Josephine Wender
10/15/25
BERLIN — After approximately an hour and a half of wandering the streets of Neukölln looking for anyone, anywhere willing to talk to us, Alex, my dejected classmate, and I head to “The Blue House,” owned by the non-profit Give Something Back to Berlin. Amid the chilly, misty fog – as the name suggests – a bright blue building emerges from the haze. Huddled around a small white table in The Blue House sit approximately fifteen people from all over the world, pouring tea into small ceramic cups and eating cherry tomatoes and blueberries from a white plastic bowl, all gathering to practice their English skills. Today, a Japanese film crew is there to film the evening’s programs.
Yara is from Russia, we learn. She left Russia at the beginning of the Ukraine War in order to escape the inevitability of her husband’s conscription. Her feelings about Germany are complicated, she explains. Berlin is more accepting than the smaller city of Hannover, but she still cannot find a job here. She likes German food, but her Ukrainian friends don’t. German apartments are weird, she says, because they come completely unfurnished, not even with lightbulbs in the sockets.
Sam is from Syria. He has been attending these English language table events for eight years and recently finished his linguistics PhD program in the UK. This is more than just a way to polish language skills, he asserts to newcomers. This is a way to meet and connect with an international community open to talking about the pains and joys of their everyday lives, forming a family. “There were even twenty students from the U.S. in a journalism program who visited a few years ago,” he exclaims to the film crew. As our class trip has been active for many years, we have a pretty good idea who those students could have been. We keep that to ourselves.
Najib is from Afghanistan. He has been in Germany for three years, prior to which he worked in the Afghan foreign ministry. He got to travel a lot in his old life, he muses with a smile. While working as a diplomat, he was able to visit Japan, India, Pakistan, China, and several countries in Africa. It is clear he misses the job. He is currently in the process of writing a book about Afghan diplomacy and how important it is for young people to learn about foreign affairs. He promises he will send it to me as soon as it is finished and translated into English. His kids aren’t with him and, despite his extensive experience and impressive resume, cannot get a job in Germany. So here he is, practicing his English and German in the hope that this can change. Still, he explains to me, there are positives and negatives to any country.
These events are weekly, with new groups of people descending upon The Blue House every seven days. At tonight’s language table sat Yara, Sam, and Najib. Chance would say that there is no reason these three would ever interact, yet alone share chuckles at the bureaucratic inefficacy of the German refugee system and bond over their shared love of Turkish kebabs. Still, tonight, here they sat, kindly sharing their stories with us and each other and therefore inducting Alex and me into this new family.
