Everyone has a story about their favorite teacher. Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to have one. One who listened and understood, even though you were completely hopeless in school, and recognized there was another space or field you excelled in. One who was like a breath of fresh air and turned what would otherwise be sleep-inducing lessons in the classroom into delightful recesses on long, dark winter days.
World-renowned literature and films have been created about a life-changing teacher. Great teachers abound in world history, inspiring great men and women alike. There are countless stories about those beloved teachers, social workers, or coaches who used their unique social talents to break through to the seemingly unreachable and turn children many considered monsters into men and women.
In the 1967 classic film To Sir, With Love, Sidney Poitier delivered one of his most memorable performances as an unemployed engineer who takes a teaching job in a rough neighborhood in London’s East End, where the students are dead set on making his life a living hell. Portier faces the challenge head-on by treating the students as young adults as opposed to treating them like animals. In 1995’s Dangerous Minds, Michelle Pfeiffer also took on the role of the teacher who makes a difference by seeing her young inner-city students of various ethnic backgrounds who grew up in a proverbial war zone as human beings. In 1989’s Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams plays a teacher who arrives at an American all-boys boarding school and replaces the strict, borderline-military discipline culture with poetry and encourages them all to seize the day.
In Hundige, that person’s name was Birger Mosholt. When the municipality of Greve called him up in 1998, he had received almost every accolade a social educator could accumulate. He had started his career as a library attendant at the Library of Freedom in Avedøre back in the 1970s. There, he spent most of his time kicking out the Greencoats and aspiring bikers who ran around with leather jackets and bicycle chains, tearing up everything they could get their hands on. He was a tall, gangly kid who soon realized that if he kept on throwing them out, it was only a matter of time before they would seek retribution. He decided to be proactive and set up a room in the basement where they could all hang out and invited them in. This action marked the beginning of a controversial and remarkable career.
Birger felt that if no one talks to us or wanted to develop a relationship with us, we’d become even more dangerous. Birger disapproved of our criminal behavior and our violence, but he first wanted to get to know more about us as people.
Birger established The Octopus in Avedøre, which became a famed project where troubled youths could come and develop the kind of relationship with adults that they didn’t have with their own parents. He became known as the father of all the Danish, halal-hippie social educators, but his efforts paid off. Crime went down in Avedøre, Birger became the leader of SSP in Hvidovre, and he was considered one of the country’s trailblazing social educators. In 1996, he was given the Peter Sabroe Award for his work.
At this time in his life, Birger decided to start a career as a private consultant. Even though he had been a successful consultant, he was tired of the time-consuming municipal system and wanted to be his own boss. Shortly after he quit his job in Hvidovre, Greve called up Birger and said they needed him. They had lost control of the young people in Hundige, and Mayor René Milo wanted Birger to help. The municipality was ready to give him anything he wanted if he accepted the post. He would be the leader of the SSP collaboration, he could bring in his own team of educators, and since the local politicians were keenly aware that something extraordinary was needed to save Hundige, he was offered a high salary. Financial resources were also guaranteed for the project. He wasn’t sure the system would back his methods, as they ran counter to the ones already in place, but in Greve, they assured him they were sure. For that reason, Birger accepted.
By this time, I had become a household name in social educational circles, and Birger was familiar with the mythical, violent monster who took revenge on his foes by lighting cars on fire and thrashing his way through the mall and youth clubs. I sounded like the tales people told about conquering warlords who marauded and pillaged towns in dusty, old history books. Mind you, I was still a teenager.
One of the first things Birger and his two trusted coworkers, Tom and Kim, did, was talk to the young people. He believes that it paid dividends immediately. Birger trusted them, and they trusted him. Crime rates began a steady decline, and one of Birger’s greatest personal triumphs was when he got a boy named Samir an apprenticeship as a mechanic.
It took a while before he got the chance to talk to me, but one day when Birger arrived for work at the youth administration, he was told that I was already waiting in his office. Again, I prefer to be proactive and take initiative.
Birger came into his office, and to the best of his recollection, our conversation went like this:
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
I was sixteen at the time but had the attitude of a seasoned biker. “You’re Birger.”
“Yes, and you’re Sleiman.”
“That’s right, and I’ve heard you’ve helped some of my friends. You’re welcome to do that.”
“Why, thank you. It’s very nice of you to grant me permission to do my job.”
“But there’s something you need to know.”
“Yeah?”
“You need to stay away from me. Don’t try to help me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve met too many guys like you. Teachers and social workers and staff who talk a lot. But I’m not gonna be taken for a ride by a bunch of people who’s all talk, so you just stay away from me.”
“Let’s just talk about this first.”
We started talking because even though Birger saw what was a hardened gangster on the outside, he simultaneously saw a boy looking for someone who could take away the responsibility of all his misdeeds and tell him that he was cruel to others because others had been cruel to him. I shared my story with Birger, and out of all the angry, young men Birger had met doing his job, he thought I was possibly the one who was best equipped to reflect on his own life.
We talked for about an hour, and for Birger, it was a great experience. He had sat down with a reputed terror who had done so much shit, and then there he was, the seasoned educator being introduced to social mechanisms that no one had introduced him to before involving the criminal underworld and gang life.
Finally, Birger said to me, “Okay, Sleiman. I know you say I’m not allowed to help you. But what if I pull some strings and find you a place to live?”
“If you do that, you’ll be the first person to ever do something for me.”
Birger was high on dopamine when he left his office and went in to see his colleagues, who had all been employed by the municipality for years and knew my exploits well. Exalted, he told them about his experience. He said, “What a wonderful kid. A diamond in the rough and intelligent as hell.”
They all looked at him and shook their heads in disbelief and insisted he was being seduced by a psychopath.
