Association for Services to Torture and Trauma Survivors - 30 Years, 30 Stories

ASeTTS

30 years, 30 stories

1 Jumana Jasim

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Contents

6 7 8 12 16 20 22 26 30 34 38 42 46 48 52 56 60

Foreword Welcome Farangeez (Iran) Farzaneh (Iran) Greyfer (Venezuela) Diego (Middle East) Norma (Canada) Sarah (Iraq) Ghulam (Afghanistan) Eva (Kenya) Wafah (Syria) Kevin (Singapore) Moe (Myanmar) Bonnie (Hong Kong) Safa (Iraq) Jumana (Australia) Margaret (Sudan)

64 66 70 74 78 82 86 90 92 96 100 104 108 112 116 120 121

Mariam (Pakistan) James (Sri Lanka) Norma (Australia) Danial (Iran) Anubha (Nepal) Esther (Venezuela) Sue (Australia) Mu Lay (Myanmar) Khouloud (Iraq) Hamdi (Somalia) Remza (Bosnia) Samira (Bosnia) Gertrud (Germany) Assadullah (Afghanistan) Priya (Sri Lanka) About ASeTTS Acknowledgements 5 Contents

Foreword

It all began with an idea that had never been tried before.

I 6 Foreword

n 1974, Dr Inge Genefke and three other Danish doctors responded to a call from Amnesty International asking for help diagnosing torture survivors recently arrived in Denmark as refugees from Chile and Greece.

The aim was to dissuade medical colleagues from collaborating in torture, and to document torture that had been inflicted using modern techniques, which left few visible traces. What became known as Amnesty International’s Danish Medical Group was the first such example of doctors working directly within an international human rights organisation.

This marriage of medicine and law for the purposes of healing and justice laid the foundations for what became the global network - 160 torture rehabilitation centres across 76 countries - that is the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), and of which ASeTTS is such an active and valued member.

The science, and art, of rehabilitating torture survivors has undergone a profound evolution over that time, from an early focus on the individual and their

Lisa Henry, IRCT Secretary General

relationship to clinical treatment, to a much more holistic approach that locates healing within the social context of family, friends, and community, and emphasises the additional importance of non-medical interventions, such as supporting survivors to become self-sufficient.

With the increasing professionalisation of the international development sector has come the adoption of best-practice standards and indicators for how the IRCT and its members can document and treat torture and measure progress towards its eradication.

This includes E-learning curriculum on the updated Istanbul Protocol 2022, the IRCT’s Right to Rehabilitation Indicators for States, and the IRCT’s collectively agreed Global Standards on Rehabilitation, the world’s first­ international best-practice standards aimed at ensuring survivors of torture can receive the best possible rehabilitation wherever they are. ASeTTS has played an instrumental role in the development of these standards.

But perhaps most significant of all the changes in the anti-torture field over the decades has been the shift of focus

that is reflected in the stories in this book.

ASeTTS is celebrating its 30th anniversary by sharing the achievements of its clients, as well as those who support them; their resilience, their experiences. Of course, those achievements reflect the success of ASeTTS’ work as an organisation. But the emphasis is subtle and important.

Where once the individual who suffered torture was considered primarily as a victim who should receive help, today the individual is viewed primarily as a survivor, who can, and should, be the principal agent in their own healing journey, and from whose experience of overcoming often unimaginable hardship we can all learn and take inspiration from.

For as Amnesty and Inge recognised all those years ago, it is only by learning from each other, by working together in ways not tried before, that new solutions to age-old problems can be found.

In these often dark and uncertain times, that’s a lesson we can all use.

Lisa Henry IRCT Secretary General Copenhagen, June 2022

Merissa Van Der Linden, CEO, ASeTTs

Gail Green, Board Chair, ASeTTs

Welcome It is our great honour to present 30 Years, 30 Stories, proudly commemorating three decades of the Association of Services to Torture and Trauma Survivors (ASeTTS).

It can change the way they feel about themselves and others and shatter their sense of belonging and wholeness.

Unfortunately, 30 Years, 30 Stories cannot do justice to the breadth and depth of these experiences. But the book has been designed to provide rich narratives, to give insights into the humanity behind the headlines. To share stories of displacement and loss, strength and courage, recovery and possibility, as well as the role and response of ASeTTS in supporting our clients to rebuild their lives - and to thrive and flourish.

We hope this book honours our clients, their families and communities.

We hope it inspires conversation and action.

Finally, we acknowledge and pay our deep respects to the many clients, community leaders, advocates, stakeholders, volunteers and staff members who have made ASeTTS what it is today.

