Spare Room

I ran across this thing in Berlin called Flüchtlinge Willkommen where three people decided to place refugees into regular shared apartments instead of just letting them pile up in mass housing. The basic idea is straightforward: you’ve got an empty room because your roommate got it in his head to find enlightenment in India or whatever. Someone from Syria or Kenya or Russia needs a place to live. You weren’t going to do anything useful with those four square meters anyway.

The money side works out different ways—some people do these standing donations, where a bunch of folks commit to throwing in twenty euros a month, and some state programs actually cover the rent to move people out of the centers. Your new roommate learns German faster living with actual people in an actual apartment, faster integration, actual shot at getting on their feet instead of getting stuck in waiting mode.

What I kept thinking about was the part that doesn’t fit the logic. You’re not running a charity operation. You’re just sharing a kitchen and a bathroom and the weird hours of daily life with someone whose entire previous existence got erased. That’s not the same as feeling good about yourself for doing good. It’s something more ordinary than that, and also something harder. Whether you end up friends or just people who exist in the same apartment and nod in the hallway—that’s not something you control, and maybe that’s the actual point. You have a room. They need a room. Everything else follows from that, and you don’t get to script where it goes.