Donnerstag, 28. Juni 2018
A participant from SH@H in Stuttgart speaks about her escape from Iraque and the reasons to graduate from the coaching programme.
Hello, my name is Tabarak. I am 15 years old and live in a refugee camp in Stuttgart. I grew up in Baghdad, Iraq. When I was born, war was already there. I have never experienced peace at home. However, there were better and worse times during the war. When I was a kid, I could go to school and during the ceasefire I could even play outside with my girlfriends. Later, we could no longer leave our house, because it was too dangerous. Often, there were bomb alerts and explosions and children were kidnapped as well. My mother did not want us to see dead people in the streets, so we stayed inside.
Because at home we were not safe either, my mother, my aunt and my grandmother decided that we need to leave Iraq and we made our way to Germany together with my two little brothers. It wasn't easy and we had to overcome many challenges. For instance, my brother fell from a boat into the sea. Fortunately, he survived. In the end, we walked almost all the way from Greece to Germany by foot.
Life in Germany is not easy for us. We have lived in five different refugee camps. Now, we are housing in a container village. We miss Baghdad and as the situation has become somewhat better, we decided to go back home.
What are we going to do there? We want to make Baghdad a bit nicer. There are many strong women in Baghdad, which have moved so much and - like us - have gone so far. For them and with them we want to open a beauty salon - my mother, my aunt and I. We want to hire only women and want to focus on the beauty in the world with them - in spite of the war, or perhaps precisely because of the war. Because we believe that one should never lose sight of the beauty, no matter how dark the world around us seems sometimes.
But we can´t do this all alone. For our fresh start in Baghdad we need support to rent rooms, buy products and market our idea throughout the city. Therefore, we get coached by the StartHope@Home team in all 8 founding modules and are currently working with them on the preparation of a fundraising campaign.
Social Impact Lab Stuttgart, June 28th, 2018