Merissa Van Der Linden CEO, ASeTTS Gail Green Board Chair, ASeTTS

7 Welcome

O

ver the past 30 years, ASeTTS has been dedicated to serving humanitarian and refugee migrants who have experienced torture or trauma in their country of origin, during their journey to Australia, or while in detention, as they settle in Western Australia.

Like many other torture rehabilitation centres across the globe, ASeTTS grew out of a passionate and committed group of people who wanted to ensure refugee survivors of torture and trauma had access to culturally safe and holistic

health and wellbeing services, to help them cope with their experiences and rebuild their life in another country.

When ASeTTS was incorporated in 1992, the Hawke Government had introduced a new system to determine claims for refugee status, ‘holding’ or ‘processing centres’ were being planned for people arriving by boat, and mandatory detention was being implemented for all ‘unlawful arrivals’.

At the same time, refugees from around the world - from as far afield as Cambodia to the former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka to Iraq - were arriving in Australia through the Humanitarian Program.

Since 1992, their number has only continued to grow, with an estimated 20.2 million people around the world seeking sanctuary by the end of 2021.

There have been various waves of refugees who have settled in Australia, and Western Australia, since ASeTTS began. Their strength and resilience cannot be understated.

The trauma that our clients have experienced, as well as the effects of dislocation, loss and deprivation, has far-reaching and long-lasting effects.

Farangeez Iran

Farangeez and her family had a comfortable life in Kurdistan.

F 8 Farangeez

arangeez’s husband Nasrollah had been a mechanic for the health department for 29 years, her children were working or studying, or starting to raise families of their own.

Almost as soon as Ayatollah Khomeini swept to power in Iran in 1979, everything changed. And nothing would ever be the same again.

“After 29 years, my husband gets told because you are Baha’i you can not come to work here anymore,” she says. “(There was) no money, no anything.”

One of the most persecuted religious minorities in the world, Baha’is have long advocated for universal education – they founded the first school for girls in Iran - and promote harmony of religion and science. All of this was anathema to the fundamentalist Khomeini and his followers.

“They start taking the children out of university and high school,” Farangeez recalls. They joined the doctors, lawyers, engineers, any one of Baha’i faith, suddenly ripped from what they knew and thrown on to the scrapheap.

“My eldest daughter had one baby and her husband was Muslim; he said you

come to the mosque and become Muslim, but she said ‘I can not, I am Baha’i.’

When they divorce, her husband’s family took the baby, and she would just sit at home and cry.”

Farangeez encouraged her daughter Fereshteh to leave for Pakistan, hoping she would be able to find sanctuary with her aunt in Canada. Instead, after 53 days, she was killed in a freak accident, electrocuted by exposed wires in the street. She was 24.

“We didn’t have a passport to go to Pakistan for her funeral, we could not say goodbye,” she says.

The family was struggling to make ends meet, with Nasrollah unable to find work. He was forced to sell the large family home to borrow money to start his own business, driving his own fuel tanker. But with Iran now at war with Iraq, Nasrollah was soon roped into that nightmare. He was told if he did not take oil to the frontline for Iran, they would seize his tanker and give it to another driver. With no other means to support his family, he agreed.

With drivers regularly being killed, Farangeez lived in constant fear she

would never see her husband again. “He would go and for 16/17 days, I would not know will he come home. It was terrible.” she says. This terror continued throughout the eight-year war.

Farangeez is an elegant woman who looks much younger than her 81 years.

She has twinkly eyes, a ready smile and loves to cook, sew and knit – almost as much as she loves to give away the things she makes. It’s impossible to see the pain behind the grandmother’s generous spirit, and not just from the days of Khomeini.

When she was growing up in Iran in the 1940s, religious leaders went on the radio and basically gave their followers permission to treat Baha’i girls as sex slaves.

Daughter Farzaneh, who helps interpret for Farangeez as needed, says even she did not know a fraction of what her mother had endured.

“My mum was living in a very small village; on many occasions my grandmother had to take the girls – all three of them were pretty – and hide them because she knew they could be raped or touched in a way to dishonour the family,” Farzaneh says.

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10 Farangeez

When Khomeini swept to power many years later, her mother was immediately fearful. “We had no idea what was going to happen but I remember one night, my mother was crying and it was because she knew from past experiences the effect it was going to have on the whole country,” Farzaneh says.

While the devastation under Khomeini was not as blatantly broadcast to the country as it had been when Farangeez was growing up, it was nonetheless terrifying. The type of persecution, including setting people’s houses on fire and killing others, depended on the clergy in different parts of Iran. In Kurdistan, at least, they weren’t as virulent.

