On a gray Tuesday evening in Berlin’s Neukölln district, the living room of the Blue House was filled with a cozy light and the murmur of diverse people. A dozen people gather around a long table: refugees, volunteers, and students practicing English. Sam Alabiad smiled engagingly at everyone around him. 

He was excited to share his story after I introduced myself and told him I was a student journalist. His expressions did not betray the challenges he’d faced, which I’d come to learn as the night progressed. 

When Sam arrived in Berlin in 2017, he was thirty years old, trained in linguistics, and already twice displaced. In 2016, he had fled Syria for Turkey, hoping to find safety and academic work. “It was unstable,” he recalled. “After the coup attempt, we were always worried, are they going to deport us?” He’s referring to the 2016 failed coup attempt against Erdogan and the crackdown on civilians that ensued. A friend in Germany told him to try for a research visa. “I didn’t want to cross the sea. I didn’t want to risk it,” he said, about those fleeing to Greece in flimsy rafts.  So he found a short-term research post in Arabic linguistics, packed his degree, and flew to Berlin.

The visa lasted six months. After it expired, Turkey’s laws forbade him from returning for five years. “I was stuck,” he said simply. “So I applied for asylum.”

What followed was not a single moment of arrival, but a slow, grinding negotiation with bureaucracy. Germany’s asylum process can take months or years; in Sam’s case, it took eight. He learned that even refugees with degrees and language skills face systemic barriers: recredentialing requirements, certification processes, and waiting lists. “If you want to teach in Germany,” he said, “you must teach two subjects. I could teach English, but not only English. They told me, ‘You need to do another bachelor’s degree.’ Another three years of study. I thought; Why?”

When I spoke to Philipp Jaschke, a policy researcher at Germany’s Institute for Employment Research, he nodded knowingly at Sam’s story. “And it’s often hard for, especially for refugees, but generally for migrants, because Germany is, I would say it’s unique with this vocational education system. If people apply, often they get a decision and then okay, ‘we approve part of your qualification.’”

“And so they tell you you need to prove practice in this and that and that and that and you need to go to school to learn in theory this and this and this. So it’s super complicated.”

In other words, integration in Germany isn’t only about learning the language; it’s about navigating institutional bureaucracy. “Everything here is on paper,” Sam said. “Letters, letters, letters. If you don’t know the language, you can’t survive the bureaucracy.” He relied on friends to translate documents and accompany him to offices, each visit another performance of legitimacy: am I educated enough, fluent enough, deserving enough to settle here?

He spent three years studying German intensively. “From zero to C1,” he said, shaking his head, referring to the European grade system for languages. “Three years of my life were just that.” When the pandemic hit, Berlin shut down. Classes went online; language schools closed; temporary teaching gigs vanished. “Two years without a job,” he said. “I was just at home.”

Finally, after six years of uncertainty, Sam found a stable position teaching English at a private school. “Now, when I apply for a job,” he said, smiling faintly, “they actually call me for an interview.”

For many in Berlin’s refugee community, the harder struggle comes not in the classroom but at home; literally. Housing in Berlin is a battle, even for Germans. For immigrants, it’s worse. “I spent two years searching for a flat,” Sam said. “Every day, every night. You apply, you go to viewings, you bring all your papers.” At open houses, he’d line up with dozens of others, clutching a folder: passport, residence permit, bank statements, a government letter guaranteeing rent payments. “And still,” he said, “they see ‘job center’ on the paper and say, ‘They won’t give you the flat.’”

Berlin’s rental market has become so competitive that underground brokers offer “black market” placements: sometimes more than €5,000. “I know people who paid under the table just to get a flat,” Sam said. “The government knows it exists. But what can they do? People are desperate.”

He eventually found his first real apartment thanks to a German friend’s mother, who vouched for him in person. “She told the landlord, ‘If he doesn’t pay, I will,’” Sam said. “That’s how I got the flat.”

The loneliness was harder to solve. “People say Berlin is open, multicultural,” Sam said. “That’s true: but only if you’re a party person. If you like bars, nightclubs, you’ll find people. I’m not that person.” For him, community meant the language cafés, the Sunday meetups, the Blue House, where volunteers and refugees trade words and stories. “This is my social life,” he said. “German people are not very open. Even your neighbors; you don’t know them. They live in their own bubbles.”

He laughed softly. “In England, they say people are cold. But the Germans are another level. To grab a coffee with a friend, you must schedule one month in advance.”

Today, Sam’s life is stable on paper: full-time job, apartment, friends, legal status. But stability, he said, isn’t the same as ease. The journey to Berlin was just the start of a years-long fight to truly take root and feel at home in Berlin. In the Blue House, where volunteers and newcomers trade stories in slow English, he finds a gome. Here, no one asks for papers. They ask where you’re from, what brought you here, and how you’re doing this week. People arrive from everywhere, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Turkey, and learn to make the city livable together.

When Deb first mentioned embedded reporting in class last week and specifically pointed to my own travels to conduct interviews for my project, I must admit I didn’t immediately grasp what she meant. However, after reading Doornbos’s reporting in Ukraine, Dickerson’s work in the Darién Gap, and listening to Mariana Baran’s In the Dark podcast about the Haditha massacre, I began to truly understand what embedded journalism is and why it matters so deeply.

Embedding reporting somewhat takes away the divide between journalist and subject, and reminds the reader that at the end of the day, they are both just people. The removal of that divide I think is necessary in this type of reporting otherwise a story cannot reach its full potential. 

What makes embedded stories stand out to me is that they can’t be told  from afar. Just as we want our loved ones present for life’s most meaningful moments, great journalism sometimes requires being physically present. Like Miriam and Raphi’s journey to Gummersbach, I found it necessary to travel to stadiums and soccer matches myself.  Otherwise, journalism risks becoming mere hearsay, no better than tabloids. Through embedded reporting, more trust is needed, which ultimately results in greater credibility.

