She wears the headscarf for religious reasons. But she could also wear it for hygienic reasons. Nursing staff have to tie their hair back tightly anyway so that no hair falls into the residents' food, for example. Perhaps this is the reason why no one gives Wfaa Alamamo a dirty look because of her headscarf. But perhaps it is also because she has an open, warm personality and is a special student nurse in many respects: she comes from Syria, she wears a headscarf - and she is 41 years old. If everything goes as the Syrian mother of three imagines, she will be able to call herself a qualified nurse in three years' time.
Yet many things in her life have turned out very differently than Wfaa Almamo had imagined. She had to flee her home town of Aleppo in Syria because of the war. Together with two brothers and two children, she came to Germany via Turkey. She had to leave a son and her husband behind. Changing places of residence and the uncertainty of how her family would fare made the initial period difficult for her. "My head wasn't clear," she remembers. Then she came to Ludwigsburg in November 2015 and got to know the Jobcenter Landkreis Ludwigsburg. "The job center helped me a lot, a lot," says the Syrian, who now speaks good German. Even today, it's still good to know who to ask when questions arise, problems occur or she doesn't understand official letters.
The family has been reunited since June 2017 - and Wfaa Almamo has hit the ground running. As she has hardly any career prospects as an Arabic teacher, she decided to start all over again in a foreign country at the age of 40. She took the B1 exam in German, visited the Jobcenter's application center and found out about the prospect of training as a nurse during an on-site appointment with the Jobcenter's company advisory service at the Mathilde Planck School. The Job Center's integration mediators encouraged her in her desire to gain a professional foothold in the care sector. She will be able to graduate as a care assistant next year, but after that she wants to continue learning: "I have to do this, I have to learn something, it's for the future." Her employer, Haus Edelberg in Ludwigsburg, is happy with her. And she herself also enjoys her work. "In the first few months, it was all very much at once," she recalls, "but now it's all good - I really enjoy going to work."
Info: The Ludwigsburg district job center currently supports and advises 12,655 customers; these include not only people who have been out of work for more than a year, but also refugees who sometimes have problematic migration histories. A special feature of the Ludwigsburg Job Center: as a job center under municipal responsibility, it can offer many advisory and information services (e.g. addiction advice, psychological advice center, but also the central contact and advice center for refugees - ZABF for short - or company advice, which is in close contact with employers in the district) under one roof. The job center is responsible for migrants who have a permanent residence permit or whose asylum application has been approved. This currently includes around 2880 people.
