Home > Allgemein > Starting Below Zero: A Guide By and For Refugee Women*

Englisch_Brochure “Starting below Zero”

This brochure, which is aimed at those living in refugee camps and those who support people living in refugee camps, contains a great deal of practical information. In the following pages, you will find quotes, explanations, a list of addresses of useful organizations, and empowering accounts and illustrations. While the brochure does not list all the many initiatives and organisations that offer support and counseling to refugees, we have tried to provide an overview. The main topics covered in this brochure relate to healthcare, legal counseling (especially regarding discrimination), and topics specific to women*.

This brochure is also available in Arabic, FarsiKurdisch, Albanian, and German.

The idea for this brochure evolved out of a project that examined the situation of women* living in refugee camps in Berlin. This project, which took place between 2015 and 2016, was a collaboration between students and teachers at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University in Berlin and the group, International Women’s Space. During the project, the experiences, demands, and needs of women in camps were collected and published in a book, Living in Refugee Camps in Berlin: Women’s Perspectives and Experiences. As this book was mainly accessible to an English-speaking and academic audience and did not directly benefit the women whose stories and experiences were essential to its creation, we decided to develop this brochure.

Apart from the experiences narrated by women who were part of the initial project, this brochure was also shaped by those who attended empowerment trainings conducted by Trixiewiz e.V. in different refugee camps in Berlin. We hope that, through this brochure, we can give something back to these women*. The brochure was created in cooperation with Trixiewiz e.V. and International Women’s Space e.V. with funding from Aktionsfond IKMO, Frei-Zeit-Haus e.V, and Bundesprogramm Demokratie Leben!. It is the result of collaboration between students, migrant organisations, and women* who have experienced flight and/or migration. It aims to go beyond simply documenting the problems of migrants and refugees by providing an overview of helpful organisations and empowering strategies for dealing with common problems.

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