"Integration is always two sides of the same coin"

Fidelis Osita Oleh August 2011

Our mission:

We aim to develop a program to help refugees to get a better orientation in the German society and to evaluate the problems they may face here. We hope thereby to contribute to the development of a "welcome culture" in Germany and to fill a research gap. Until now there are not many academic research projects which focus on refugee’s socio-cultural background and worldviews in Germany.

So we try, according to our constitution (2§ (2)), to work in two ways:

1. To pass information about Germany to the refugees to help them to get a better orientation in Germany

2. To carry out sociological and anthropological research to be able to pass deeper information to all who are interested to learn more about "our neighbour - the refugee".

Actually the media are full with reports about the many refugees who come to Germany. We realise that we are not well prepared to host them. Acute and fast aid is important and we see much solidarity in Germany to help the refugees, but also much fear. This fear may come from the fact that we simply do not know "who" come to us.

We think that sociological and ethnological researches can help to develop better strategies to improve the live of refugees in Germany and to minimise the fear in German communities to open the arms and empty houses for refugees.

Our strategies

1. We will develop presentations and information paper about basics of the German society and the live in Germany for asylum seeker and refugee in different languages. We will publish them online and hand them out in refugee-camps.

2. We cooperate with non government organisations which offer practical assistance for refugees (legal advise, material support etc.)

3. We work on it to create an online database which contains documents, laws and information about important organisations which may help refugees to orientate in Germany. We aim to provide this information in English, French and Arabic and we hope to be able to offer more languages soon.

4. From Summer 2015 on we would like to create practicum for volunteers, especially for Master students which study social/cultural Anthropology, Sociology or History of Religion and which speak at least English and French or Spanish, or a relevant non European language.  We would like them to carry out their own field research, write a report about it and help to fill the above mentioned research gap.