The hallway alone is a challenge: the apartment door opens and behind the threshold there is a lot of air. At the very back, near the large window facing the courtyard, there is only a camping table with five chairs around it. Dilan Kazem asks the visitor to take a seat at the family’s dining table and immediately apologizes: “We don’t even have curtains.” A few weeks ago, the Iraqi woman and her four children moved into their first apartment in Munich through private contacts, “purely lucky.” 94 square meters, six-story apartment building. Previously, the five lived in temporary homes in the city – with space for nothing.
Before, all that was important was having a roof over your head. Back then, after Dilan Kazem’s second escape. In front of her drug addicted German husband from Northern Germany. The youth welfare office and the police had advised her to leave him as quickly as possible. Kazem went with her two daughters to Munich, where her relatives lived. For the purposes of the story, the single mother and her children have a different name.
Kazem’s first escape was years ago. That was in 2015. From Baghdad, the young woman set off on foot via Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and Austria to Germany. It was the time when millions of Iraqis fled their homeland to escape the violence of IS fighters. She carried her daughter Lya, whom she had from an arranged marriage, with her.
The boys’ father lives abroad and visits the family regularly.
The woman wearing light gray leggings and an anthracite-colored sweater doesn’t quite get around to talking in more detail. Sarah was the first to sneak up, out of one of the doors off the hall. The fact that she approaches on tiptoe is not due to her caution. The seven-year-old cannot put her heels on and has therefore undergone multiple operations. The next operation is just around the corner. Another door opens and barefoot, in a long tie-dyed dress, Lya, 14, comes smiling towards the guest. On her right hip she has placed the smaller of the two brothers, Arif, one and a half. Now it’s getting stormy, around the corner is Karacho Ilhan, four. The boys’ father lives abroad and visits the family regularly.
There’s something going on when all five of them get together here every evening at half past five. At 6:30 a.m. Dilan Kazem sets off with the two little ones to the other side of the city, where they lived in a temporary home until recently. The boys still attend crèche and kindergarten nearby. “It’ll take me 50 minutes to get there,” her mother says, rolling her eyes. The two girls have already moved to the nearest school and are setting off alone in the morning. Sarah couldn’t get an after-school place here, so Lya picks up the seven-year-old after class and goes home with her. When it comes to her eldest, the single mother has a guilty conscience: “She is my right hand and a great help.” The 14-year-old takes on a lot of responsibility. Maybe too much.
The two of them are often “at school” with their mom during the lunch break and do their homework there. “I don’t want to leave her alone,” says the 30-year-old. She worked as a geriatric nurse in Iraq, “the qualification is not recognized here.” That’s why the mother of four is currently training to become a nurse’s assistant. The course runs daily from 8:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. and she will finish at the end of July. She doesn’t earn anything yet.
“I really want to work, then I can do it on my own.”
The family lives on citizen’s money. After deducting all the bills, the Kazems are left with around 1,100 euros to live on. “That’s not enough,” says the woman, who wears her long light brown hair loose. Sometimes she borrows money from her mother, who still lives in Baghdad. “That’s why I really want to work, then I can do it on my own.”
Above all, school equipment for children consumes a lot of money. After moving during the school year, a lot of new things had to be purchased for the girls. The subsidy from the city’s education package of 174 euros per school year and child was already used up when it was first purchased. Many of Lya’s middle school classmates worked on tablets. That’s not in it. A bike for the 14-year-old and her little sister Sarah so that they can explore their new neighborhood, too. Your clothes are used. It bothers the girls that they can’t keep up with a lot of things, says the supervisor in the city’s Housing and Migration Office who accompanies the family. “Mrs. Kazem fights very hard to give her children a good childhood and a good future.”
Window shopping is also free
In the new rooms of her own apartment, the 30-year-old built one bed after the other herself. Sarah has now danced back to her room and sits down on her pride and joy, the one with the thin mattress. The frame wobbles. The large window in the room she shares with her sister is covered with a fabric picture. There are plastic toys in front of it. There is a street carpet for children on the ground. No other room has this much equipment. Neither do desks. Where to start with tendons?
Dilan Kazem has a small car that she always uses to drive the boys to daycare and crèche. At the weekend all four wanted to go to Ikea. They can play there and watch something in the children’s cinema. That doesn’t cost anything. Lya also likes to meet up with her friends from the old school at Marienplatz. “We walk around like that,” says the 14-year-old. Window shopping is also free. But it whets your appetite. The 14-year-old doesn’t want to talk about it. Rather about what else she dreams of: “I want to become a midwife in the Third Order, that’s where my little brother was born.”