Every day in Lina Mawazini´s life passes slowly, she wakes up at about 4:30 am and leaves her home an hour later. Five o´clock in the afternoon.
The 40-year-old mother, without a husband, starts her household chores by cooking to feed her four children. After they sleep, she goes to the gym, often sleeping only four hours a night.
“Sometimes I feel like a robot,” she laughs. She has Palestinian citizenship and has been living in Germany since 2015. She and her children have fled the Gaza Strip to seek a new homeland. Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Romania, Austria and Denmark before ending up in Germany.
Mawazini gave birth to her youngest child during her long journey.He currently works as an engineer in the port of Hamburg for a year and a half. Unfortunately, they are rare.
In addition to common problems such as the inability to learn German and restrictions on work, there is a problem of balancing work requirements and caring for family affairs, she says. Help with childcare more than the state allows.
According to the Ministry of Employment, the Employment Research Institute estimates that during the second half of 2017, 27% of male refugees across Germany received a job, compared to a percentage of women. 6% of refugee women.
Steps are being taken to integrate more refugee women into the German labor market, even though statistics released by the Federal Employment Agency indicate that 87% of refugees working in Germany are men.
It is likely that this gender difference is due to the fact that refugee women tend to live in a home where they care for young children, not because of a lack of education or a desire to work. Contrary to what is often assumed, we have found a strong desire to work among this segment of women. ”
"We found conservative values ​​within the family, but not in terms of integration into the labor market."
For Mawazini, her single mother status was not her biggest challenge in her quest for a job, but felt that she was being underestimated as a woman and refugee, and had applied for jobs that were in fact below her scientific level.
“She has persevered and fought,” she says, because her only goal was to get a job that would allow her to spend on her children and give them a better future than would be the case in their home country.
Refugees in general have problems finding a job that needs them to be skilled, especially if it requires previous experience or training. "The men parked their cars to stare at me," she recalls. "I felt like I was a monkey in an zoo."
It is different at the construction site in Hamburg. "Here I can go out and tell a man that you are making a mistake," he says.
It remains unclear whether the German authorities will allow Mawazini and her family to stay, as the authorities are still considering their application for refugee status, but Mawazini is optimistic that she will also overcome this obstacle.
However, she managed to overcome many of the situations she could have succumbed to, she said, and recently put a tattoo on top of her right arm that says in clear black letters "Never give up."