Baran’s persistence in the In the Dark podcast especially stood out to me. I was struck by how she and Parker Yesko went door-to-door to interview Marines, even when confronted with signs reading, “No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.” It felt almost movie-like when Baran drove through West Virginia searching for Colonel Gregory Watt, who led the first investigation into Haditha, and in the process lost cell service, getting lost, and even had to ask locals for directions. I was also curious how much flexibility her editors gave her; after all those FOIA requests stalled, many editors might have told her to move on. Yet it seems she had the backing to keep pushing, which ultimately allowed her to uncover something powerful.

Every story takes time, but with embedded journalism, excellence often comes at the cost of years of persistence. Should this level of commitment be the standard or should embedded journalism be able to happen with quicker turnarounds? Perhaps we already see glimpses of it when broadcast journalists report live from the scenes of car crashes or school shootings.

From these works, it’s clear that embedded journalism is for reporters who are gritty and unafraid to get dirt or even blood on their hands, both literally and figuratively. To me, it also raised questions of when that divide between journalist and subject narrows, does the power dynamic shift, and do the chances of exploitation from the journalist grow stronger or weaker?

A car riddled with dark holes is parked in the middle of a plaza in Berlin. Smoke billows from its shattered windows, partially obscuring the occupants inside. Out of one hazy window, a hand stretches. Its sleeve is stained with red. 

The installation, set up in Alexanderplatz, memorializes Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who the Israeli Defense Forces killed in a car alongside her family. A crowd of onlookers surrounds the car, peering into its shattered windows or reading the plaques that tell Rajab’s story. 

Clad in a blue reflective vest and wearing a Palestine-shaped pendant and a black headscarf, Assil El Haj Hussein weaves through the crowd, watching for any disruptors. A 24-year-old student living in Berlin, Assil encounters them often while monitoring vigils as a volunteer for the cultural organization Generation Palestine. “They are waiting for us to be aggressive,” she said. Assil has learned to not take the bait. “I’m not going to put more gas on fire. I’m like, ‘okay, we can talk about it.’”

The skill of communication under pressure is one that Assil has learned from a young age. Growing up as a third-generation Palestinian in a country that views the protection of Israel as its “reason of state,” Assil has navigated an upbringing where expressing her identity could lead to ostracization, but staying silent would mean complicity in the erasure of her culture. That upbringing has taught her to stand her ground. “I’m ready to fight,” she said. “I don’t want to hide anything just so the government or the German people can be comfortable.”

***

Assil has had to struggle for her identity to be recognized in a culture that sees Palestinian expression as a threat to Jewish existence. She recalls this struggle beginning in school, where some of her teachers would try to prove to her that Palestine did not exist. “Look, search: where is Palestine?” she recounts one of them saying after displaying a map of the Middle East. “There is no Palestine.”

According to researchers, the silencing of Palestinian identity in schools is common in German classrooms, representing one part of Germany’s complicated relationship with its Palestinian diaspora. The German government believes it has a “special responsibility” for Israel because of Germany’s genocide against European Jews during World War Two. As a result, the protection of Israel is central to the government’s understanding of its purpose.

To carry out this mission, Germany has moved to curtail public expressions of Palestinian solidarity that it considers antisemitic or a threat to the state of Israel. This policy reaches down to the school level. Teachers refuse to acknowledge the existence of Palestine as a nationality or cultural identity, according to Carola Tize, an anthropologist who has studied the Palestinian community in Berlin. The dynamic has only strengthened since October 7, with schools banning keffiyehs and the expression “free Palestine.” 

Tize said that Palestinian students like Assil get the message: “They’re raised to know that they’re not wanted.”

Assil has continued to fight for recognition during her masters program in real estate engineering. After October 7, a psychologist offered consultation hours for students affected by the massacre. As Assil found out, the hours were only open to Israeli citizens—and not her or any other Palestinian students grieving over Israel’s violent response. She brought the omission up to the dean, and was shocked by the response. She remembers him telling her, “There are many Palestinians that have the Israeli passport, so we see them as Israeli students.”

Despite a productive back and forth with the dean, the university would not change its policy. Assil told me that she had always tried to have faith in German society’s ability to accept Palestinians into its ranks. But this made her lose that faith altogether. 

“If you cannot even recognize my pain,” she said, “then how can I say I’m comfortable here with this country and with this government? How can I say I’m German?”

The answer, Assil has decided, is that she will not call herself German; instead, she refers to herself as a Palestinian who was born in Germany.

***

In a rented classroom at the center of Berlin, Assil helped host a seminar with a group of young Palestinian-German children. The children were encouraged to draw Palestinian symbols and stories on sheets of paper and small bags. While they drew and talked, Assil answered questions from the children about how much they could express themselves in public. Her sister pulled her aside and asked if she could wear a set of Palestinian earrings. Assil told her that she had every right to. “Nobody can tell you to take it off,” she recalled saying.

The event was hosted by Generation Palestine, the same cultural organization that hosted the Alexanderplatz vigil. Assil’s mother founded the organization in 2018, for two purposes. First, she intended to provide an alternative form of public Palestinian expression to the more militant protests in the streets. Each week, Generation Palestine installs vigils or public education exhibitions that highlight the victimization of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. “We want to change the German mindset. We don’t just want to show them we’re Palestinian. No—we want to show them why we are right,” Assil said. 

When Jewish Israelis or vocal supporters of Israel come to the vigil and begin to cause a scene, Assil is there to engage with them. She told me proudly of a time when she convinced a man that Palestinian children should not be shot alongside their parents. “I didn’t convince him to say free Palestine, but at the end of the day I worked something up in him,” Assil said. “Maybe in the next conversation he’s having with Zionists he will say, ‘okay, but not the kids.’”

