A Long Way From Home
(Originally published in W: The West Weekend Magazine)
Betty Tukwaje has shiny eyes, a wide smile, and a sweet, shy manner. When words fail her in her newly learned English, the 30-year-old Sudanese aged care worker gestures to show me how it was, the night the rebels came to her house. With quick hands she shows the scar on her shoulder where the bullet left her body, and on her feet where the machete-cuts carved out her flesh.
She shows how her hands were tied behind her, when they shot and killed her husband, James. She ran outside, she explains, and was on her knees in front of her house when they shot her from behind. At the time, she was pregnant with her second son, Sirrija.
No one came to help her – the neighbours were too terrified – so she lay in the dirt, trying not to breathe least she lose too much blood. She could hear her firstborn son, Joseph, crying inside the house. She lay still until dawn, when aid workers found her and took her to the hospital. Later, the rebels returned and torched her house. They’d targeted her family because her husband, a storekeeper, was by local standards considered rich. “They were looking for money,” she says. To this day, she doesn’t know if her husband’s body was buried.
Before that, life had been a terrifying game of hide and seek amid the mass destruction of wartime – a two decades-long civil war in Sudan that cost the lives of an estimated 1.5 million people, leaving more than two million homeless. During the fighting and bombing, they were often forced to flee their homes for months at a time, living in the bushes outside her village. Once Betty went for two weeks without food, just water, eating leaves off trees.
After she was shot, she went to live in a refugee camp in Uganda with her sons and her sister’s two children. She lived first in a tent, then a single room, grass and mud hut. “The boys slept on one side, I slept on the other, and the kitchen was in the corner,” she says. There was no electricity, and she used to get up at midnight to walk three kilometres to the water pump to bring back the day’s supply. Sometimes there was bread for the children’s breakfast, and a little sugar. Sometimes there wasn’t. She tried to make do with the rations of rice, beans, oil and salt she received from aid agencies, but it was never enough, and most days were spent trying to find enough food. She lived in the camp for seven years.
One day, while going out to fetch water, she was raped by two men – she doesn’t know who, but thinks they were rebel soldiers. From the rape she became pregnant, with a baby girl who died shortly after she was born. It was then she discovered she had contracted syphilis from the rapes.
There are tears in her eyes as she tells the story, but she’s determined to go on. She wants people to know what she went through. After the baby died, aid workers helped her apply for refugee status.
The first night in her new Australian home, a small, white, brick-and-tin house in suburban Embleton in Perth, after the case worker had shown her how to turn on the lights, the gas, the TV, and she was alone with her two sons at last, she got down on her knees again, this time to pray. A devout Christian, she thanked God they were in their own house, and finally safe. Sitting in the front room, her boys, now ten and five, crawl under the couch and yell out for their mum in thick Australian accents. “I’m just so happy,” she says.
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As a boy growing up in Afghanistan, Hussain Sadiqi thought the world ended on the other side of the mountains that towered alongside his village. He never imagined that, years later, he’d be living on the other side the world, in Perth, Australia.
The son of a blacksmith, he wove carpets after school as a child, and rose to become a Shaolin kung fu national champion in Afghanistan. But as one of the Hazara ethnic tribe, a Shi’ite minority from Oruzgan province persecuted by the Taliban, his high profile made him a target.
“People knew me because of my sport, and I was a role model for young people,” he says, in a deep, serious voice that occasionally breaks into a goofy laugh. “They even used to copy my haircut.”
“When the Taliban came, they tried to get rid of Hazaras. When they came to my village looking for people like me, my friends and I ran away to the mountains. But they came back, and this happened a few times. We realized you couldn’t run every day, that some day they will catch you. I had to leave.”
In 1999 he paid smugglers to take him to Indonesia, and from there traveled by rickety fishing boat to Australia. He was picked up by the navy at Ashmore Reef and spent six months in detention before getting refugee status.
