So, my name is Elias Karam, and I’m from Lebanon, and I came to the Netherlands in 2015. I’m now Dutch citizenship, and I work for Secret Garden. My work with Secret Garden is part of my activism work, because I’m an activist for LGBT, HIV, you know, migrants, people living in the Netherlands, and refugees as well.
So, and Secret Garden is Amsterdam-based organization. We are at the office now in the center of Amsterdam, and the Secret Garden is a grassroots organization that works for refugees and with newcomers, but also immigrants with, Dutch with immigrant background. So, and also we have the volunteer-wide Dutch LGBT that try to come to our organization, and we try to connect people together, you know.
So, what we do, we offer social support, legal support. Every day from Monday to Wednesday, the office is all open. In the morning time, people, refugees, like, whom think that needs an attention or help, and he cannot find his way, they come to us. We speak different languages, you know, like, mostly our target group, they are coming from Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, North Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, you know. From Iran, from Pakistan, sometimes from Africa, from Cote d’Ivoire, and these African countries, you know. And also we have even from Latin America, from Ecuador.
So, we try, you know, to ask people to help us as much as they can, you know, to be able to communicate, because many refugees, they come, they speak just their language, and they find the difficulties and hard to communicate. So, we try to find what the problems are, we work with the refugees and with the specialist people to, to solve the problems with the, as I’d say, when they are located during the asylum procedure. If they need any legal help with the lawyers and advocates, you know, so our work is, you know, social, and communicative, and connect, you know, people, and try to solve the problems, even help with integration, with embroidery.
They come with us, they come with us, they don’t know where to start studying the language, we recommend some schools, we have connection with, you know, and they have more, well, it should be accepted everywhere, but, you know, LGBT refugees, they are special groups, and they need special attention, especially, you know, the transgender people that they are going into, you know, transition. If, like, also, if, like, also, we have part of our group, like, that HIV positive, you know, and they are still in this shock, that they discovered, and they need also extra attention, so, we try to suggest the schools that we know they are, they have, they, they have kind of understanding.
