, where small houses replaced the rental flats in our area, and we searched for a while before finding the house. A pretty little brick house with an accompanying garden, was supposedly the correct place according to the address we had been provided with.

As we rang the doorbell a small boy opened. “My mom is coming” he said, then adding, unasked: “She only speaks little Swedish.”

A woman dressed in a black abaya appeared in the doorway, introducing herself in broken Swedish. We realized it was an Iraqi family that we had come across. It was obviously not one of the Baghdadi families, liberal in the urban kind of way – it was a conservative, religious family we could tell from the woman’s appearance and the religious scripts on the wall. We were surprised, then felt stupid being surprised. Why couldn’t a conservative Iraqi family stay in this upper middle class area? Here we were: two white women still buying second hand furniture because we couldn’t afford the new things, still sharing a flat in what someone could have called a “socially deprived area” where water leaks in the house made our flat smell of mold, and shootings was such a regular happening it hardly made headlines. Your own prejudices can have a way of coming back and slap you in the face sometimes.

The woman introduced us to the tables they were selling off and we chatted a bit. It turned out they were from Diwaniya, a city in Southern Iraq, and had arrived to Sweden a few years before. Selling all they had in Iraq before fleeing the escalating violence, and her husband starting to work as soon as they had arrived, after a while buying a small candy shop, had made them being able to buy themselves the house and put their children in nearby reputable schools.

Her husband and his brother came home, we agreed on a table on a price, then it was time for us to go. The woman started to propose that we had to drink tea first, we must be tired from the long bus ride. Or maybe eat something before leaving? We explained we were in a hurry and that we had to call a taxi to transport the heavy table to our place.

“Taxi?” the man asked. “You don’t have a car?”

“No.”

None of us actually even had a driving license, but we withheld that so as not having to lower ourselves even more in the eyes of the sellers – we had already told them the area we lived in. Without further discussion the man and his brother carried the table to their car, announcing they would bring us home.The woman kissed us both goodbye and, when we declined tea or dinner a second time, welcomed us back anytime. None of the people we had bought our furniture from had been that nice.

We squeezed into the car (damn, it was even a Volvo) with the brother of the husband and the big table, and at our house he helped us to carry the table into our living room. When he had left we looked at each other, baffled. It had been a trip of surprises, not only over who stayed in the house, but over the ride. None of our fellow Swedish countrymen would ever have done us that favour.

Photo: Copyright Sweden and the Middle East Blog

What Iraqis Think About Sweden

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Irakier i sverigeSince the American invasion and the following gradual collapse of Iraq, many Iraqis has applied for asylum in Sweden and in 2007 constituted the largest group of asylumseekers among the many different nationalities that applied.

In my city Malmö, sometimes called “Little Baghdad”, many Iraqis have settled and formed their own communities. In small shops in the middle of our city you can now find things like halal meat, wonderful carrot-marmelade with 80% sugar (that Swedish health freaks would report to the police if they could) and other products that I would find in my local baqala in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. Globalization is a great thing when you can find your favourite marmelade from another part of the world in your own hometown.

Host communities usually has opinions about newcomers, but I think the other way around can be more interesting. Iraq I dare to say is quite the antithesis of Sweden: a large country with a weak central state, where religion plays a major role for many, hospitality is highly valued and your family is the main social network to rely on. The clash is quite big for some – Sweden being very secular with a strong legal system where many people can feel controlled by the authorities; from the housing market to the humiliating procedures at the unemployment agency. If I ask though I might not receive the true answer – critizicing someone’s home country being such a taboo for most people. But what does Iraqis really think about Sweden?

A while ago I joined this interesting Facebook page, “Iraqis in Sweden“, to see what was going on. The group is nicely illustrated by a Swedish and an Iraqi flag intertwined, with updates in both languages. On the page news about Sweden and Iraq are posted, often in an informative way about Sweden. One of managers of the page, Mohammad, tells me that the aim of the page was to create a meeting point for Iraqis in Sweden/Europe and that the group aims to serve people who might need help in Sweden, for example legal assistance or to rent a flat. Quite a nice idea, isn’t it, especially if you think about the many hate groups online, dedicated to bring down other people?

Checking the updates, one post caught my attention: “What advantages/disadvantages are there in the Swedish culture/society do you think?” The answers to this post arrived quickly.

“That everyone pretends to be PERFECT while they’re worth nothing!” one man writes, the comment getting three likes.

Someone replies:

“There is no disadvantages everyone goes his own way, and there’s nothing better than the Swedish society!!” Two exclamation marks, 15 likes.

Other people add upp to the bad list: the politicans, the wheather, there is no summer, it’s hard to find a job. Then another one, the profile picture showing the face of a young woman in a hijab, comes up with a long, reflective post:

“There are both advantages and disadvantages in each society and this is the case for the Swedish society. But I think that the advantages in the Swedish society are more than the disadvantages (…) The RESPECT, FREEDOM, EQUALITY (social), HELPFUL etc… The disadvantages are that parents have some problems raising their children here since the parents wants to raise them according to their traditions/religion. This often leads to a big problem that in its turn is a big disadvantage!! Me myself I have all love and respect for SWEDEN”

Who knew that such a subject could bring on such strong feelings? I wouldn’t, if Ihadn’t found this page. Or as a post reads when scrolling up to another heated discussion: “Do you think you can say anything just because now you’re in Sweden?”

Well on this page, obviously yes. And what better is, everyone gets to share their views without censorship or feeling held back. How I love the dynamics of the diversity sometimes. In Iraq or in Sweden.

Photo credit: Irakier i Sverige

We Hate Refugees

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UNHCR poster

I’m in Beirut, Lebanon. One thing has changed since I was here the last time: the refugees. Everywhere, children in plastic shoes and torn clothes selling chewing gum; women on the brink of exhaustion slowly dragging around their children, asking for money, then falling asleep in street corners as as the night falls, tucking their children under their abayas.

“Don’t be humanitarian now”, my Lebanese friend said when a young boy approached me. “There are so many of them, you’ll never be able to help them all.”

Sweden complain on how many Syrian refugees that has been applying for asulym the last year, and as an escape route, issued only temporary three-year-residence permits in the hope of being able to send everyone back later on. Well Swedish authorities should visit the neighbouring countries of the source of conflict – these are always the ones that carries the greatest burden of refugees. Nevertheless the authorities of my country are not the only ones that doesn’t want the refugees. In Turkey, they are locked up in camps next to the border, suffering under horrible conditions, so that they won’t travel to the inland and bother the local population. Why don’t we just admit it, that we all hate refugees? We never seem to reflect upon the fact that it could have been us that had to flee our homes.

When I was on my own again another small, dirty boy approached me, holding out packets of chewing gum.

“We’re sleeping on the street miss, we live in the street, we have nothing to eat.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

I tucked a few bills in his hand, hoping noone saw. I know I’m a stupid humanitarian person, but I just can’t be a part of the rejection – at least not all of the time.

Photo credit: UNHCR