Others have managed to make it …

 Germany, Wustermark:  6000 Kilometers further north we hear almost the same sentence: “I have not done anything with my life. I have only myself to blame”. Benno is again in the driver’s seat. He arrives at Rossmann’s central warehouse of in Wustermark/Berlin. After his lorry is docked in, a small army of warehouse workers with the tags “Promota.de” start to unload and stow away the goods within a 24.000 square meter warehouse area. None of these diligent bees speaks German. But then we hear Hausa the main language in the north of Nigeria and the south of Niger. We find out then in Hausa that the warehouse workers are contract workers. It is their job to remove and fill  the goods on the shelves of the Rossmann outlets both here and mainly in the Berlin outlets – always at night.  In the day time they are brought back to their quarters which are provided foe them by the Promota company. When he was new on the job the accommodation was in a room with 4 beds. In the washbasin one could just about wash one’s clothes , cooking was done on a  hotplate that they had to buy and eat without a table. “Officially we now receive a wage of 8.50€ per hour but the alleged costs of the company are deducted. 150 -250€ for the room, the cost of transport and the clothing which the firm provides. That means hardly more than 5€ per hour remain. But that is still some 500€ more at month’s end than similar work in Nigeria,” says Coulibaly Yahyah from Gombe in the East of  Nigeria. That way they can send home at least a few hundred dollars at month. This is already his fifth workplace. Every three months he is lent out to somewhere else. “Always unfamiliar people, always unfamiliar firms, unfamiliar rules.  The main thing however is that the people back at home think I’m doing well.”