Helping asylum-seekers in their dealings with the authorities

The Interpreter Service of Central Switzerland was set up by the Caritas charity organisation of Lucerne in 2006 to help foreigners, many of them refugees, in their dealings with the authorities. While their services were required on 8,000 occasions in 2006, now this number has risen to 25,000. One of the interpreters who helps out is Kanber Colak, himself once a refugee.
 
The now 39-year-old was born and grew up in Adiyaman province, in a Kurdish-speaking community to the north-east of Gaziantep and not that far from the border with Syria. In the late Nineties he went on to study English at the University of Izmir on the country’s Aegean coast and, for a time, all seemed to go well, with the Turkish government making a number of concessions for its Kurdish population.
 
Then, along with some other students, he set about calling for Kurdish to be able to be taught at Turkish universities and duly handed in a petition. All this came to a sudden end when the police turned up at his front door and he was given a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.
 
Even when he was released, he felt a certain pressure exerted on him and his family, to such an extent that, in 2005, he decided to leave his homeland and headed to Switzerland, where it took eight months before he was granted political asylum. In fact it while he was staying in asylum-seeker accommodation that he made use of his English to interpret between his compatriots there and the Swiss officials. Once he was given his permit to stay, he thought this would be the end of his interpreting, but twelve years on, his is still very much in demand.
 
His plan on being given permission to stay was to continue studying, and, as a result of a German course he was able to attend thanks to the Caritas organisation, he achieved the required standard to apply to university but he did not enrol at the time as he felt he wanted some job experience in Switzerland first, ending up as a supervisor in an asylum-seeker home and continuing to interpret.
 
With the influx of so many asylum-seekers in recent years, Colak is now helping not just Turks and Kurds but also Iraqis, Iranians and Syrians in their dealings with the Swiss authorities. With his own experience, he knows how daunting such sessions can be for asylum-seekers. In addition to social matters, Colak is also called upon to translate health issues.
 
As he, himself, concluded, learning the local language is the most single important aspect to be able to integrate, but this alone is still not enough. “Wherever you get two cultures coming into to contact with each other, there will always be a degree of friction, which is why he is working as a cultural mediator, too, pointing out how confusion can arise in relation to appointment times with people turning up, say, at half-past eight, when half-past seven (halb acht) was meant. A problem English speakers will be aware of, too.
 
Now Colak is well settled in Switzerland, living with his wife and four-and-a-half-year-old daughter in Zug and very well integrated in his new community. He sees his future here, too. Under current Turkish law, he is prevented from returning home. And now he is not sure if he would return, even if the opportunity arose. “I am very happy here in Switzerland,” he said.
 
Indeed, thanks to his language skills, which led him to be able to land a job, Colak has been able to do what so many asylum-seekers want to do. He is pleased, too, when so many of them embark on German courses, even if it means his services might no longer be required.
 
Urs Odermatt, a spokesman for the Caritas organisation, mentioned how many more interpreters are required, especially in Tigrinya, the language spoken by Eritreans, as well as in Tamil, Arabic, Portuguese and Farsi, the language of Iran, and a variation of it known as Dari, as spoken in Afghanistan.