Aziz and Sima met close to the beautiful tiles and towering minarets of a preferred shrine in Tehran. Aziz, a mild and pensive nineteen-year-old, seen Sima sitting on a bench, and launched himself. Sima, he realized, was from the identical province in central Afghanistan as he was, and likewise a Hazara, a traditionally persecuted ethnic minority. Both of them had fled to Iran as kids—Aziz as a result of the Taliban had killed his father, Sima as a result of her household had been threatened with comparable violence. Every different week for almost two years, they met at the identical bench; a significant friendship blossomed right into a profound love. Sima, who’s a 12 months older, would inform her household that she was seeing kin. (“If my family knew about this relationship, believe me, I would be beheaded,” she later advised me.) In 2017, the couple determined to marry. Aziz’s mom visited Sima’s household to ask for his or her blessing. They refused. Sima’s mother and father felt that Aziz, who labored in building, was too poor. “If you try to run away with him,” Sima recalled her mother and father telling her, “we will find you and kill you.”
The following 12 months, the couple scraped collectively sufficient cash to pay an Islamic scholar to marry them in secret, and a smuggler to assist them make a five-hundred-mile journey to Turkey. Within a month of their arrival there, Sima grew to become pregnant. “All of our friends encouraged us to go to France,” Aziz mentioned. In Greece, Sima gave beginning to a lady. After one other 12 months and a half of travelling, together with prolonged stays in Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, they arrived in Paris, this previous January. The solar had not but risen, and it was raining and chilly. The couple, who solely spoke Dari, had no particular vacation spot besides the identify of an iconic landmark, which that they had dedicated to reminiscence: the Eiffel Tower. A employee there provided them tea and known as the authorities on their behalf. Aziz held his daughter, now greater than a 12 months previous, at the base of the tower, and captured a brand new WhatsApp profile photograph. That afternoon, an area group secured a room for them at a low-cost lodge that had been transformed into an emergency shelter. But the house was short-term. Every week later, they have been on the road.
At the time, France had a backlog of asylum circumstances. Nicolas Delhopital, the director of the affiliation Famille France-Humanité, advised me that asylum seekers in France can wait years to obtain a choice on their case. A scarcity of state-provided housing has meant that migrants are sometimes pressured to sleep in makeshift camps, below bridges, and in Métro stations. Last 12 months, the European Court of Human Rights found that France had violated its duties below the European Convention of Human Rights by inflicting “inhuman and degrading living conditions” for 3 asylum seekers—from Afghanistan, Russia, and Iran—who claimed that they have been pressured to sleep on the streets for months earlier than having the ability to register as asylum seekers. The coronavirus pandemic has solely difficult the state of affairs. In March, 2020, throughout the nation’s first lockdown, administrative workplace closures made it just about unimaginable to submit an utility for asylum in France. “You stop people from being able to register [for asylum], you stop them from being able to accept legal housing,” Elodie Journeau, an immigration lawyer who works with migrants and asylum seekers in Paris, mentioned. “More isolated women, isolated children, ended up on the streets.”
In response, tons of of Parisians have joined an ad-hoc shelter system, opening their spare bedrooms and dwelling rooms to deal with migrants and asylum seekers throughout the pandemic. The apply first took maintain in 2015, as more than a million people—greater than half of them from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan—utilized for asylum in Europe. France was in no way the main vacation spot. It fielded greater than seventy thousand functions that 12 months, whereas Germany, in the high spot, acquired almost 5 hundred thousand. But the inflow was sufficient to immediate officers in Paris to open a humanitarian middle for migrants north of the metropolis, at Porte de la Chapelle. (The middle closed in 2018, and was changed by six comparable facilities throughout the Paris area.) Four hundred beds have been obtainable for lodging of 5 to 10 days at a time. Many extra individuals used the house throughout the day to bathe and eat meals. An encampment of some twenty-five hundred unhoused individuals quickly shaped close by. (Months later, the camp was dismantled; inhabitants have been bussed to short-term housing in gymnasiums and occasions facilities.)
Yann Manzi and his spouse and son based a volunteer group, Utopia 56, that gives help to migrants in France. In 2016, they created a venture in Brittany whereby French individuals may home unaccompanied minors dwelling in a makeshift camp, in Calais, which had come to be generally known as the Jungle. That identical 12 months, when a bunch of involved residents, working totally by phrase of mouth, started opening their properties in Paris to the unhoused migrants in Porte de la Chapelle, Utopia 56 stepped in to formalize the initiative. “We didn’t doubt the generosity of people,” Manzi advised me. “However, they need a framework, and they want to know they’re not alone.” During the pandemic, church buildings and companies compensated for a slight discount in hosts. Still, in 2020, Parisians hosted greater than three thousand individuals by Utopia 56.
