The Kuperus Family Blog: February in Berlin

February in Berlin

Since February is the shortest month of the year, I’ll keep this update short and sweet.

One of the biggest things that happened was finally having my long-awaited appointment regarding my residence permit. After five months of waiting, I finally got it!

But the most meaningful moment of the month was something much smaller.

My boss at the homeless shelter had been encouraging me to host an event in the main room where our guests eat dinner—something simple, like playing ping pong, singing songs, or coloring. I thought about it for a while and eventually settled on coloring. It’s something I enjoy and a good way to connect with people. So, I dragged my roommate Anastasia into helping me, and we set ourselves up in the middle of the shelter with stacks of coloring pages and half-sharpened pencil crayons. Then, we waited to see if anyone would join us.

A woman almost immediately came and sat down with us, she talked and talked and had her friends come sit with us as well. We sat and colored and talked. When she finished coloring, she folded her paper and put it in her purse.

Anastasia, my suite mate who speaks Russian, found other Russian speaking people and had them join our table. She talked with them about life and got some of them on the medical list to see the doctor when they spoke of injuries. They talked about why they came to Germany. One talked about his trouble in getting lost on the streets of Berlin, how he has found a friend he hangs out with all the time, so he will not get lost. He informed us he had bought a ticket home. If memory serves right, he was scammed into coming to Berlin through a job offer that didn't turn out to be what it had promoted itself to be, something I have heard from a few different guests.

At one point Anastasia looked over at the food line and shouted the name of a man standing in line, the men sitting at the table echoed her, trying to get the man's attention. The man looked over really confused. "No, no, no" Anastasia said "That's okay. I was just really happy to see him here". We had met a homeless man elsewhere and recommended he go to the shelter for food and a bed, and when we had seen him there, I think part of us was relieved that we knew he would have a dinner and a warm place to sleep.

At 11pm, we packed up, the lights went off, and the guests who had not gone to the sleeping houses began to fall asleep on the floor and the benches in the main room. One of my friends stated the first time she had come into the Notübernachtung was at midnight, and she stated it felt surreal, walking past people just sleeping on the floor and on benches in this darkened room.

The woman who had sat at our table for the first half of the coloring time, now becomes really excited when she sees me and updates me on her life, asking when I will host the coloring event again, at one point even pulling the paper out of her purse to show me she still had it.

Something for next month, I suppose.