The organization plays a similar educational role within the Palestinian community itself. Tize, the anthropologist, suggested that when communities face discrimination because of their identity, they “cling to that identity even more.” But as younger generations grow up with increasingly distant connections to their homeland, their sense of identity can become indistinct. “They are not educated about their roots. They don’t know the history of their parents,” said Alaa, another Generation Palestine volunteer. “You feel a very big disconnect.”

Generation Palestine’s volunteers hope to prevent that loss in transmission. As Assil put it, the organization teaches young people in the diaspora “how to be a Palestinian.” Assil and her fellow volunteers fill gaps in knowledge among children in their community, teaching them the original names of the places from which their ancestors were displaced. They also teach restless youth how to respond to criticism with evidence, rather than aggression. To Assil, this information will help young people in her community speak up when they face marginalization, rather than staying silent.

Assil plans to take this approach to her future career in building management. After she graduates from her master’s program, she plans to enter a line of work that will allow her to financially support her community in Germany and the broader Palestinian cause. Eventually, Assil aspires to start and lead a real estate engineering company in Germany. She hopes it will become large enough to make her impossible to ignore. “If this company will be successful,” Assil told me, “then they cannot reject me or silence me, because I made something of myself.”

“I’m big now. They cannot shut me up.”

I first met Mustafa at an English-language table event in the heart of Berlin’s Neukölln district. The room was filled with small talk, as non-native speakers practiced how to order coffee, make introductions, and describe the weather. Sitting between a Russian woman who had fled her husband’s looming conscription in the Russia-Ukraine War and a Turkish man refining his English skills to find work, Mustafa spoke of a past life full of ambassadorial travel across Asia and North Africa.

Mustafa, a former Afghan diplomat, was forced to seek asylum in Germany amidst the Taliban’s 2021 return to power. Now in Berlin, he spends his days practicing German and English, waiting for the chance to find work that he believes matches his experience and global ambitions. “I am trying to find a job that is suitable,” he tells me during one of our meetings. 

Mustafa, however, is not his real name. True to his diplomatic past, Mustafa was deliberate in the information he chose to share — and not share — with me. 

Born in a remote, under-resourced village within a province far from Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, Mustafa’s father had impressive dreams for his son. “My father wished for me to be in the foreign ministry,” he tells me. “He worked hard to give me every opportunity.” 

Following his achievement of a Master’s degree in International Relations from the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, Mustafa joined the Afghan Foreign Ministry. Beginning as an associate officer in the Ministry, he worked his way up the ranks and was appointed to his first ambassadorship, Ambassador to Hungary, in 2013. He went on to become Ambassador to Turkmenistan in 2019 and to Pakistan beginning in 2020.

Due to his position of power within the NATO and UN-backed, democratically elected Afghan government, Mustafa says he had “no choice” but to leave after the republic’s collapse on August 15th, 2021, when the Taliban took over Kabul. 

Dr. Lukas Fuchs, researcher at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research, emphasized the probable necessity of Mustafa’s departure from Afghanistan. “People were persecuted because they were working with Western organizations or governments or because they had been advocating for human rights or women’s rights… whatever the Taliban stands against. There have been arbitrary killings, mass arrests, and disappearances of people.”

One month after the Taliban’s takeover, Mustafa, his wife, and their 16-year-old son were able to fly from Kabul to Istanbul.

Once in Istanbul, Mustafa and his family waited another month to receive a visa to move on to somewhere in Europe. “It was terrible,” he says. “There is no support for refugees there.” On December 31st, he received a visa for his family to travel to Germany, a development he calls “a miracle.”

According to Dr. Fuchs, this does seem miraculous. “Asylum cases from Afghanistan have routinely been taking the longest time to be processed,” he tells me. “It was at an average of around three years until you will reach a final decision…So that is a long, long, long time living in uncertainty.”

The second time we meet, this time in a cozy cafe run by refugee volunteers ahead of a German language event, Mustafa tells me about travelling from India to Morocco, Egypt, China, Thailand, and the former Soviet Union. He also brings along with him his book, The Realities of Relations with Pakistan – a 330-page reflection on the regional challenges faced by the Pakistani government, with a large image of his face gracing the cover. The book is printed in Dari and Pashto, but has yet to be translated into English. He flips to pages filled with pictures of him shaking hands with foreign dignitaries and international ambassadors. “I didn’t want to be a refugee,” he tells me several times as if to assure me of his devotion to his country and his diplomatic duty, “I always returned home to Afghanistan after my posts.” 

Mustafa remembers crying while standing in line to submit his refugee application at a local site for the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). “I tried my best to study and get my Master’s degree. The dreams of my father for me to be in the Foreign Ministry were destroyed in a second.” At nearly sixty years old, Mustafa was starting anew. 

Not only did he have to rebuild his life from scratch, but he also had to become a student again for the first time in forty years. The German Government mandates participation in German language courses for asylum recipients. Thus, Mustafa enrolled in German classes alongside other refugees.

At the time of our meeting, after approximately three years of study, Mustafa tells me that he is at the B2 level of German. However, most employment and higher education opportunities in Germany require advanced language certifications amounting to a C1 level. This, in part, is why Mustafa has yet to find a job in Berlin. 

This is not a challenge unique to Mustafa. A 2024 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that about 51% of immigrants living in  Germany surveyed saw knowledge of German as a major barrier that has prevented them from finding employment. Additionally, 65% said that a lack of knowledge of German was the most important obstacle in their daily lives.

