Gränslandets villkor - Att arbeta med gömda flyktingar

Abstract

This paper is about hidden refugees and their link to the society. There are different ways of helping these people. One can help as a private person, within voluntary organisations or as a part of professional work. Our aim purpose is to study the options for people who are trying to help refugees and are working in the borderland between the visible and the invisible world. – People who constitute the link in-between the refugees and the society. Our purpose is also to try to understand how people doing this kind of charity, act to manage to cope with life in the borderland. We also want to examine how these people are looking at themselves and their part in the context of borderland that they are working within.

Based on this purpose we want to find answers to following questions:

- How does one cope with being in the borderland? - How can one combine ”ordinary” life (family and profession) with this kind of voluntary work? - What does one experience the options of acting in the borderland considering the regulations of our society?

To answer our questions, we have used a qualitative method based on half structured interviews with five people that in one way or another work or has worked voluntarily to help refugees that are forced to hide. Our starting points are a human perspective and coping theory, which we hope will help us to analyse our results. We have also used some conceptions that we find relevant and those are strategies of action, include/exclude, role, borderland and solidarity.

Our main result shows that there are different ways to act in the borderland considering if you are working for a voluntary organisation or if you are working as a refugee helper on your own. Examples of ways to help is to give these people a place to live, economic help, or through media and politicians try to influence and point out the severity of this problem. Our respondents has also different ways to cope whit their life and work in the borderland and some of them points out that one important part is to talk about their experiences with other people. Other ways of coping with their feelings is to think, read and/or write about it. Some of our respondents are also saying that what they get in return from the people that they are helping makes it all worth the time they are spending to help these people. Another thing that appears is dissatisfaction towards our society, and how people are choosing to interpret the law in a certain way when it, according to one of our respondents could be interpreted in other ways. Almost all of our respondents are expressing that they don’t want to be a part of this, considering how our society acts today, and they have therefore chosen an alternative way of acting as a protest against the way our society is excluding certain people