2019-June-24

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How Teaching Refugees Changed Me

BY CLAUS SCHAALE · EMEAR LEAD FOR HYBRID CLOUD · GERMANY



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Can you imagine what it’s like to flee a war zone and spend months — if not years — in basic survival mode?

And after you survive that, you are still hungry to learn. You’re eager to embrace a new life and make the best out of a second chance, full of hope that you’ll eventually be able to go back and rebuild your country.

That’s what it’s like for my students at ReDI School.

What is ReDI? It’s a nonprofit helping newcomers in Germany with an education or interest in information and communication technology (ICT).

We train them, connect them to professionals in the industry or academic world, and help them get internships or jobs. We teach what we are passionate about and can really change lives, for good.

At ReDI I teach IoT skills for the new digitized world, and I get to learn from my students too.

Drawing from Experience

I personally have gone through two major relocations. But I would say I had a very comfortable and privileged situation. One where my background and local network would easily open doors.

Working with these students has changed my perspective. They are hungry for opportunities and will endure hardships like standing in line outdoors — for hours — in minus-10C temperatures just to get into the immigration office.

After driving 30 minutes in my car with heated seating, complaining about the cold and traffic, I meet people attending my evening class that were up at 3 a.m. trying to navigate the system.

Starting from scratch and being nobody twice can put things in perspective, but I really can’t compare it to fleeing a war zone.

How We Got Started

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The school was founded in response to the refugee crisis in 2015, when more than 1 million people fled to Germany. The mission was to break down barriers to help these newcomers integrate into our society.

A local group headed by Anne Riechart was helping refugees get access to laptops and learn coding. Cisco Networking Academy stepped in to support this initiative and recruited us to volunteer as teachers. The very first class was held in an events room at my tennis club. After a few weeks, ReDI was officially created.

As with all success stories, you have to get people to rally together behind a good idea.

The Cisco community has been amazing — especially team NetAcad!

We have so many local colleagues helping in many ways, but also colleagues from the U.S. who get to the office at 6:30 a.m. to teach and mentor our interns remotely on Webex twice a week. Others come here to Germany for weeks to teach and help every year, like Eugene Kim from San Diego.

In my job, I work with many ecosystem partners. Once I share the concept of the school with friends from the industry, most are eager to help. In this case, we’ve built an amazing group between Cisco, SAP, Bosch, and Microsoft. We’re always recruiting people willing to help.

Check out Claus’s video.

From the Classroom to the Job Market

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We’ve had over 1,200 students at ReDI now, from over 34 nationalities. We have so many success stories.

In each course, we learn a lot about our students. To some extent, it’s like a chance to interview a candidate for 50 hours before hiring them. With our knowledge and local network, it’s natural for us to connect talented students to great local jobs.

Students have gone from living in a homeless shelter to getting engineering jobs and starting families. From making money by selling blood to having a job in IoT. We have Cisco employees and interns who were our students, like Sana Abo Helal.

Helping at ReDI is unique. It allows us to share our knowledge and our passion for technology with our students. And we do it in a manner that will change their lives and ours — not only by teaching, but also by hopefully inspiring them to be part of our industry and community.

This experience forced me to get out my comfort zone, get my hands dirty, and enjoy building and coding stuff. But it also forced me to put myself in other's shoes — and really different shoes this time.

I want to give thanks to this amazing group of students (and now friends) that have taught me so much in the process. That is what diversity is all about.

I believe I end up learning more than our students do!

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