Stephen Sulimma, an employee at Berlin non-profit Contact and Advice Center for Refugees and Migrants (KuB), thinks this language-based exclusion is indicative of a larger issue. “The majority of people in Germany accept being a refugee, mostly under the condition that you then will leave again. But only a minority of people accept people who show up and want to improve their economic situation.” Sulimma continues, saying that necessitating high German language skills to improve the economic status of refugees “is where this racism thing kicks in.”

Dr. Fuchs adds, “Afghan refugees have historically struggled to be very well integrated into society in Germany. That has definitely also to do with the long waiting process during which you don’t get language courses and government aid. A lot of these factors hindered the integration of migrants in the past.”

Despite his constant effort and impressive international experience, Mustafa cannot find employment. In an ideal world, he tells me, he would get his PhD in International Relations, but it is too expensive, with costs as high as twenty thousand Euros per year. 

Mustafa still considers himself to be very lucky. “Every country has its pluses and minuses,” he says, smiling – a phrase he has repeated several times over the course of our meetings. “Germany is a very secure environment, a multinational country… I have faced no discrimination,” he tells me. And so, until something changes – a job, a scholarship, or any sign of what may come next – his weeks remain measured by his language classes, English on Tuesday and German on Wednesday, suspended in a limbo he never wanted.

It was a rainy Friday afternoon in the summer of 2011 in Damascus, Syria. For 20-year-old college student Hesham Moamadani, shuffling through the soaked crowd of over 1,000 alongside his older brother Ghiath — whose name, in Arabic, also stands for rain — was a typical ritual at this time of week. Immediately after Friday prayers at the local mosque was the only time when Moamadani and his brother could be amidst such a large crowd of people. For Bashar al-Assad, the totalitarian dictator who had ruled Syria for nearly 10 years by 2011, large public gatherings were a sacrilege; a mass could be potent, dangerous.

This time around, though, something was different. Moamadani and his brother were a part of the Shield of Daryya, one of many online Facebook groups that emerged from the boom of internet activism during the Syrian Revolution. Like many other online resistance networks, they organized protests directly beneath the nose of the Assad regime’s stringent censorship. The crowd had assembled that day with a knowing conviction. In a defiant move, someone had begun chanting “hurriya” — freedom. Moamadani and his brother followed. The crowd chanted hurriya repeatedly, fists pumping in the air, entranced by their neighbors’ hope-drenched vigor. Then, the buses full of men arrived, and the bullets, too, began raining from the sky.

***

When I saw Moadamani for the first time in Berlin, Germany, nearly a year after the fall of the Assad regime, the weather was eerily similar to that fateful afternoon 14 years ago in Damascus, a coincidence he described as “beautiful.” Even in the dreary humidity of the rainy day, the scent of tobacco wafted from his shirt when he embraced me like an old friend from another lifetime.

In March 2011, the embers of Syrian dissent against the Assad family’s nearly 50-year-long reign of terror had erupted into the flames of the Syrian Revolution. Darayya, a small suburb West of Damascus and Moamadani’s hometown, stood as a flashpoint of anti-Assadist resistance and pacifist protests. Now 34, Moamadani betrayed little of his harrowing life in his handsome face and the toothy grin that seemed to accompany him in perpetuity. “He’s incredibly friendly, incredibly generous,” said Mada al-Zoabi, a friend of Moamadani and a senior at Bard College Berlin, who recalled her first impression of him. “He’s also just so funny.”

In between bites of his chicken shawarma, Moamadani recalled his life under Assad’s violent dictatorship. We were sitting at a Levantine restaurant in Neukölln, Berlin’s well-known Arab neighborhood. “The death toll was almost 2,000 people a day,” he said.

Moamadani, who lived with his parents, siblings, and half-siblings in Darayya throughout his childhood, recounted that war never occurred to him as even a remote possibility. “You don’t think it’s possible, until it happens to you,” he said. By the time the war broke out, Moamadani was 20, studying law as an undergraduate at Damascus University. His education informed his commitment to anti-Assadist resistance, which he engaged with for nearly 2 years after the start of the war. “When I was [studying] law, the first thought that came to my mind was, what’s the purpose of my law degree under a strict dictatorship?” he said.

But by June 2012 — almost one year after the start of the Syrian Civil War — the situation had significantly worsened. Around 3000 Free Syrian Army (FSA) soldiers, a decentralized insurgent rebel group, had made Darayya their stronghold. By August, however, the suburb underwent heavy shelling by the pro-Assad militias, and the rebel groups withdrew. Faced with little resistance, the military began a rampage, indiscriminately carpet bombing residential neighborhoods and executing any townspeople suspected of being rebels. By August 25, nearly 300 townspeople had been killed by the military, with around 80 of the dead identified as civilians according to Reuters. (Moamadani suggests a number closer to 1500).

“I would go and hide with other activists and move from apartment to apartment,” Moamadani said. “They would divide the city into blocks, then [clear] it block by block, [planting] snipers then moving to the next block.” After jumping from block to block in hiding, Moamadani recalled spending nearly six hours in the middle of the night attempting to return home, which was less than two miles away. While it was safer to move at night when most militia members were asleep, snipers bedecked the roofs of residential buildings and shot at first sight. “You had to walk over the dead bodies [strewn] across the street,” he added.

Moamadani was reaching a breaking point. He was terrified for his own and his family’s safety, perpetually in jeopardy from his activist history. So he left, paying an acquaintance to drive him to Lebanon. He eventually made his way to Egypt, where he would attempt to enroll in an Egyptian university to complete his law degree. He was too late — the academic year had begun in August, and he’d arrived in September.

That dejected 20-year-old Moamadani never could have imagined that it would take him nearly 3 years and a trip back to Syria before setting foot in Germany. Destitute and jobless in Egypt, Moamadani had few remaining options but to return to an even more war-torn Syria, where it took him nearly 6 months to return home due to the extensive siege of major Syrian cities by the Assadist government.