Although still anchored to their homeland, Farangeez and Nasrollah nonetheless wanted a future for their children. It’s why, even though she had lost her eldest child in Pakistan, she supported Farzaneh’s flight to the same country. She hoped Farzaneh would be able to do what Fereshteh had not: find sanctuary in another place, to build a life with hope.

Even when Farzaneh settled in Australia, the couple had no thought of moving themselves. Iran was their home, no matter how difficult, how would they cope. But in 1995, nine years after Farzaneh arrived in Australia, they sent their 24 year old daughter and 13 year old son to Turkey, so they could apply to join their sister.

“When my children go, I cried every day,” Farangeez says. “When I cook food and I remember what they like, I cry. I cry all the time. But they need a future.”

Desperate to see them again, she went to the immigration department to see if she could get a passport to visit. “I said ‘I cannot see my children, I am crying, I need a passport’ and they said ‘no, you cannot go, you are Baha’i, we will not give you a visa’.”

Farangeez kept pushing and finally she and her husband were granted a passport that was valid for three months.

They came to Perth in 1996, not intending to stay, but soon realised they didn’t want to be anywhere other than where their children were.

The couple were granted permanent residency on the grounds of family reunion, on the condition their daughter supported them for a few years, though they also could have applied as refugees.

The Iranian Government eventually granted passports to elderly people, so they were able to return to see family if they wished. Nasrollah would never return; Farangeez has only been back once. Perth was now home.

I was happy because it was like heaven for me here. My children are successful, they have their education, they can vote.

“I was happy because it was like heaven for me here. My children are successful, they have their education, they can vote, so I was happy,” she says.

Her joy was tempered with the sadness of losing her beloved husband to bladder cancer 10 years after they arrived.

Her family, including six grand children and four great-grand children in Perth, have kept her busy. But Farangeez is not one to wait for them to visit, either – she is fiercely independent and likes to get out and about herself.

The great-grandmother has been involved with the women’s group at ASeTTS for about eight years and likes to share her passion for craft, teaching others to knit or sew as they talk, or doing some cooking.

She also volunteers at the Bentley

Community Centre near her home and, until recently, would regularly take three buses to Edmund Rice Centre, in Mirrabooka, where they paid her to help out at the women’s group there.

Whether it’s making a floral mask or a knitted mobile phone case, Farangeez is always busy with her hands. “I like making something for the ladies,” she says. “They are coming to this country and they are missing their family, this is very hard.”

It’s a feeling Farangeez knows only too well. “One day my daughter, who was still in Iran, she called and she said I am missing you and I said I am missing you too,” she says. “I said ‘don’t worry, please go to the water put your hand in the water and I’m putting my hand through, too’.”

Farangeez doesn’t miss Iran at all. “In Iran, we, my children, we always living in danger. We had a good country, a rich country but then this happened to us, there is no life,” she says. “My brother and my sisters, they are there, but they are not happy.”

She misses her granddaughter, Shervin, the little girl born to her eldest daughter in Iran before her life was so cruelly cut short and who is now in her 40s. She has only seen Shervin once since they left for Australia and wishes she could join them.

Farangeez also feels for those who never made it to safety. Her sister’s daughter went to Turkey 17 years ago, where she applied to come to Australia.

She was approved, and even had her ticket to come, but never arrived. No one has heard from her since.

There has been so much pain – how can a mother ever recover from the loss of a child - and yet Farangeez is at peace in Australia. For it is here where her family has found peace.

“Iran is my country, of course, but here is freedom for us, no colour, no religion, no man, no woman. We are all together, this is good.” And she gives another of her beaming smiles.

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Farzaneh Iran

Farzaneh was just about to finish school, dreaming of going to university and studying architecture.

And then, almost overnight, those dreams were shattered.

“

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Farzaneh

was in Year 12 and they said to me ‘you don’t have a place here, don’t even apply’,” she says. All around her, hopes for the future were being crushed.

The country Farzaneh had loved, a beautiful country from sweeping seas to majestic mountains, was suddenly unrecognisable. “The Shah had been trying to change Iran and make it more European; university was for everyone, women were doctors and lawyers, there was the best fashion,” she recalls.

Now there seemed to be no opportunity for women, let alone Baha’i women. “For a couple of years, I did some hairdressing and other bits and pieces, hoping that maybe they (the new regime) wouldn’t last too long. But then I thought ‘no, I am just losing my time’.”

Young people were fleeing the country in droves. Desperate for his daughter to have a future, Farzaneh’s father borrowed some money so she could join them.

She left in 1985, and spent a year in Pakistan, sharing a room with six other Iranian refugees, getting by with the support of the United Nations and whatever

work she could find while her application to come to Australia was processed.