Birger insisted that they were all wrong and blinded by their own prejudice. They just waited for everything to go wrong so they could tell Birger “I told you so”.
The next morning, Birger and I met again. I was standing at the mall by the escalator with a handful of people. Birger walked up to us with the best of intentions and told me how much he had enjoyed our conversation. He said he would like to write some of it down and explain to his colleagues my experiences within the system so that we all might meet somewhere in the middle.
I looked at him sideways. “Did you not understand what I said? Don’t you fuckin’ dare write my story! You just stay the hell away from me.”
Meanwhile, Birger opted not to comply with my instructions, and I went from being an angry, young man who refused to accept help to being an inquiring boy who demanded a great deal of attention. I called Birger constantly to test him. Was this guy worth trusting? Was he more than just hot air?
In time, a degree of confidence was established between the two of us, and when the young people of the community needed permission to do something, I took it upon myself to act as the liaison. Whenever my friends were in trouble, Birger would receive a phone call.
I called Birger up one Saturday night when my friend Farid had been beaten up by his father and cousin at a gas station. Farid had been beaten up really badly and didn’t have a place to stay, so Birger let him stay with him so that his father wouldn’t know.
I was very keen on helping my friends and took responsibility for a group of young boys who grew up under very rough conditions. All the really hardcore criminals and gang leaders I’ve met, almost all share the same story. They have been locked up in closets and beaten to a pulp. They have been hung by belts in the living room, where they were thrashed by fathers who were desperate and powerless and thought that that was the medicine they needed.
In the beginning, the Birger Mosholt project was a success. Crime didn’t disappear overnight, but the rates did go down. An important element of his philosophy was that it was vital for the kids to have something to lose. The kids caught on to that quickly.
We asked one day, “Birger! We have never been on a real trip together. We’ve never experienced anything together! Can’t we go on a trip to Spain?”
“But how would that work? What are the conditions? Who is going with you? Tom and Kim?”
“No,” we said. We decided it should be a self-appointed group of fathers because, in order for us to have something to lose, they should also have a stake in the responsibility in case things went awry. Birger accepted, and the trip was arranged.
It was an early Sunday morning during the summer of 1999 on the vacation island of Gran Canaria. After a wild night of drinking and doing drugs, me and one of my friends (whose name is being withheld) were lying in our beds and had just fallen asleep when we heard a knock on the door. Two of the youngest boys, who were brothers, were standing outside, yelling, “There’s a fight outside. Come on!”
Drunk, high, and half-asleep, we both ran out on the hotel lawn and joined the madness. The two brothers’ older brother was getting his ass kicked by a couple of Irishmen. We each grabbed a chair and jumped the Irishmen, and suddenly, the brothers’ father, whom we had called for backup, came gliding across the lawn as if shot from a gun. In front of him stood a six-feet-five Irishman who was as broad as a bathtub. We started throwing chairs at him. He and his friends had knives, and so did we. When we realized that these Irishmen weren’t tipping over so easily, it got wilder and wilder because we actually had to defend ourselves.
The police arrived, and it turned out that the Irishmen were part of a larger tour group who had basically booked the entire hotel. Since our group was the smaller one, we got half an hour to pack up our things and immediately vacate the premises.
Birger was interviewed by the paper and confirmed that the municipality had received an additional charge of approximately $400 USD from the hotel for destroyed furniture. He said, “Obviously, it is extremely annoying and frustrating, but I certainly don’t think it detracted from the educational aim of the trip . . . Let’s not blow this out of proportion.”
The charge was added to the $13,000 USD in kroner that the trip had cost the local taxpayers of Greve.
The paper reported that the above-mentioned father had participated in the brawl against the Irishmen. The newspaper also interviewed René, who said that Birger had never revealed to him that trips to Gran Canaria in high season were part of his educational practice. The mayor continued: “I fully understand that certain alternative methods must be employed, but Mosholt must also understand that some people in this municipality may question the relevance of such a trip.” He added that even though Birger had a budget at his disposal, it did not imply that the whole world was his oyster, and he intimated that he never would have signed off on the trip had he been consulted.
In spite of the fight, Birger did not regret the trip. Two educational standpoints had collided. For René , the case was clear: to him personally, to the system, to the police, and to the inhabitants of the municipality, Birger had crossed the line. René has since left Venstre, the main center-right party in Denmark, and formed his own local party.
The articles in Ekstra Bladet were published while Birger was on vacation. During his vacation, he received a call from his boss, urging him to keep fighting. But it was too late. When he returned to his office, there was a note on his desk saying that he should report to René immediately.
Birger basically received a letter that said, ‘Sign this and get lost.’ It was a shame for him personally, for the kids, and also for Hundige.
“You’ll get wiser,” they had told Birger at town hall when he had had his first conversation with me and called me a diamond in the rough. But did he get wiser?
In that regard, Birger is still the same person. To this day, when I describe something humane, understanding, and perhaps a touch naïve, I refer to it as “a Birger project.” I still regret the consequences the whole affair had for him. Like so many times before, we had failed. We had failed to keep our promise, and it had cost Birger his job and a lot of grief. He stood tall, but we had destroyed his life’s work, and I contributed to his downfall even though he had put his faith in me. I had let him down.
Birger is now head of department at Kofoed’s School, where he teaches socially deprived youths, and he still believes his approach to troubled criminal youths in the Danish ghettoes is the right one. But back in 1999, the project ran aground on the front page of a newspaper, and in Askerød, things ended the same way as they did in Dead Poets Society: in tragedy. Once again, I faced charges. There were thirty-three cases in total in which my friends and I were involved. For all of these infractions, I was sentenced to three months in prison.