By the time he finally returned, he already wanted to leave. “It was unlivable,” he recounted.

***

It was Hesham Moamadani’s third time ever swimming in the ocean.

The first two instances occurred in Latakia, Syria, a coastal city in Western Syria facing the Mediterranean. It was the highlight of a family road trip before the war had begun. This time, though, the entirety of his belongings — his passport, phone, some valuables, candy bars — had been dropped in a plastic bag and wrapped in nylon. Unlike his road trip to Latakia, Moamadani didn’t know if he could return home — or where ‘home’ even would be, should his journey be successful.

Moamadani had embarked on the longest swim of his life: eight hours, from the shores of Çeşme, Turkey, to the Greek Island of Chios, alongside a stranger he met named Feras Abukhalil less than 24 hours before. After a “miraculous” arrival in Chios, Moamadani trod on foot through Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and then eventually to Germany, where he would settle for the next decade of his life.

After obtaining a full-ride scholarship to Bard College Berlin and graduating in 2021 with a degree in Economics, Politics, and Social Thought, Moamadani became a journalist at Mnemonic, an NGO that provides an open-source database for war crimes and rights violations in Syria. In 2024, he became a Civic Engagement Officer at his alma mater. Albeit continuing to grapple with his complex past and trauma, he finally felt like he was settling into life in Berlin. Then the Assad regime fell.

“I got my German citizenship the same week the dictatorship ended,” he said, recalling the surreal moment his two nationalities — one by birth and the other by naturalization — emerged at a crossroads. It was a climactic moment for an identity crisis and a lingering sentiment of guilt that, according to Moamadani, had plagued him since his departure.

After Assad’s fall, Western countries have implemented a string of updates to their migration policies, urging Syrians to return home. Last September, the United States suspended the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program for Syrian refugees, which had allowed Syrian nationals to work and live in the U.S., but wasn’t a direct path to citizenship. The German government escalated attempts to repatriate Syrian refugees to their home country. “The only people who want to leave Syria now are criminals,” said Anwar Bunni, a Syrian lawyer and human rights activist.

But for many Syrians like Moamadani, the idea of a permanent return generates hesitance. “It’s not like the country was taken by Assad and [by] December given [back] to us,” he said. “There was a release of tension [when] the dictatorship was over. But there are consequences: they still discover graves, memories, [and] you’ve changed as a person.” Moamadani’s friend, al-Zoabi, who is also Syrian, reiterated this sentiment. “The international consensus seems to be, well, ‘that’s solved’, you know. But [Syria] is obviously in a state of instability,” she said.

Moamadani once “dreamt” about the day the war would be over. If that day, he thought, would ever come, he imagined that Syrians — including himself — would pack their bags immediately and ‘return home’. But for a nation with an infrastructure in ruins and a raw history of stark suffering yet to be reckoned with, it’s easier said than done. And in the decade since the beginning of the war, Syrians have established new lives in their communities that are now reliant on them. To some, then, ‘home’ is where they are now. But to others like Moamadani, ‘home’ no longer exists. “The term ‘never going home’ applies, because it is not there, [and] it is not here.”

It took a full-scale invasion to convince Martin Skopych, the son of a Ukrainian Baptist pastor, to become a Christian. Or, at least, to allow himself to be considered one.

“It’s not like, [if] you’re born and raised in a Christian family, it means that you’re a Christian,” he told me. “Real Christianity is not just visiting church once a week.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, 19-year-old Skopych and his family have lived in Gummersbach, an unremarkable German town of 50,000 people just east of Cologne. While he had wrestled with whether to become a Christian for several years prior, the shock of war and displacement pushed him to take the leap.

“It was helpful for me to believe that God [could] control a situation in my country, in my city, my family, in my church, in my life,” Skopych said.

Skopych is one of an unknown number of young Ukrainians who have chosen to move closer to evangelical Christianity after fleeing the war. In Gummersbach, he has slowly emerged as one of the growing Ukrainian community’s most prominent young spiritual leaders, holding youth group meetings as often as three times a week and ready to speak earnestly about his connection to Jesus at any given moment.

Meanwhile, Almaz, the congregation headed by his father, Nickolay Skopych, is starting to put down roots in Gummersbach. With the help of a Baptist congregation in Hendersonville, Tenn., Almaz recently acquired an old movie theater in Gummersbach to renovate into a worship space (the church currently borrows space from another evangelical church in the small town outside of Cologne). It will be Almaz’s first-ever permanent building; even before the war, the church rented from place to place in Kyiv.

On a recent visit, Skopych became my tour guide to the construction site, bounding around the gutted space with brisk confidence. There he was, helping me rip out an old wire fence buried in rotting leaves in the church’s backyard or foisting giant tree branches into an overflowing dumpster. I’d wander around upstairs and see him emerge from a gaping hole in the wall wearing a respirator and safety glasses, covered in dust after chiseling old tiles from the walls. 

Some of Skopych’s self-assuredness naturally comes from Nickolay, his father and the pastor, who is a constant presence in the church and has helped attract dozens, if not hundreds, of Ukrainians to Gummersbach. The predominant church in Ukraine is the Ukrainian Orthodox church, but the Skopychs are Baptist, a denomination that the Baptist World Alliance estimates accounts for about 112,000 Ukrainian members.

“Maybe, my family is a special family. We don’t, like, fear about war,” Skopych said, adding that he had considered going back to Ukraine to be a missionary. “I don’t stress that, if I will come to Ukraine, they will take me to army. If they take me to army, I’m going to serve,” he added, almost nonchalantly.

