Javier will only laugh once during the long conversation. It’s his reaction to being asked if he’s anything like his family’s manager. After the laughter comes an answer: “Yes, you can put it that way.” Javier is 16 years old. A serious and eloquent young man. When he and his parents and sister migrated from precarious circumstances from Spain to Munich six years ago in the winter, the boy didn’t speak a single word of German. In their first winter on the Isar, the family is accommodated in the city’s cold protection program and thus away from the streets. The next stop is the shelter for the homeless – to this day the home of the family, which is now seven. During the day, when Javier is standing behind the counter in a suit and shirt, no one can tell where and how the newly started trainee at a Munich bank lives.
He’s not ashamed of it. But still, not everyone needs to know. That’s why Javier makes a point of telling the story of his family under a different name. He does this on a workday after work, in the park next to the homeless shelter on the outskirts of town. It was already pitch black when he headed for the square with his mother at his side, a small woman in a wide dress and a headscarf over her hair, next to her the tall boy in black jeans, a black anorak and white athletic slippers over his socks. The two of them actually invited people to their two rooms in the complex for a chat – but security hasn’t been informed, coordination problems, visitors are no longer allowed, guests are out and so they’re talking outside the door. That doesn’t bother Javier.
He leans on the railing next to his mother, for whom he still helps interpret to this day. A woman who keeps looking questioningly at her son’s gaze, who is two heads taller than her. Javier nods briefly when she says something to him, moderates, translates like a government spokesman on a sensitive mission who weighs what is allowed outside and what is not. With great concentration, the young person keeps a chronicle of the stages of his Gambian-Spanish family and his own social emancipation.
In April, after the winter to protect against the cold, Javier moves with his parents and at that time a sister to Munich’s first shelter for the homeless. It’s the same one they’ve been living in for a few months: in two rooms that aren’t connected and with three more children than when they started. The little siblings are five, three and one year old. “We eat in our rooms, sleep here, spend time here. “If we want to go from one room to the other,” says the big brother, “we have to cross the hallway.” To shower, they have to go up the stairs one floor up.
Despite the most adverse circumstances, Javier has had a lightning-fast academic career
His mother now also says that cooking in the distant communal kitchen is particularly difficult. Every pot, every spice, everything she needs for it, she has to take with her from the room. “I can only do all that when Javier or my husband are at home, because then I have to leave the small children in the room.” The family man works part-time in the catering trade, “washing dishes, sometimes waiting tables a bit or hauling goods upstairs,” says the son.
It’s a busy life. “Our current accommodation is often noisy and not always very clean.” Despite the most adverse circumstances, the native Spaniard has had a lightning-fast school career. When he ends up in this city at the age of ten without any knowledge of the language, he first goes to middle school, from there to a transition class with intensive language classes. “After a year I was able to speak German by default and they noticed that I was good in a few subjects and thought it wouldn’t be bad to get me into the Realschule.” The sprint program is what the educators call this path. The name couldn’t be more apt for Javier’s development. He has meanwhile completed his secondary school leaving certificate and started his training as a bank clerk on September 1st.
Where does a child that lives with four siblings and their parents in two rooms, plays, eats and also receives friends here learn? Where the sister with heart disease rests, the little brother suffers from epileptic seizures and the mother from asthma? Javier listens in the night park. And shrugs: “I could always go to a study studio an hour and a half after class.” For teaching, he withdraws to a library. The little sister does her homework in the after-school care center and in principle there is also school help in the shelters for the homeless.
Hundreds of people apply for the few subsidized apartments that are eligible
The family has never had their own four walls. In Spain she lived with other relatives with her grandmother. One of Javier’s few memories of that time: “It was a small rental apartment in a very, very old building. When it rained, the whole apartment got wet.” Since they have been in Munich, they have been looking for an apartment. “Intensely,” says the family’s government spokesman, and becomes very determined: “It’s not like we’re sitting back and saying maybe an apartment is coming our way.” Large apartments that are suitable for them have not been uploaded to Sowon, the online platform for subsidized apartments run by the municipal office for housing and migration, for months. And if so, then hundreds apply for it. “But it’s always someone else.”
The rent for her two rooms in the homeless shelter is very high, “for the fact that we live in a very bad location”. Javier’s father had to pay 200 euros from his wages for it. Since the eldest son started his apprenticeship, the monthly income of the family has increased. “It’s all considered together. I have to hand over practically my entire salary.” The parents would have saved some of the child benefit and then bought a suit and shirts for the bank apprenticeship. The job center pays for membership in his football club, where Javier trains three times a week, and also provides a subsidy for shoes and jersey.
“Our greatest wish is,” says Javier in the park after a short conversation with his mother, “that each of us has our space and our place.” The somewhat smaller wish: “That we can go on excursions together and have fun, switch off from the stresses of everyday life.” And a larger closet in the current accommodation, which they could also urgently need. “It’s so small that I have to hang my suit and shirts outside.” Javier pulls all the organizational threads together in this family. “Yes,” says his mom at his side, “he’s our manager.” And he’s not allowed to walk around in battered suits. None of the colleagues should know where and how Javier lives.
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