“I think because my friends came here I was fixated on going to Australia,” she says. “I came to Sydney because that is where some of my Iranian friends from Pakistan were and I wanted to be somewhere I knew someone.”

Those first few years in Sydney were very difficult. While she was at a hostel with other friends, she was determined not to fall into the trap some of the others living there had.

“They had been there for six months and they were just walking around the house, not going out. For me, everything happened quickly, I didn’t want to stay put, I wanted to learn and then I got a job.”

When she decided to move out independently, Farzaneh had trouble finding accommodation because she didn’t have a referral. She finally had to accept a friend’s offer to pretend to be his girlfriend so she and another friend could all rent together. “I was not happy about that but that’s what you had to do.”

One of her overwhelming memories of those early days was that she always

felt behind everybody else.“When you come here and you see this person has an education, they have finished university, they have got a job and I was worried would I ever get to that stage. Would I ever get to university?”

Eighteen months after arriving in Australia, she came to Perth for a Baha’i youth conference and met another few friends from Iran. She decided this was the place for her to finally start university. But first she had to redo Year 12.

“I was 26, I went to Canning College as a mature age student,” she says. “When I was in Sydney, I didn’t really have that encouragement to study. People would say, ‘you’re already 26, why you want to go back to school or study, forget about it’.

And I didn’t want to hear that.”

In 1989, almost 10 years after she should have started university in Iran, she began her degree in electrical engineering at Curtin University.

“I have to be responsible for everything in my life. In Iran, you live with your parents; the kids are not independent like here. For me it was difficult,” she says.

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It is not easy to pull yourself out of that, but somehow we did.

14 Farzaneh

Even things like sitting an exam were completely different. “In Iran, you have plenty of time for taking a test. It was a very difficult test but you had enough time to do it,” she says. “I never forget the first time I did a test here, I was in Year 12, I kept reading and reading, to make sure I understood it, then the lady said time is over.”

But Farzaneh stayed focused; her aim had always been to get an education and she was going to get one, no matter how hard it was. She graduated from Curtin University in 1995.

As she built a life for herself in Australia, Farzaneh says she always hoped that her family might join her one day. But she didn’t expect that first she would end up being a second mother to a teenager.

When her 13 year old brother Ameer and 24 year old sister Shokouh arrived in 1995, she had a whole new set of problems to master.

“I took him to school and tried to tell him how to behave and be careful, but I didn’t know much about children,” she says with a laugh. “Sometimes I think that my brother was lucky that he didn’t

end up doing something wrong because I had no idea what I was doing!”

Farzaneh must have done something right because, even though he wasn’t that enthusiastic about school, he later went on to Edith Cowan University, to follow in Shokouh’s footsteps and study computer science.

When her parents were finally able to obtain passports to visit in 1996, Farzaneh knew better than to suggest they apply to stay. She had seen too many migrants put pressure on their families to do so, and it didn’t always end well. If her parents wanted to stay, she wanted them to tell her of their own accord.

After a few months, they asked.

A few years after they had settled, Farzaneh’s other sister, Sheida, who was three years younger and had married soon after Farzaneh left Iran, came to Australia with her three children and son-in-law. The family was, finally, all together again.

“We grew up with humiliation, we grew up with a feeling that we were not just second class, but very low class, less than human,” Farzaneh says. “It is not easy to pull yourself out of that, but somehow we did.”

Sitting in Farzaneh’s lounge room, a feast of dried figs, smoked almonds and fresh watermelon laid out on pretty plates, sipping piping hot tea, it’s hard to imagine a world more removed than the one they come from.

Her experience has given her great understanding and empathy for the career she found herself in almost by accident.

After some time in Kalgoorlie as an electrical engineer, Farzaneh came back to Perth where she married and worked for Transfield Tulk. When redundancies hit, she was already pregnant with her first child and applied to do an interpreting course. But it would be another three years, while Farzaneh was pregnant with her second child, before she was able to take it up.

over. That is my personality. Maybe that helped me go through life.”

While she may not have ended up doing what she planned, Farzaneh has instilled her passion for education in her children.

Her daughter is studying urban and regional planning and her son construction management, but she says they can’t have any real understanding of how lucky they are to be doing so.

“I tell them that you know life is not always that nice and rosy and my son

says ‘yeah, Mum, I remember you have always said that’,” she says with a laugh.

Teenage eye rolls aside, Farzaneh knows with certainty she made the right decision all those years ago when she applied to come to Australia. She remembers the interview so clearly.

“They asked me ‘was your life threatened’ and I said ‘no, they might find an excuse to take me in and interrogate me but no’. The main thing was I don’t have any freedom. Now my children have freedom.”