Gummersbach now has about 3,000 Ukrainians, I was told repeatedly on my visit, although it hasn’t released census data since 2022. Almaz can attract some 200 people at a Sunday service from a variety of religious backgrounds, with services held in Ukrainian. 

Skopych estimated that as many as 60 young people show up to his groups every week. But he admitted that being a pastor’s son could be difficult, with the constant attention and expectation from parishioners.

“Some people don’t understand that pastor’s children are not saved,” he said. At one point, he said, he asked his parents not to help him with the question of whether to become Christian — although he had already bought into a belief in God. 

“I need to see to believe,” he said. “I [spent] a lot of time praying to God and asking, ‘are you really existing?’ And if it’s Christianity, or Islamic, or it’s just science … I spent a lot of time to study this question.”

Other religions, however, didn’t have the answers he was seeking.

“I watched a lot of videos about Islam, about other religions. And I didn’t find like that structure that had Christianity. I didn’t find enough proofs for me is that it can be real,” he said.

Skopych’s family was in Gummersbach visiting friends when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Their vacation has turned into a stay of three and a half years. Skopych had to quite literally start from zero, with only a backpack of clothes with him for what he thought would be a short trip. That time ended up being spiritually transformative — although he was very reluctant to get into the details.

“It was period of hard times where you can see miracles,” he said.

Several of the young Ukrainian Baptists I interviewed in Gummersbach spoke that same way: with an intense evangelical devotion, but without being able to articulate what exactly got them there beyond their favorite scripture passages.

“It’s clearly said that you’re not perfect. You cannot be perfect. Nobody can be perfect. But Jesus still loves you, Jesus still died for you and died for your sins,” said Viktoriia Hluschenko, who had come for the day from Düsseldorf to help Almaz with the renovations. “It’s not so easy to explain.”

While many of the younger Ukrainians told me they felt alienated by the tradition of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — “you must be holy,” Lisa, another Ukrainian girl, told me with an eye roll — Skopych grew up in and around his father’s church.

Nickolay Skopych didn’t respond to repeated messages and calls for an interview about his son. However, he has blogged about his children’s relationship to the church, including some revealing passages from Barnabas Piper, the son of prominent Baptist preacher John Piper.

“PKs [pastor’s kids] live in a fishbowl, or at least it feels that way. Everyone in the church knows the names and faces of the pastor’s children. There is never the safety of anonymity,” Barnabas Piper wrote in 2012. “It is mighty hard to live a life surrounded by people knowing your every move, romantic interest, misbehavior, athletic triumph (or failure), college choice, and seemingly every other personal detail.”

Skopych, however, doesn’t seem to mind the fishbowl now. With some prodding in conversation, he can conjure up stories of trying to preach the gospel to complete strangers: an Italian businessman sitting next to him on a flight, a retired Cuban professor in a hotel in San Diego. His favorite Bible verse is 1 Timothy 4:12–16, which begins: “Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.” He’s now considering becoming a minister to help Almaz grow other churches in Germany.

“Even in Germany, for example, I see big opportunity in Cologne to work with students, and to share gospel. I think for me, it’s possible to do something bigger,” he said. 

That would require giving up on a job offer at DVAG, a German financial services company that Skopych claimed could make him $65–75,000 his first year. However, the firm seems to be closer to a multi-level marketing scheme, according to an investigation by Jan Böhmermann, a comedic TV journalist akin to a German John Oliver — a helpful reminder that, for all his wise-seeming spirituality, Skopych is also a 19-year-old boy. Thankfully, God also seems suspicious of DVAG.

“I don’t think that it’s really good life,” Skopych said. “I don’t think it’s where God wants me to be.”

The beginning of the Week 8 module includes a quote: “Embedding is a fancy word for letting journalists go see what the military units do.” However, upon reading and listening to the award-winning stories included in this week’s assignment, it is clear that embedded reporting goes much beyond that description. Embedded journalists have the opportunity to use their own first-hand, lived experience to convey details of a crisis to readers. 

Caitlin Dickerson’s “Seventy Miles in the Darién Gap” showcases a different type of war than the one I initially pictured from the preceding quotation – this time a war between humans and nature. In reading this piece, I thought a lot about the process journalists must undergo to embed within stories, and the subsequent challenges and rewards reaped by this process. In experiencing this grueling journey with her subjects, Dickerson gains their trust and builds a shared sense of companionship, both of which are felt by the reader. Additionally, in creating these relationships, she not only writes a deeper, more resonant story but also gets to share the lives of people who would never have gotten their stories told otherwise. However, once Dickerson returns to the U.S. she resumes her normal life. What happens to migrants as they continue their journey? It is a struggle felt by journalists and their readers alike – where does the story really end? When journalists embed themselves within the lives of others, it is hard to know when the reporting stops and when a journalist has done their due diligence in reporting a subject’s story. I imagine this must be an immensely challenging decision and step to take. 

In The Dark’s reporting of war crimes committed in Haditha, Iraq doesn’t seem to necessarily face the same challenges. Investigating a crime that occurred four years prior allows reporters to go down different paths of probing – following contrasting opinions, recollections, and explanations, interviewing individuals connected to the story in different ways. It also brings up the question of what the sphere of embedded reporting actually encompasses. New Yorker reporter Madeleine Baran could not move with troops and live the moment with them as the crime occurred years prior. However, Baran does follow the story closely enough, with a plethora of first-hand testimonies from different witnesses, to feel as though journalists and readers are embedded within the story. In this way, the phrase does seem to encompass this stunning work of investigative journalism. 

In conclusion, embedded journalism seems to represent the most intense form of immersion in storytelling. In blurring the line between observing and participating, journalists are able to witness to history occurring in real time, whether in the jungle or on the battlefield, and provide readers with the most accurate and up-to-date look into global crises.

