Crossing Borders

Just over one month ago the Crossing Borders community came together to celebrate how far we have come in 20 years. Since 1999 our family has continued to expand, and it was a true joy to bring some 250+ family members from all over the world together under Cinemateket’s roof for an extended night of storytelling, food sharing, and revelry. The event was a true celebration of a borderless world in miniature. Notable speakers such as Sara Omar, Jacob Holdt, and H.E. Zindzi Mandela shared stories of past struggles and future dreams. The mood was festive but there were also persistent reminders of how far we have yet to go and why the work of Crossing Borders is so important. Ambassador Mandela put it aptly with her opening words, “welcome comrades, welcome friends.” In noting that we all share this world, she reminded us that we must push forward together as one to create a more open, inclusive and welcoming world were our friendships can freely blossom. Mpho Ludidi, Khalid Albaih, and Sara Rahmeh were just a few who took part in  the two part our Voices of the World feature where artists and activists shared their ongoing efforts to break down borders and promote a more inclusive global society. With our bellies in mind, a number of attendees and CB staff had worked up a sweat in their respective kitchens prior to the event. A decadent tasting buffet with homemade savory dishes and sweet desserts from every corner of the world filled everyone’s stomachs and hearts. It speaks to the quality of the cooking that nary a crumb was left at the close of the night. In addition to the time put in by CB volunteers and staff, the event could not have gone as well as it did without the generous contributions from sponsors: Stalks and Roots, Fiolblomster, Kultorvets Blomster, Impact Roasters, and Nordhavn Coffee Roasters. We at Crossing Borders are eternally grateful for all the positive energy from the event and have used it to propel us further. Since the event, we have continued our mission. Just last week, staff visited Berlin as part of a Dialogue in Adult Education, we hosted a multiplier event targeted at entrepreneurial migrants and refugees in Ubuntu House, and staff hosted a training of trainers for youth engagement in northern Fyn which drew practicioners from four European countries. The list could go on and on. Looking forward, we are proud to announce the relocation of our Global Studies højskole program to Nordfyns Højskole and the opening of shorter programs in northeastern Sjælland. We have come so far in 20 years, but this is not a path with an end. This is a mission where the reward comes from the journey, not from reaching an end point. We will not succeed without the continued support of our friends and family. Thank you and we look forward to seeing everyone again!

Jacob Holdt made the Food for Thought event an unforgettable experience, not only for those guests who already know him, but mostly for those who heard him for the first time. His charismatic personality and life experiences were almost impossible to imagine — he left the audience impressed, inspired and empowered. It almost felt as if one evening was not enough to get to hear all that Jacob has to say. During the evening, the author of The American Pictures, and the newly published book “Om at sige ja”, presented some of the chapters designed for the audience to understand what milestones or better, coincidences shaped his life decisions, personal opinions and beliefs from early childhood to where is he today. He started off by showing pictures of his family and family house in Fåborg  (the village where his spent the most of his childhood). As the son of the pastor at Grundtvig´s Church, expectations of who he should become were set. However, after being thrown out of high school, his next rebellious moves opened the doors in a world outside of Denmark. In 1970, Jacob travelled to Canada to work on a farm and from there he wanted to travel to South America to support the government of Salvador Allende after he was elected president of Chile in September 1970. However, he never made it – he arrived with only 40 dollars, fascinated and shocked by the social differences he encountered in the US. Holdt stayed in the USA for more then five years, crossing the country by hitchhiking over 100,000 miles and taking thousands of photographs. During these years Jacob started working with civil rights issues. He spent years protesting the Vietnam War and conditions in the Third World. He talked about how these events shaped his perspective on the issue of human rights and democracy and how it evolved over the years. He shared the interesting and adventurous part of his journey with us through the chapter love amongst the oppressed – in spite of all and showed photographs that presented aspects of black culture rather than aspects of oppression. The chapter Ghetto Love revealed pictures and story behind Jacob´s first marriage. A particularly interesting picture featured Jacob and Annie holding the South African consul´s baby during their