Spontaneous grass-roots organisations are springing up to help refugees newly arrived in Austria. Joan Avery describes her experience teaching German to her new Afghan neighbours. At the end of October last year, several refugees quietly moved into the house next door to ours in the Austrian village of Rohrau. The first people we saw outside were the children. Maryam, a 12-year-old Afghan girl, wore a headscarf for the first few days; she has now discarded it and rides her bicycle around the courtyard in bright pink clothes. She moved in with her siblings, three-year-old Rehanneh, five-year-old Mohammed Hussain and their parents, Bas-Bibi and Elias. With them came two other families from Afghanistan. There are now six adults and eight children renting rooms in the seventeenth-century sta