Constructing a story by inhabiting the lives of its characters, as we read this week, is a potent form of journalism. There is a certain kind of credibility that a journalist can achieve by the simple act of saying, “I was there. I know what it was like. This is the story.” Caitlin Dickerson, for example, uses this tool in her piece on the Darien Gap, ending the nut graf with the sentence: “What I saw in the jungle confirmed the pattern that has played out elsewhere: The harder migration is, the more cartels and other dangerous groups will profit, and the more migrants will die.” Each clause of the sentence is important, but what provides it a unique rhetorical force is the first: “What I saw in the jungle confirmed the patter.” Each part of the ensuing piece, down to the last scrap of detail, is channeled through this clause and acts as evidence to support the rest of the sentence. Not only does embedded reporting lead to details in the piece (e.g., the story of the Vietnamese woman who lost her son, which Dickerson found out about by seeing a paper ad), it also adds the moral weight which distinguishes embedding from other methods of journalism. 

At the same time, I do think that this credibility-raising has its limits. Although I recognize that Natalie O’Neill’s was tailored to a rightwing audience skeptical of the US’s decision to send military aid to Ukraine, I do feel that the way she framed the embedding was a bit overdone. Dickerson used herself as a character to emphasize the danger of the voyage and as a lens through which the reader could see the world. By contrast, O’Neill’s description of the danger she faced seemed less organic; phrases like “I felt a journalistic duty to trade the safety of Washington for a war zone to discover why Western weapons are so critical to Kyiv’s fight” risked putting her own story over the story of weapons she was trying to tell, as did her interjections emphasizing the danger not of the war itself, but of her decision to go to the warzone. Perhaps Siyeon’s argument that “there is only so much you can understand about something you are clearly not” is at the root of my quals with O’Neill’s piece: she seems less conscious of this fact throughout the piece, acting as a universal explainer while spending less time hinting at the fact that her knowledge of the war is necessarily incomplete. That said, I do feel that when O’Neill was talking about the subject matter itself with less explicit framings in service of her argument, the narrative that she produced was powerful and did do the job. I imagine the reader of the New York Post may have less qualms than I do—the narrative of “the embedding journalist” may serve to amplify, rather than detract from, its message. Perhaps, then, there is only so much I can understand about the viewpoint of the reader of the Post because they are a kind of person I am clearly not.

Many of this week’s readings made me think a lot about what we’ve talked about in the Dart Centre sessions about safety, empathy, and the emotional cost of witnessing. Each story, in its own way, showed how reporting in high-risk situations requires extensive preparation and ethics: how to stay safe, how to stay human, and how to tell the truth without turning someone else’s trauma into your material.

Caitlin Dickerson’s reporting on the Darién Gap feels like a textbook example of what the Dart trainers meant when they talked about trauma-informed reporting. She meets and reports on migrants as people, rather than victims. You can feel that she’s careful and aware of the power imbalance between a reporter who can leave and the people who can’t. When she describes the jungle swallowing bodies, she’s not trying to shock the reader, and instead asks them to understand what policy really looks like on the ground.

The same awareness of what it means to enter someone else’s crisis runs through The Embeds from CJR. The journalists there talk about living with military units, witnessing raids and violence, and the strange blur that happens when you’re too close to the story. Colonel William Darley mentions that every embed is like “seeing the war through a straw.” It’s exactly what the Dart people meant about perspective: access is not the same as understanding. You can be there, literally in the middle of it, and still miss the bigger truth if you forget to step back.

Caitlin Doornbos’ Ukraine reporting felt like another side of the same lesson. She talks about needing to “go to the scene” because she couldn’t tell the story from behind a desk. But she also reminds us that showing up doesn’t mean throwing yourself into danger blindly. It’s easy to romanticize bravery in journalism, but her reporting makes it clear that responsibility is part of it too. You protect yourself so you can keep telling stories.

All these stories circle back to what the Dart Centre kept emphasizing: journalism is relational. You have to think about what your presence does to the people you’re covering—and to you. The best work doesn’t come from detachment, but from respect. Rather than being fearless, it’s about being careful, and still choosing to look.

The plane lifted through a pale, cloudless sky above Moscow, one of the last few to leave as sanctions grounded almost everything else. Inside the cabin, Ivan Kondratenko sat tightly, his backpack under the seat, watching the snowbanks along the runway quickly blur into motion. “When our plane was getting off there was like this huge sigh,” he recalled. “I had honestly, psychologically, a feeling of great relief.” Below, the city that had shaped his politics and his fears receded into the frozen dark.

At 42, he packed only what fit into that backpack, believing he would be gone for a couple weeks at most. It was late evening on March 3rd, 2022, nine days after he had woken in a fever and discovered that Russia had invaded Ukraine.

Three years later, Kondratenko sips a cappuccino in a small café in Gesundbrunnen, the Berlin neighborhood where he studies German. His curly hair has begun to gray. Berlin has become a kind of home, though never his own. Around him, thousands of Russian dissidents and journalists have built parallel lives in exile. They are the aftershock of a system that criminalized dissent and exported its silence abroad: the unintended diaspora of a country that could no longer bear its conscience. For Ivan and many others, persecution has travelled with them, even when they left Russia, and their lives, behind.

A native of Oryol, a Russian oblast close to the Ukrainian border, Ivan Kondratenko had devoted most of his life up to 2022 to political activism. After moving to Moscow in 2012 following his studies, he began working for the Moscow office of Amnesty International in 2014, eventually becoming its Acting Director until 2018. “It had a tiny office of five employees,” he explained. “I was very young.”

The morning of February 24th felt unreal. Kondratenko had just come back to Moscow from a work trip to Berlin, where he had also received a Pfizer dose of the Covid vaccine. Sweating profusely from the fever, he woke up confused, and started scrolling the news on his phone. The blue light from the screen flickered faintly on his face, as he struggled to understand what he was reading. “It all felt like a fever nightmare,” he said. “I didn’t know if I could trust myself.” Before dawn, President Putin had announced the beginning of the infamous “special military operation.”

