Yes, there is an app for that, or at least there will be soon. In January 2017 refugees arriving in Germany will be able to consult an app called Bureaucrazy to help them navigate a new language, a new country, new rules and new homes.
It’s the brainchild of six Syrian refugees who arrived in Germany within the last 2 years.
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Omar El Shafel and Munzer Khattab are two of the main developers of the app. Both arrived in Germany with the waves of refugees that risked their lives crossing the sea and eventually walked to their final destination.
“The first step from Beirut to Algeria was not that hard because we take the plane,” El Shafel told Global News. “But then we started walking, taking cars, paying the traffickers and the most dangerous in this journey is the sea.”
Khattab had a similar experience on his journey. “It was actually the worst journey I’ve ever had… we had to walk a lot, through woods, through mountains and a lot bad places.”
Once they finally arrived in Germany, the two men were placed in a refugee reception centre in Berlin. It was essentially a makeshift tent erected to deal with the influx of so many people.
El Shafel spent just over two weeks there, while Khattab was lucky and transitioned out to a hostel in a week. Like their fellow app developers, they were alone in having to deal with paperwork and housing issues in a foreign language.
“I found it’s really, really hard cause I had to do my first paperwork which is registering in the citizens office,” said Khattab. ”
I get there and I waited for five hours and it was the wrong place and then I go to another place wait for four hours, take an application to fill, don’t know the language, so it’s really hard.”
The idea for the app came out of a computer coding class at the Redi School for Digital Integration, a non-profit IT school in Berlin.
There the six colleagues found a place where they could learn new skills to give them an edge in the job market in Germany while improving their language skills.
“We didn’t have an IT background before so we started learning and applying at the same time,” said El Shafel.
“One of the biggest problems that we had was the language, the housing problem, the internet connectivity and of course the bureaucracy,” explained Khattab. “Everyone came up with bureaucracy is the worst one.”
Deciding that the notorious bureaucratic red tape in Germany was the biggest concern, they decided to come up with a plan to help others and they aptly called their app Bureaucrazy.
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Once it’s out of the testing stage and goes live, the app will help on several fronts: it will help with translation of key paperwork, finding the right government offices to go to, helping with housing concerns and even helping find banks to open accounts.
“The main goal of the application is to help people, just to help people navigate through the Germany bureaucracy system, it’s a very hard complicated one,” said Khattab.
Khattab and El Shafel say the app will be free of charge once it launches because they know that many refugees need to save every penny they have.
Although they hope to one day be able to return to their home in Syria they know that isn’t possible right now.
“Germany is a good country, a safe country. We can continue studying here and we can build our future here in Germany,” said El Shafel.
Both men say this not just a way to help refugees new to the country but also a way to give back to Germany — a country they are grateful to for helping them see a future for themselves that doesn’t involve war.
Melanie de Klerk is an assignment editor at Global National. She was one of the 2016 Arthur F. Burns Journalism Fellows based in Berlin Germany.
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