Community PROJECT: KOLLBRUNN-Zurich / Switzerland Since 2019
HOMING BIRDS
Painting birds on the wall with residents, as a symbol to fly you back to the home you’re missing.
“The house looks completely different now. I used to be so sad whenever I come home, now I feel so much joy to enter this colourful home.”
While we were working in the AOZ, we lived in the teaching room, which was changed into a temporary sleeping-eating room for us as, with our kids as a family.
At the opposite of our door lived a couple from turkey, we got to know them already at the first evening. They both came to help us, covering the floor and get ready to paint with the kids. At the first afternoon Nias, our oldest son really wanted to go to them and asking them about their background and why they are here now. They spend hours together to talk about different countries and how the had to run away from their country.
At the second last evening we invited them to our temporary room for a tea after dinner.
Ygit used to work for the marine and a fitness teacher and Buket is a historian for turkish litury. three years ago the government put him into prison and excused him to be a terrorist. He told us how he could escape after two years from prison and the way from Turkey to Switzerland as refugees. When they showed us their not-very-often-used instagram account, we look at the photos and couldn’t recognise them, as they both used to have very long hair.
They laughed and he said; “ I swear by God that as long as Erdowan is at the power I will not cut my hair. When I came out of prison my wife asked me; “Do you like short hair?” I said, yes why not, but never imagined that she would cut her hair. But she just went to the haircutter and shaved off her hair. “For you!” she said and smiled.
Then he cut his hair as well. In this moment he had a big smile on his face and said: “But with her big eyes she looks so pretty with short hair!”
Their love story is full of this kind of moments. They engaged two weeks before he had to go to prison and got married while he was in prison. “I wanted have her name, but she just took mine”, he explained, “as I was in the prison I couldn’t do much, she had to go to the registration. But her name would have been much easier to spell.” Than after two years prison he got charged for five more. This was the moment they decided to flee. She burned together with him their passports and said; “What ever comes I will stay at your side. I will not let you alone.”
“I love this birds, they gave me the feeling that I can fly as well. I love the colors, it feels like being on an other planet.”
Mohammed from Syria