"I was born in the Seif Aldawlah district in Aleppo, Syria, into a family of Palestinian origin, the eldest daughter of a clerk father and a teacher mother. As I was growing up and discovering the world around me I realized the differences between me and my friends at school, I held a different identification card with the words 'Palestinian refugee' inscribed on it. [...] As Palestinian refugees living in Syria, we didn’t have the right to own any kind of property even if we had enough money to buy it. As a result, my family was constantly on the move in several neighborhoods in Aleppo. We didn’t have a home that we felt we belonged to, every time we moved in to a new place, we knew that one day the landlord was going to ask us to move somewhere else. Finally, my family felt encouraged and bought a house under the name of a friend of ours. We started decorating the house the way we always dreamt of, we waited for the summer to pick the grapes in our little vineyard. After a while, the revolution started in Aleppo and we left the house in our nightgowns taking our little kitten Lucy along. I remember carrying a photo album in one hand and holding my little sister’s hand in the other. Smoke surrounded us, sometimes we ran, other times we bent down fearing the snipers on the roofs. [...]

On the Syrian-Lebanese border I realized that my Syrian-Palestinian citizenship was a curse that will follow me to my grave. I still remember my mother’s exhausted face after five hours of waiting on the border and the Lebanese officer’s voice yelling at us: 'Palestinians stand back!'[...]

Since my arrival to Berlin in October 2015 I have been working as an editor for the online newspaper Wir machen das!, I’m active within the theater section of MitMachMusik project (professional musicians sing and play regularly with refugee children and young people in their accommodations) and I sing in the Der Tagesspiegel choir. With many dreams to achieve in Berlin, my love for this city grows every day as if I had lived here all my life."

Hiba Obaid comes from Aleppo, Syria and has lived in Berlin since 2015. At the time the portrait was taken, Hiba Obaid was 26 years old. After several internships as a journalist, she was doing a traineeship at Radio Alex and studying at Evangelischen Journalistenschule.