On a recent blustery Sunday, I joined a tour group huddled by a schoolyard fence in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. A gust of wind pushed dead leaves across the basketball court as Ali, a Sudanese refugee, blew into his hands. He was showing us the Gerhart-Hauptmann School, an abandoned edifice from whose rooftop he had threatened to jump when, last summer, police tried to evict six hundred refugees who were living there. Ali continues to live at the school with twenty-three others; together with Mo, a guide from Somalia who was among the hundreds relocated from the school to a camp outside the city, he explained that the eviction effort had lasted more than nine days, involving more than seventeen hundred police officers and costing the city five million euros.

About a dozen of us were present outside the school, attracting uneasy glances from the security guards posted just inside the locked gate. We were participating in the inaugural outing of Refugee Voices, a donation-based “solidarity tour” that allows sympathetic locals and tourists a peek at Berlin’s subculture of asylum seekers and their allies. Other stops on our tour included Oranienplatz, a nearby square famous for activist gatherings, and Görlitzer Park, where young African refugees hang out and sell baggies of marijuana—for many newcomers the only work on offer. At each location, Ali and Mo shared stories of activism, police harassment, and efforts to study and find work. (All of the asylum seekers in this story asked to be identified only by their first names.)

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Hoppers Way in Singleton, Kent, is a quiet suburban cul-de-sac of red-brick detached houses, each with its own garage and driveway. Parked outside No 8, there is often a large white-and-grey camper van – a luxury Swift Kon-tiki 679 model, with a double bed in the back and another over the cab. Singleton is a suburb of Ashford, the last big town on the M20 as it approaches the Channel Tunnel entrance at Folkestone and a stopping point for Eurostar train services between London and the Continent. That makes it a convenient location for the rental business run by Teresa and Stephen Tyrer, who hire out the motorhome for £1,000 a week to people wishing to travel to Europe.

 

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