‘My soul gets bored’: inside an asylum seeker's hotel room
A refugee from Turkey recounts her experiences living for six months as a family of five inside a single hotel room
I am A. I am one of those who say I can live without bread, but I cannot live without freedom. I am a mother of three children. My husband, a teacher, and I were severely affected by the genocidal practices initiated by the government after the coup in Turkey. Overnight, our lives turned upside down. They imprisoned everyone who was educated, did their job honestly, did not tolerate theft, and criticised the government. We had to leave our country so that our children wouldn’t be left without parents, and my asthmatic husband wouldn’t die in prison corners. We came here through the Ankara Agreement. I will try to tell you about our six-month hotel adventure. I hope you won’t get bored.
We came here three years ago in November. They took us to a hotel from the airport at midnight. Then they gave us some documents and settled us in a room. We are a family of five, but there were only two beds in the room. They said they would give us another room later. At that time, my twins were four years old and my oldest daughter was eight. Confusion, fatigue, sadness and stress, and the disappointment my own country gave me made us grow old in one day. How difficult freedom was. My children fell asleep from exhaustion. We put them in one bed and we slept in the other. We had no strength left for anything, even to think.
A worker woke us up in the morning and gave us milk and cornflakes. My children did not know about cornflakes. They ate them with great appetite because they were hungry. We were together in the new country, we were free and our breakfast was delicious. Maybe there was no one happier than us at that moment. Our room was a normal standard room. There was a TV, a table, two armchairs, two beds, a closet and a bathroom. The window only opened about four centimetres. The room never got enough ventilation. Because my husband has asthma, we had to open the window even in cold weather.
We were going to learn the hotel’s system as we lived here. We didn’t know how long we would stay. At lunchtime, they gave us sandwiches. We ate them, and to be honest, we began to wonder about dinner. Due to Covid-19, we were not allowed to leave the room for a week. For dinner, they gave us rice and extremely spicy chicken. It smelled so strong that my children refused to eat it, and my husband and I only had the rice. The hotel did not have an alternative menu for children and the same food was served all the time. Later, we learned that all asylum hotels had the same menu.
Cooking was prohibited. They checked your room for even the slightest smell, and if they detected anything, they would report you to the management. The fire alarm in the room went off whenever there was any steam, and this sound could be heard throughout the hotel. At night, the alarm was constantly going off because some people were cooking. It was impossible to put my children to sleep without interruption due to the continuous fear. When we first moved into this place, my son saw the kitchen fire alarm and felt sad. He said: ‘Mom, we won’t be able to cook here either; there's an alarm.’ It’s not easy to forget some things.
Most of the time, your laundry gets mixed up with others, and of course, you can’t find it again. Often, it comes back unwashed. The cleaning staff give you clean sheets once a week. You are allowed to be outside from eight in the morning until five in the evening, and you have the right to stay outside the hotel for one night a month, but you need to specify the address you will be staying at. At one point, even during the day, you had to write down where you were going if you wanted to leave the hotel. Later, we learned that this practice was not legal and was a discretionary policy of the hotel management. After complaints, they stopped enforcing it.
The first week was very difficult because you can’t even breathe with five people in one room. When our time was up, we left our room and explored the area around the hotel. The kids didn’t want to go back to the room. Meals were a nightmare for the children. My husband and I struggled but ate, but I couldn’t convince the kids. If there was a sandwich for lunch, we wouldn’t eat it; we would save it for the children in the evening. It had been a month since we arrived, and we hadn't had any fruit. My children lost a lot of weight during this time. We talked to the hotel management repeatedly, explained our problem. They told us to call the Home Office and they would let us leave, but despite calling the Home Office multiple times, nothing changed.
In the same corridor, a friend told us that the church was distributing fruits, and we could go and get some. I had no choice for my children, so I went and got some. At one point, the food started to taste so bad that I couldn’t even eat it. Whenever I ate, my stomach started to ache. The government was giving us £20 per week and we were buying tomatoes, cheese and bread with it. A friend had an iron and I was making toast for my children with it. I was boiling eggs in the kettle.
They knocked on our door and told us to go downstairs. People were protesting about the food. Everyone had gathered in the garden. We watched from the window. I didn’t want my children to experience trauma because I could guess what would happen. The police came and took away many people. I was so saddened that I can’t even describe it. The next morning, there were many journalists at the hotel’s entrance. A woman approached us saying she was from a charity organisation here to support us. She asked about what happened last night. My husband explained what had happened, that the children couldn’t eat the food, and there were no alternative options. Yes, the adults should be patient and eat because that’s what everyone thought and wanted. But what about the children and those who were ill?
The woman felt sorry for us, said we didn’t deserve this, and left. The next morning I saw the woman in the daily newspaper. She had lied to us. She was a journalist and had written that the hotel food was excellent, but people didn’t like it. In other words, she was a fraud who deceived her people with fake news. We went to the hotel manager and told them about what had happened. They said that people like them always came and made false news, but not to worry, we were used to it. The next day, when we went outside the hotel, she was there again. I stood in front of her and stared at her for minutes. She turned around laughing.
I experienced another moment of shame for humanity. After the news, we received meals without spice for a few days. We could have dinner again, but they returned to the old menu. Sometimes, outside the hotel, charities would distribute food. In the meantime, I got Covid and stayed alone in a separate room for three weeks. They didn’t even allow me to see my children. I got very sick, and after eight hours in an ambulance outside the hospital they returned me to the hotel. I couldn’t receive treatment, but nobody cared because I was unwanted.
There are no healthcare staff at the hotel. While we were staying there, a father with five children had a heart attack and passed away, and that family continued to live in the same room. One day, my little daughter hit her head on the table, and her forehead split open, causing a lot of bleeding. In panic, I rushed to the reception and asked the hotel staff to call an ambulance. They told me they wouldn’t do that and suggested I call a taxi if I wanted it so badly. How could I call a taxi? Where would I go? How could I explain my situation?
Helplessness is something one cannot understand unless you experience it yourself. Some Turkish teachers who had stayed at the same hotel before us reached out to us. They had gone through the same difficulties and understood us. They said they wanted to bring us food. Every Saturday for a month, they brought us food. I would put it in the fridge and feed my children with it for three days. For two days, I would make pasta or sandwiches. We were lucky; someone helped us. I don’t know what I would have done without them. But what about the others? What a pity.
Months passed like this there. I have tried to summarise the six months I lived there regarding food. We had chosen freedom, but experiencing things similar to prison life was very tiring for us. Desolation, loneliness, not knowing the language, the fate of being a refugee. We experienced all of these. I see your floating prison on the news, and my soul gets bored. I feel ashamed again on behalf of humanity. The world should be a liveable place for everyone.
A lives in Swansea.