wedding ceremony. Another fascinating story Jacob shared with us took place in 1977, when his book was published and the KGB revealed to him that it was their intention to use it in their campaign against President Carter in an effort to demonstrate that human rights were violated as much in America as Russia. Holdt hired his lawyer, Søren B. Henriksen, to stop his own book across the world except for in Germany, Holland and Scandinavia where they had already signed contracts with his Danish publisher; he managed to stop it and until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Jacob did not release the book again. Jacob told us of his escape behind the Iron Curtain to Poland, experiencing and seeing the real face of communism in everyday life and meeting people until he met his current wife and took her on an adventurous journey around the world! Due to him losing most of his expected income from his book, Jacob could not fulfil his desire of financing a hospital but his hard work, activism and efforts throughout the years enabled him to build a nursing school for the Namibian resistance group SWAPO in Angola. Among all others stories, photographs and thoughts Jacob shared with us with such a passion, he taught me one fundamental thing – if we want to change the world or at least play a small part in influencing it positively, we need to find the “freedom to be able to say yes; the freedom to throw yourself into the arms of every single person you meet.”

HackYourFuture In my experience, charities are often seen as far removed from innovation, as fusty organisations preoccupied with the ills of society, putting a damper on the exciting progress being made in other sectors. Hack Your Future Copenhagen and its bright-eyed, dapperly dressed Managing Director Christopher don’t fit this stereotype at all. Instead, as I follow him down the all-white, minimalist corridors lit by the morning sun, Chris embodies the energy of the project he leads, one that teaches refugees, asylum seekers and marginalised groups programming skills in Javascript and front and back end development. At the weekly gathering of HYF’s students (a group from migrant backgrounds including a significant number of refugees and asylum-seekers), Chris leads a stand-up, replicating what many small businesses now do to ensure everyone in a team is on message. HYF’s version, however, struck a different tone. News that one student was granted asylum in Denmark marked the end of the stand-up after another was presented with a Raspberry Pi — a credit-card sized computer which enables people to explore computing and learn coding languages — as a prize for good effort. This is certainly indicative of the blend of business and charity seen at HYF, where migrants aren’t merely given a skill, but introduced to the fresh face of modern, European business culture. Describing his rapid introduction to HYF as a friend of the manager of the Amsterdam branch, Chris says “So I was like ok cool. I’ve got everything, the laptops, students and was like, do you wanna take over now? And they said, Chris, you’re the manager of Copenhagen now!” This sort of speed of development is indicative of a wider trend, where over 15 refugee coding schools have sprung up over the last few years across Europe and North America. Dr Rasmus Jones, a recent optical communication PHD graduate whose named is fantastically representative of the international world he inhabits, has been teaching at HYF in his spare time for the last three years. With obvious passion he speaks about the future potential of programming to influence society, and — at least to my luddite ears — he has a knack for making the technologically complex sound simple. “Let’s try to explain, say, with a hammer and a nail. You have to put two beams together. I got shown a hammer by my dad at some point. Let’s say I’m 22 and have never seen a hammer or a nail. They put a hammer and a nail in front of me, but to me these are abstract things. If they teach programming in school, if my dad showed me how to write a little program when I was five, then when I’m 22 I have different tools. We are humans in an evolutionary process, we learn from experience and exposure.” In light of this, Rasmus explains that if he taught me coding for only a few hours, the random code I see on his computer screen would begin to make vague sense. It isn’t only that we fundamentally adapt to technology in such a manner but that educated migrant groups are suited to fulfilling such roles. “It’s a growing job market. Everyone needs an app and people need those people. On the other side they have a fairly good background because they had a similar education back home, but they don’t have this stamp from society”. Getting their qualifications recognised in host societies is difficult for migrants and, contrary to much of public opinion, many of them are highly educated. Present among those I spoke to at HYF were a former financial analyst, a computer science student from Pakistan and a father of two who’d come over to study in Sweden after completing a