When Home Isn’t Where the Heart Is

In Polva, a rural village deep in the Estonian countryside, Iyman Ateek and her sister-in-law Taimaa Abazli squeeze onto a packed public bus. The pair are Syrian refugees, and they have been in the Northern European country for little more than 36 hours. Today they will attend an orientation session for recently arrived refugees in the city of Tartu, 45 minutes away. Iyman and Taimaa are the only women on the bus wearing headscarves, and Taimaa, whom TIME has been following since the September birth of her daughter in a Greek refugee camp, is convinced that everyone is staring at them. Gazing at the patches of snow and sleet outside, Iyman groans. “Living in Europe is very different from the picture we drew in our minds when we left Syria,” she says. “We were idiots.”

Neither Iyman nor Taimaa chose Estonia. Their families were assigned to the country as part of an E.U. plan to disperse the hundreds of thousands of refugees washing up on Mediterranean shores as a result of Syria’s ongoing conflict. When the two families set out from Turkey in a rubber raft on Feb. 17, 2016, they thought they would be joining family in Germany within a few days of landing in Greece. Instead, they were trapped on the wrong side of Europe’s closing borders. After living in refugee camps for nearly a year, they were offered relocation to Estonia–and only Estonia. “It feels like an arranged marriage,” Iyman says as she watches sparsely populated farmland roll by. “Like when a family forces their daughter to marry a person she didn’t choose and doesn’t like.”

Nearly 13,500 refugees from Greece have been settled in their new countries so far. Most would have preferred Germany, Sweden or France, countries with flourishing immigrant populations, long histories of accepting refugees and large economies. Instead, many have been moved to smaller, less wealthy and more homogenous countries like Estonia in an effort to fairly distribute the burden across the E.U. The result is a grand social experiment in which families like Iyman’s are thrust, unprepared, into alien cultures with little experience of outsiders.

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