During those nine days leading up to March 3rd, Kondratenko travelled back to Oryol to visit his parents. He put some anti-war leaflets up on streetpoles there. But, most importantly, he bought coffee. A lot of it. To this day, the coffee is still sitting in his Moscow apartment. He relied on a German experience from World War Two, when the country was struck by a shortage. “I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to leave Russia,” he explained. He hoped he wouldn’t have to.

When the police started detaining those who were attending the protests, Kondratenko started rationalising the situation. “You could either run away, or get caught,” he said. “Panic was growing that the border would be closed down.” On March 2nd, he bought a one-way ticket to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The following day, amidst fear as flights were held to the ground, he boarded the plane and looked back at the lights of Moscow flattened against the snow, not knowing it would be his last time.

Bishkek, for a few weeks, felt like a reprieve. He shared a small hotel room with former colleagues, working remotely and trying to stay connected to the world they’d left.

Awareness that exile was no longer an interlude but a life grew slowly. Three weeks later, when colleagues suggested he join them in Berlin, the decision felt almost casual. “I had a feeling I would stay there for a couple of weeks,” he said again, smiling at the irony. “Let’s see what happens next.”

He landed in Berlin at the end of March, but his stay only lasted a week. “I realised it would be very difficult to legalise myself first in Germany,” he explained. Like many others, he decided to leave for Georgia, where the border was still open to Russians. “It was easy to get there,” he said. “I had many friends there.” 

He would spend six months in Georgia. For a while, it seemed like the war—and exile—might still be temporary. “In summer 2022,” he said, “it felt like I could just travel to Moscow—kind of dangerous but still possible.” That illusion faded quickly. By autumn, arrests were mounting for social-media posts, and the mobilization decrees made return impossible. “I was also in Maidan in 2013 and 2014”, he explained. “I said, ‘I have a record.’ If they start mass arrests, I would be a good candidate for that.”

The path that would bring him back to Berlin came, as he put it, “very random.” A colleague mentioned a new German program offering humanitarian visas for Russian civil-society workers. He wrote to the officials running it, attaching a one-page account of his work and life. “And then it was silence for several months,” he said. One day, he received a message: please come and bring your passport. 

He was among the first to receive one of such visas. He officially relocated to Germany, where through the NGOs he was working with he helped others apply, drafting dozens of letters attesting that particular journalists or activists were “in danger” and should qualify for the visa.

In Berlin, Kondratenko moved into the House of Critical Voices, a residence for exiled media workers managed by the NGO MiCT. It is a place of constant proximity, where journalists, activists, and artists orbit one another’s routines.

Some kept producing articles and campaigns out of habit, but many others, including Kondratenko, the distance hollowed the work itself. 

Danila Bedyaev, once a producer at Echo of Moscow, now keeps the lights running in the same building. “I’m the tech guy,” he said, “responsible for everything you can plug into power.” When he arrived with his wife and two small children, he imagined journalism would resume once the shock passed. “We thought it was temporary,” he said. “Two, three months—such craziness can’t continue.” But the war did continue, and the profession that had once defined him became a luxury. His wife, Lyudmila Shabueva, also a journalist, still tries to stay in the field, hosting a small monthly Russian-language radio show. In Germany, though, there is little space for Russian journalists in exile—too many voices, too little demand. The work survives as habit, not livelihood.

MiCT, supported by the German Ministry of Culture, created the infrastructure of the exile press. Coworking studios, legal counsel, emergency stipends. “Because no one wanted these people to stay on the street,” explained Bedyaev. The program kept dozens afloat, though it also revealed a harder truth: aid can sustain a community, but it cannot restore its purpose.

In the past three years, Berlin’s Russian-speaking exile community developed its own microclimate. One of nervous solidarity. Mental strain and professional burnout became shared conditions. “People feel stuck,” Kondratenko said. “They don’t see any future… It’s a very nervous community these days.” Yet he also described small rituals that allow them to endure. Weekend retreats in German villages, seminars, conversations that oscillate between despair and dark humor. “We do regular meetings, self-organised with my friends,” he said. “It’s both to have fun and a way we manage it.”

Over time, activism gave way to literature, a dormant passion in Kondratenko’s life. The NGOs he had worked for either collapsed or released him, and he began receiving state support while studying German and finishing a degree in creative writing.

His first novel—a blend of fiction and autobiography—draws from his years in human rights work and the experience of exile. “I’m trying to explain my generation,” he said. The book, recently accepted by a small publisher, follows young Russians who believed that one more protest, one more petition, might end authoritarianism. “We said, ‘Let’s do a little bit more effort, life will change, Putin will go,’ and then we found out it’s so difficult.”

Writing, for him, became both mirror and refuge. “Literature is something very important for me,” he said. “It’s how I can maintain my connection with my motherland somehow.” He has started attending Russian literary circles in Berlin and dreams of writing in English too, one day, inspired by Nabokov. 

In Berlin, his days are organized around language classes in the morning and writing in the afternoon. But the war still shapes every silence. “It’s very shocking that this horrible war [has been] going on for three and a half years,” he said. “The Second World War… was going on for less than four [EN: for Russia].”

He no longer speaks about return. “I think actually this sort of exile provides a good distance,” he said. “But of course, exile also means a little bit of loneliness… sometimes I feel alone.” Distance, after all, was how he’d learned to live—and to look back.

The coffee he bought before fleeing Russia is still in his kitchen cupboard in Moscow, sealed and forgotten. It has survived three winters, waiting in a city he no longer recognises.