Computer Network Engineering BA in Ghana. However, coding represents an opportunity for them to use their previous experience to learn a concrete skill, bypassing the need to gain recognition for past qualifications in a labour market that does not necessarily require a degree. According to both Rasmus and Chris, another important element of coding jobs is that they are less reliant on learning Danish. Chris points out that English — at least in Europe and the US — is very much the lingua franca of coding. Even in a Danish workplace where Danish is spoken most of the time, instructions related to code and the code itself will essentially be in English, and it is highly unlikely that many tech jobs today will purely be Danish-speaking. This stands in contrast to wider debates about English in Denmark, where places are cut on English language university courses and learning Danish is seen as of primary importance on the road to integration. Neither is Danish the easiest of languages to learn. An article in Babel Magazine cited pronunciation as the reason for Danish being the sixth hardest language in the world for an English speaker and both Chris and Rasmus couldn’t avoid dropping comments about the language. HYF is taught in English, so, as well as it allowing for a far larger group of teachers to draw from, it removes the difficulty of learning a new skill in a language one isn’t quite comfortable with.  Despite this, Chris by no means dismisses the overall importance of Danish when living in Denmark. A student of Danish himself, he talks of the need to show a desire to meet the local population, order in a restaurant and generally be able to communicate on a basic level. According to him, it is requiring Danish as a foundation for employment that should in fact be questioned. It is undoubtedly important to learn the language of the nation you adopt (or adopts you), but it is up for debate whether this needs to happen before finding gainful employment and thus avoiding the sense of anomie that often derives from lacking a place in the job market. The work HYF does seems especially prescient when you consider the context it operates within. Our increasingly

  The Danish Institute for International Studies recently hosted an event that focused on the children of foreign fighters who fought for the Islamic State (IS). At stake is the future of at least 7,000 children under 12. This means that some of these children were brought to IS and some were born there. There are at least 30 Danish children in camps. Many states have citizens who traveled to support IS and may of those states are seeking ways to revoke the citizenship of their nationals, prevent their return, and deny citizenship to their children. What is going on here? Do we not live in societies where we believe in rehabilitation or, if a crime is heinous enough, life sentences? The dialogue around this topic centers on the violence these children have been exposed to and the beliefs of their parents. Analysts and politicians worry that allowing the return of these children and their parents pose a security risk. “… they do not belong in Denmark” say political leaders. To these children, I would like to say, welcome home. To those who question their humanity I say, who are you? The children currently live in camps where they have little to no access to education, organized activities, or a sense of a future. Those who previously lived abroad are having their earliest memories overwritten by a sense that the world does not want them. Those which were born into the Islamic State are given no frame of reference to judge against. For both, the lessons of the Islamic State, that they exist to fight against a world that does not want them, are proved true on a daily basis. It does not have to be this way. DIIS researcher Maja Touzari Greenwood has interviewed Danish foreign fighters who traveled to Syria to fight and have now returned. Among her subjects, she identified a need for a meaningful life that drew them to IS. They thought that through their involvement with IS they could achieve “moral transformation and absolution”. The children currently being left to waste away in camps such as Al-Hawl and al-Roj are being left in situations far worse than those Danish environments that produced individuals who viewed their surroundings as so bereft of value or future that they left to join IS. Thus far, Germany and Belgium have taken the lead in this matter and have repatriated a few orphaned children. Denmark has repatriated one 13-year-old who was shot in the leg after their mother granted consent but is attempting to prevent the return of adults. And, despite the recent change in government, there does not seem to be an effort to renegotiate this year’s earlier deal If the world does not want another Islamic State or Boko Haram it should not keep children in these disastrous conditions as possible recruits are literally toddlers and school-age children who are only just beginning to develop a moral compass. As the Danish Social Democrats say, “we need to help more”.