Translator: Delia Bogdan Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So I think I'm a nervous smurf.
(Laughter)
But let's do it, and also let's do it smurf, so...
The word "refugee" is a very loaded word.
It comes with powerful images
of streams of people trying to cross the borders
on crammed little rubber boats,
and these powerful images are a legacy of the media
trying to cover what we refer to as "the refugee crisis."
And the word "refugee" has now become a label,
where we can't see the normal people behind it,
the normal people who came here:
bakers, designers, engineers, super happy people,
smurfs maybe.
And that's what we want to talk about.
So, let me tell you the story about the tailor and the dentist.
Imagine your grandfather,
forced to leave his country.
He has to leave his country without his children,
without his grandchildren.
He comes into a new country;
he doesn't know the language, the food, the customs.
Imagine his confusion.
I want to introduce you to Mr. Galeb;
this is Mr. Galeb.
I met him in an emergency shelter, last year, in Amsterdam.
I saw a man,
only speaking Arabic, 59 years old,
and I thought for him it would be very difficult to find a job,
here in the Netherlands.
We were talking, and he told me that he was a tuxedo maker,
in Syria, for years.
We were asked by Denim House in Amsterdam to find tailors,
because they couldn't find any good Dutch tailors in their network.
So, we put up a Facebook post, and 20 tailors responded.
And we did a testing day,
and Mr. Galeb was one of them.
And when he was sitting behind his sewing machine,
a complete change happened:
he was confident, a master tailor,
obviously, all the young tailors - he was just directing them.
And it was really beautiful to see.
But Mr. Galeb has had a long journey.
It was a frightening journey to come to the Netherlands.
He lost his family,
he couldn't be together with his family again.
And now, he was in an emergency shelter when he came to the Netherlands,
and then they transferred him to Gilze,
to the shelter.
And from his shelter in Gilze,
they transferred him to the shelter in Emmen.
and from Emmen, just a few weeks ago,
they transferred him to a shelter in Hoogeveen.
When he has to work, because we sell tuxedos,
he comes to Amsterdam,
and we provide him with a place to sleep,
a nice place to work,
and we talk with him,
and we know his worries about his scattered family.
But the system sees him as a statistic.
Wherever an empty place comes up in a shelter, they will place him there.
And the system doesn't see his grief about his family,
and the system doesn't see that he's an excellent tailor.
And I think Mr. Galeb was a tailor,
and he became a refugee, and now he's a tailor again.
Let me tell you the second story,
about the dentist:
Mohas.
Mohas studied for over six years in Syria to become a dentist,
and then he had to flee his country, had to leave.
He came into the Netherlands and was really enthusiastic,
a young guy, he really wants to work,
and then they told him that he couldn't get any accreditation;
he had to start his whole study completely over again.
And then he came to Refugee Company, and we were talking,
and he explained to me:
"I'm working in a restaurant.
I was so demotivated, so I started to work in a restaurant,
and I don't want to do this whole dentist thing anymore."
And it happens to be that my sister is an orthodontist in Leiden.
And on her birthday, just a few weeks before,
she'd told me that she couldn't find skilled people for her practice.
So I told her about Mohas,
and she invited him over for a cup of coffee.
And they worked together for a few days,
and after a week or so, she phoned me and she said:
"I'm super super enthusiastic, because his work, his hands...
You know, he really has this in his fingers.
So I think, let's try it. I will give him a year contract."
And that sounds really beautiful and simple,
but it's now a couple of months later,
and he is having difficulties with the language,
with the acceptance in the team.
But, you know, it's a start.
And just from one informal talk...
And my sister, who is brave to give him this job,
and I love her for that.
Actually, refugees had been forced to leave their countries.
We all, as human beings,
have similar life stories.
I was born in the country,
raised by a family,
grew up in a neighborhood in town.
I went to school,
I found a job, I fell in love, I got married,
my kids were born,
and I was expecting almost the same sequence
to happen for my kids as well.
This could be almost the life story of many people in the world.
Probably Mr. Galeb has had the same story, as well as Karin Dijkstra,
my fictional language teacher in the text book
"Nederlands in gang."
(Laughter)
Yeah, but the point is that this is about all the bad things
that we hear about some countries -
and then many of them are really true -
but people still prefer to live in their own home,
among their own relatives,
their own friends, their own fellow citizens,
unless something literally forces them to leave everything behind,
everything that they have had, everything that they have done,
every loved one,
and seek refuge in countries that they can not even speak the language.
This is something that many people tend to forget
or just don't think about,
or maybe they cannot imagine it
because they haven't had that experience.
That it is enormously difficult and hard,
to leave everything behind.
You're here, but your heart is pounding where your home used to be.
So I think what we try to convey in this talk
is that refugees, normal people like you and me,
their life had come to a sudden stop.
They've taken this very dangerous journey,
and when they came here, they were really exhausted.
And to overcome all these traumas,
I think they should be able to restart their lives
as soon as possible.
And their life will never be the same again.
They will never hear the sounds
of their children playing in their neighborhoods;
they will never smell the fragrances of the kitchens of their grandmothers;
they will never, maybe even be with their loved ones in one place again,
because they're scattered all over.
But I think they can rebuild their lives,
and work is a quick path to rebuild your life.
Any psychologist will tell you
that the longer you are out of the work process,
the harder it is to reintegrate into a workplace.
And then the rules.
The rules are really difficult.
I didn't find two officials working in the same department,
giving the same answer to a question.
I think we should coordinate better,
work together to change attitudes
and maybe try to push the red tape boundaries.
What's important for us
is that we believe that work is a quicker way of integration.
I've been working for 16 years
in refugee shelters on different projects,
and I didn't speak to any refugee who wanted to stay on our welfare system.
Everybody wanted to work as soon as possible.
So I think we, Dutch organizations, NGOs, voluntary groups,
or just ordinary citizens like you and me,
I think we should support this drive.
So I urge you to get personally involved.
You can do simple things:
look around and see if you see any opportunities for work
for new arrivals who came here to live here.
You can join our network, you can join the Facebook group,
you can become a mentor,
you can do something small.
And don't be afraid of reality,
just try to understand it as deep as you can.
Then you might be able to deal with it, to manage at work,
maybe to introduce some changes.
It's really important to be aware of the fact
that the refugee crisis, the migration issue,
is not a temporary matter, but a permanent one.
This time, the brutal and complex war in the Middle East
has caused a new wave of emigration to hit the European borders,
but what about the global warming?
Which, according to many scientists, is going to change some parts of the world
to become totally uninhabitable.
So, in Refugee Company, we acknowledge this reality,
we try to respond to it.
And we also strongly believe
that refugees are a great source of talents, skills, and knowledge,
and they could create added value for the whole society,
if, and only if, they are welcome and assisted and guided properly.
And the fact is, we're all together in this.
And we only have one planet as our home,
so let's make all of us feel comfortable at home.
Thank you.
(Applause)