Going from national sporting hero to an unknown refugee in a Port Hedland detention centre – nineteen, alone, and with no English – was hard, he says. His ten years in Australia since then have been full of ups and downs. Hopes of representing Afghanistan in the 2000 Sydney Olympics were dashed when his team withdrew for political reasons. Visa-complications prevented him from competing in Athens, and injury kept him from Beijing. All the while, the middle son of eight held down different jobs – personal trainer, nightclub bouncer, carpet salesman –in order to send money to his family in Afghanistan.
In 2006, a scholarship to the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne got him started in the world of performing arts. Roles in two martial arts movies, one of which won him a US award for his fight scene choreography, cemented his dream of becoming a film actor. His favourite actor is Marlon Brando.
“Hopefully one day, with more experience, I could direct my own movies, and show the true face of my country to the world, how they live and where they live, the kindness and the truth of their lives,” he says. “Because many people don’t really know about my people. All they see on TV are the Taliban.”
In the meantime, he lives in Rivervale and works as a migration agent introducing refugee children to Australian sports. The first thing he tells refugees when they get to Australia is to get an education, something many never had the chance to do in Afghanistan. “My father never went to school. When he was a child he had to tend the sheep – he would leave the sheep in the mountain then run to the village and sit on the school roof, hiding and looking down on the lessons, learning the alphabet by writing letters with coal on his legs and hands, then he’d run back to the mountain and practice with a stick in the sand.
“Because we were financially very weak in Afghanistan, as soon as people come here they try to work, and I beg them, please, don’t send your kids to work, send them to school. I tell people, this country is heaven for education. Educate yourself, educate your kids, and tomorrow they could have a better future than you do.”
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T’Blay Paw was born in a jungle hut in a Thai mountain village, while her mother was fleeing a Burmese military attack on their ethnic Karen village. Her name means “free.”
Now 41 and a mother of four, T’blay spent the next forty years moving from village to village along the Thai-Burmese border, escaping from the Burmese military junta that has persecuted minority populations and suppressed dissent in the country for the past sixty years. More than half a million refugees have fled Burma, also called Myanmar, mainly to neighboring and nearby countries. Around 150,000 people, mostly ethnic Karen and Karenni, live in designated camps in Thailand, where they face discrimination, poor wages and living conditions and few protections from the Thai Government.
The softly spoken teacher’s assistant, who arrived in Australia in February last year, chooses her words carefully. Serious and hard-working, she sits in a plastic chair in her spotlessly clean Balga home, a plate of fresh rock melon cut up on the table.
“Life was really hard,” she says. “All the time we were moving, moving, moving. We always had to be ready. Any time the Burmese troops wanted to cross the river and enter our village and harm us they could. When we heard them coming, we had to pack up, but we could carry only a small bag with medicines, one or two jumpers for the kids, and food. We climbed up the mountain and hid in a cave until it was safe to come back.”
She lived in a small house made of bamboo and leaves. “We had to pick leaves and sew them to make a roof,” she says. To earn money, the men would take odd jobs in Thai villages, digging bamboo shoots or working on construction sites, where they were often exploited. “It was really hard. Nobody would protect you.” Eventually, T’blay and her family fled to Mela refugee camp, a huge settlement on the Thai border, where they lived for eleven years.
“In the Mela camp we had to wait three months to get the rice and the beans and the sauce and the fish paste that NGOs gave us. Our friends and our neighbours gave us a pot to cook.” T’blay worked as a teacher in a mission school to earn extra money. Today she works as a teacher’s assistant at Nollamara Primary School.
“It was hard there too, because the Burmese came to attack the refugee camp in summer time, when the river was shallow so they could cross it. On the full moon night they used to cross the river so we didn’t sleep and we watched all night.” Sometimes, they were shot at as they ran. The Thai military, who were supposed to protect them, would run away too. If the Burmese caught them, she says, they’d rape the women and either kill the men or force them into slavery.
Adjusting to life in Australia has had its challenges. “Everybody seems busy with their stories and with work, and we don’t have much time to visit each other in Australia,” she says. “In the refugee camp, the houses are very close, and you can call each other when you need things, and walk to every house. Here if you don’t have a car you can’t visit. In our first year we couldn’t afford to buy a car, so we walked to do our shopping, 30 minutes, and we carried the things, we ask all the children to carry. But it’s good exercise.”