Citizens of all ages and children and their doting parents all enjoy Berlin’s Gorlitzer Park.
Everyone goes about their business, including the drug dealers - many of whom are migrants from West Africa - who work the park gates, seeking out potential customers.
Nobody seems to mind the cannabis much; it is just accepted as the way things are in this hipster neighbourhood of Berlin, but after getting to know the dealers while walking her dogs each day, one local woman decided to do something about it.
Jobs
Migrants could do way more than deal drugs, she said.
“We want to show they can have normal jobs and this can reverse the whole situation in the park. If you give migrants opportunities they will take them,” said Brigitta Varadinek, founder of
Bantabaa - “meeting point” in the Mandinka language spoken in West Africa.
As well as weekly German lessons and legal advice as a first step to integration, the social enterprise she founded in 2015 offers employment opportunities in its cafe and a place to live for 15 people chosen for its work training scheme.
There are more than 300000 unregistered migrants in Germany, drawn largely by the promise of work.
Immigration is increasingly shaping politics in the US and Europe and wealthy Germany is where the newly arrived mostly end up.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, is under pressure to curb their numbers.
Since Mediterranean arrivals spiked in 2015, when more than a million refugees and migrants reached the EU, only about 41000 people have made it to the bloc across the sea this year, but opinion polls show migration is the top concern of the EU’s 500 million citizens.
In Germany, dozens of charities and social enterprises are working to ease their integration, with a host of initiatives, from retraining refugees as city tour guides, to helping them fulfil the country’s complex bureaucratic obligations.
Slim and shy to speak, Mass, 38, works at the cafe.
He has been in Germany since 2015 and spent two days sleeping in the park every week when travelling into Berlin to seek work from a refugee shelter in Mecklenburg Vorpommen, the federal state north of Berlin.
Bantabaa employed him because, of the many migrants who come asking for work, he was one of the few with a CV.
Although Mass - who did not want to reveal his surname - has been refused asylum, he cannot be returned to Mauritania because he does not have a passport.
He does, however, have a work permit.
Mass fled slavery in Mauritania, working as a bonded labourer for five years for a man who had been subcontracted by a German construction company.
He was given food and shelter, but said his boss kept his money.
The West African country has one of the highest rates of slavery in the world, with two in 100 people living as slaves, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index.
Mass said he could not return to Mauritania because he would be forced back into slavery.
If he refused to work for the man who owned him, he would be killed, he said.
Like his 80 fellow passengers, he had been told to bring enough food and water for a five-day journey from Morocco to Spain by boat, for which he had paid 500 (R7 500).
However, bad weather hit.
“The journey was prolonged to two weeks. Food and drinking water ran out and 15 people on board died as a result. They were tossed overboard,” said Mass.
He eventually arrived
in Italy.
The people in the park had come looking for work because they did not have any in their home countries, Mass said.
“Bantabaa is doing a lot for the African people that work here and it doesn’t get any support from the state. They could help them with money or clothing. The state should support them,” Mass said.
Pressure
Merkel welcomed refugees in 2015, but has been under pressure over a policy that is threatening to undermine her ruling coalition.
The situation in Gorlitzer Park was tolerated because of its location in Kreuzberg, with its liberal local government, but things have changed, said Varadinek, who continued to work as a lawyer while
running her social enterprise.
So far, it has helped 50people and is largely funded by Varadinek, with donations from companies, charities and friends. Her aim was to help more migrants as the cafe made more money.
The drug dealing still exists and the political atmosphere has soured - but Bantabaa will keep trying to bridge the gap.
“We will not solve the whole migrant question,”
Varadinek said.
“It’s a question of helping each other not to change the whole world.
“This is something that we cannot do.” - Reuters/African News Agency (ANA)