Many extra individuals register on-line with the emergency housing program than really grow to be hosts. “Convincing them to open their doors to strangers is hard,” Marwan Taiebi, the coöordinator of the program, advised me. “You need to be helped to do that.” After an preliminary name with a possible host, a member of Taiebi’s workforce makes a house go to. Hosts are required to move a criminal-background verify and to signal a type absolving Utopia 56 of accountability in the event that they grow to be contaminated with the coronavirus. (So far, there have been no reported circumstances of COVID-19 spreading between hosts and friends in Paris.) The program has additionally created a “blacklist” of hosts. “Some hosts expect too much of the families, or are, like, weird people,” Taiebi mentioned. “They don’t realize what the families they are hosting are going through.” Although hosts are welcome to share meals with friends, they’re inspired to not ask too many questions. “Most of the time, the families come, and, in five minutes, they sleep,” Taiebi mentioned.
François Lemeille, a twenty-six-year-old engineer, grew to become a bunch final fall, after three of his roommates fled Paris’s second lockdown. An acquaintance who was a bunch with Utopia 56 advised Lemeille that the group was on the lookout for individuals like him. Lemeille’s roommates agreed to supply up their rooms. “Sometimes, it can cause anxiety,” Lemeille mentioned. He as soon as made pumpkin lasagna for an Eritrean couple who didn’t prefer it. On one other event, a visitor smoked indoors. And but, when his roommates returned to Paris, in January, the house continued to host households a number of nights per week. They moved a settee mattress to the nook of the front room and used tall cupboards to separate the house. “When we tell friends, it seems really impressive, but when you see the reality, it’s not,” Lemeille mentioned. “We offer a comfortable place, a shower, and a warm tea. That’s it.”
By the time I met Aziz and Sima, in February, that they had spent a month shifting between shelters, lodges, and strangers’ flats in Paris. We met at the “tea shop,” as they name it, a day middle close to the Gare d’Austerlitz, in the southeast of the metropolis, the place asylum seekers and refugees can bathe, do laundry, and eat a heat meal. Aziz had devoted a lot of the day to calling 115, an emergency hotline for short-term lodging and different companies. During the pandemic, the line’s operators in Paris have been overwhelmed, receiving a thousand calls per day. Upward of 300 and fifty of them are requests for housing that can not be crammed. That day, Aziz and Sima have been amongst the unfortunate ones.
When the middle closed, at 4 P.M., they packed their child stroller and different belongings—snacks, telephone chargers, a folder of paperwork—and boarded the Métro. “I do not have one euro in my pocket,” Aziz advised me. “When I travel by train, the people of France buy tickets for us.” Their daughter blew kisses to different passengers, one among whom gifted her a Snickers bar. An hour later, the household arrived at the Rosa Parks station, in the northeastern outskirts of the metropolis, subsequent to a strip mall and a film theatre. At the time, Utopia 56 ran its emergency internet hosting program from a close-by storefront. (It has since modified the location to Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, in the metropolis’s middle, to focus on the state’s failure to offer shelter.) That night, a crowd of some fifty individuals gathered. Many of them had been there earlier than. A lady from Côte d’Ivoire sat on a concrete slab, urgent henna on her nails. She greeted Aziz and Sima, and handed their daughter a vanilla pudding.
Registration for housing started at 6 P.M., as a citywide curfew set in. In a close-by workplace, a volunteer texted hosts to verify on their availability. Eight church buildings have been on standby, together with one named Saint-Luc, which had not too long ago hosted a household of fifteen in a room normally dedicated to studying the Catechism. Volunteers communicated by a WhatsApp group, matching households with hosts. A volunteer named Élise Longé, who’s sixty-three, advised Aziz and Sima {that a} younger couple dwelling throughout the metropolis, close to Porte d’Orléans, would host and feed them that evening. Longé accompanied them on the Métro experience. On the means, she advised me that, till retiring, this previous September, she labored as an operator for the 115 emergency hotline in Seine-Saint-Denis, a division simply north of Paris. Wait instances could possibly be so long as three hours, she mentioned, at which level the name robotically disconnects. “People are at their wit’s end, and they cry on the phone,” she mentioned. “They beg.” When I requested her about the high quality of the shelters, which are sometimes located in transformed low-cost lodges, Longé sighed. “Oh là là,” she mentioned. “Now we’re lifting the cover.”
Around 8 P.M., after roughly an hour on the Métro, Longé, Aziz, and Sima arrived in the tranquil Petit-Montrouge neighborhood. Longé pointed to a nondescript brick constructing. The house was a fifth-floor walkup; Sima carried their daughter, and Longé helped Aziz with the stroller up the slender staircase. Longé knocked on the door, and a pair, named Guillaume and Thérèse, welcomed the household into their four-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot house. The household stood at the doorway and waved goodbye to Longé. “Merci,” Aziz known as out.
