Located between meadows and trees, at the outskirts of the northern German town of Bramsche, is a refugee and migrant reception facility.
Birds are chirping, a rubbish collection lorry rolls up. Apart from that, it is eerily quiet, as if the centre and its many fenced-in residents didn't exist.
At the facility's entrance, security guards check everybody coming in and out, just like at a border crossing. Part of their job is to prevent foreign secret service agents from spying on political dissidents seeking asylum.
The camp's residents are allowed to leave the facility though given their current status, their opportunities beyond the camp are limited.
One of the security guards says he arrived in Germany some two years ago. Showing us around the site, he reports that things have calmed down in recent weeks, after the country saw a surge in asylum applications over the course of 2023.
According to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), some 329,000 people applied for asylum in Germany last year, more than at any time since 2016.
The Bramsche reception centre is of considerable size, almost like a small town, criss-crossed by streets and green spaces, with cars parked along them.
Concrete table tennis tables, like those found on German school yards or in parks, stand in front of the site manager's office.
The Bramsche facility is one of two in the northern German state of Lower Saxony, with the other located further east near the city of Braunschweig.
Asylum seekers arriving in the state will usually spend their first months in one of the two reception centres or alternatively in one of the dozen additional shelters run by the State Reception Authority, which is responsible for asylum seekers.
At the Bramsche facility, applicants go through five administrative steps: registration, initial examination, file creation, interview and distribution to the municipalities, site manager Hendrik Robbers explains.
It's a purely administrative approach, which sounds terrible, he says, but that's the way it is. At the end of the day, Robbers says, his facility has been tasked with "managing" the new arrivals, instead of taking care of them.
With a maximum occupancy rate of 1,200 people, the Bramsche centre was officially overcrowded at the time of our visit at the end of November. Warehouses have been repurposed to accommodate all of the approximately 1,600 residents. Occasionally, more than 2,000 people had been accommodated at the facility. But Robbers agrees with the security guard that the number of new arrivals has been on decline recently, though he is unable to say why.
One of those living on site is Mohammed Shariff Junior. We meet him as he's queuing up in front of the sanitary facilities. One arm of the young man from Liberia in West Africa is in a plaster cast. He broke it while playing football, says Shariff Junior. He's already undergone an operation.
"Everything is running smoothly," he says about the arrival centre. Another man from Liberia later also praised the centre.
On his way to Germany, Shariff Junior travelled through Guinea, Mali, Algeria and Tunisia, he says. In Tunisia, he boarded a boat to cross the Mediterranean, he explains. But then he pauses.
It was a very dangerous journey, he says eventually. Two dozen people died in an accident before he and the remaining passengers were rescued by an Italian vessel.
"I thank God that I'm alive today," says Shariff Junior, before he is called into the medical centre.
A man carrying a little girl in his arms passes by. She turns out to be his daughter. Unlike Shariff Junior, Nisar Ahmad from Pakistan is unhappy about the accommodation.
The shower rooms are far away from the rooms and dirty, the food inedible, he complains. Ahmad repeatedly stresses that his wife is pregnant and that the driver who was supposed to pick her up and take her to a doctor's surgery in nearby Osnabrück arrived late. "Life is very tough," he says. "Every day is very tough."
He leads us to the room that his family of five currently calls home. Several beds are placed next to each other on the PVC floor, opposite a cupboard with several missing doors.
Ahmad points angrily to discolouration and dirt on the walls. Then he goes to the cupboard to look for a document, his Bachelor of Laws that's been idly sitting around. Ahmad says he expected more from Germany.
Facility manager Robbers also shows us around the site, eventually stopping in front of a large building. A repurposed gymnasium, it is now home to male asylum seekers.
Inside, the sweaty smell a remnant of the old school days, one of the residents asks a security guard in Arabic about the wi-fi. We're working on it, Robbers says and the guard translates. The resident seems okay with waiting a little longer.
The facility manager says he wished their was more room to accommodate new arrivals - whether in Bramsche or elsewhere.
What is needed, Robbers stresses, is reasonable quality: proper beds, washrooms and privacy. "We can't always offer that at the moment."