Clockwise from right: Farzaneh dreamt of becoming an architect; Farangeez and her husband, Nasrollah; the family in Iran.

15 Farzaneh

“When I started, I realised all of my friends from uni, all of them all highly educated, all had applied too,” she says with a laugh. “I think we realised that this is a flexible job, one you can say no to work because your child has a sports carnival or something.”

When she finished the course, her beloved father was diagnosed with bladder cancer and the family’s focus shifted once more.

Ever the student, Farzaneh was keen to go back to university to do a master’s degree after her son started kindy but life had other ideas again. She badly injured her back and took years to recover from the operation.

“Since then I have been working as an interpreter,” she says. “It’s not what I planned, I guess, but I don’t regret it.”

She can be called in to interpret for any number of reasons, from navigating Centrelink inquiries to assisting someone at a medical appointment. And her skills have been in demand at ASeTTS, where she must give voice to the pain of others, for almost 13 years.

“The clients (at ASeTTS) need to trust your confidentiality with what they are saying, that you will convey what they say with the emotions to the counsellor,” she says.

“I think I have the personality where they can trust me and they feel comfortable and the counsellor feels comfortable. It is very important that you are working with both of them and they both need to be comfortable with you.”

She hears very distressing stories in that safe space, stories she says are far more traumatic than her own. Although Farzaneh doesn’t want to diminish what she has been through, she knows there is much worse.

“When I was leaving Iran, I was not crying because I don’t know, I was excited, maybe I was looking at it as more of an adventure,” she says.

“I guess I own my life. I tried hard, I fell down again, but I got up and started

Greyfer Venezuela

Greyfer’s mother loved horror movies, so she used to go to the local cinema and take her daughter to the free creche while she watched the latest release.

“

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Greyfer

t was amazing, they had everything a child could want,” Greyfer recalls. “And I remember this one woman, she always used to give me ice-cream, and ask me if I’d like another ice-cream.”

Money was tight in her family, in most families the little girl knew. So one day when the seven year old was offered another ice-cream, she asked the kind woman to give all the children one.

“Then my mum, she came to pay and it was a lot of money. I did not know that the creche was free, but the ice-cream was not!”

Greyfer laughs now but it was an early lesson in the cost of living in Venezuela.

Her dad Jose worked as a teacher and her mother Jenifer in administration in a local company. When that shut, she worked at a stall, selling toys and other bits and pieces. She also tutored children for free at home, helping them with their schoolwork.

The family didn’t have much, but they had enough to get by. Their fortunes dived, along with so many others, when Venezuela’s long volatile economy collapsed in 2014. Inflation surged,

as much as hundreds of thousands of percent, making the cost of everyday items unreachable.

“Everything went wrong, I don’t know how it happened so fast,” Greyfer says. “I remember this day, we were going to buy cornflour, and it was so expensive. My father could just afford to pay for it but the next week, we went and it was even higher.

We couldn’t pay, the prices went crazy.”

Greyfer could feel the frustration and distress of parents unable to buy enough food to feed their family.

“I remember one night we had two mangoes in my fridge, so my brother and I ate them and then my father went out and came back with chicken bones – there was hardly anything on them, we just took off the little bits to eat,” she says.

“We were trying to have a normal conversation, and then my father just started crying. In my country they have this mentality that men don’t cry, so it was shocking for me.”

At the same time, her father was an activist in a group campaigning for democratic rights. He was being followed and started to fear for his safety, and that of his family’s.

“They don’t arrest you, no one is arrested – they just take you and they kill you,” Greyfer says. “And they don’t care about your family, either.”

Her father tried to hide his fear from his family, which now included her younger brother, Giorgi. But as the situation worsened, Greyfer’s mother started to take refuge in alcohol.

In 2016, Jose went to Trinidad and Tobago in search of work. Venezuelans were invariably treated like secondclass citizens in the Caribbean country, working long hours for very little money, but he would send back what he could.

“We buy what we can,” Greyfer says.

“Maybe we have food for the week and by the weekend we don’t have anything.”

As his family struggled back home, Jose fell apart. He turned to drugs and stopped sending them money. Jenifer became increasingly depressed, relying more and more on alcohol.

Greyfer was a smart child - her mother had enrolled her in school at two and a half - and she was doing well in high school.

“When my father was there, we would sit together, he would teach me and my grades were really good,” she says. “Now

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18 Greyfer

I was getting home and I would have to look after my brother because my mother was drunk, and he wouldn’t have had a shower all day.”

She came home from school one day to find her brother alone in the kitchen.

Her mother had gone to buy more beer.

Greyfer walked in to see the toddler on the bench, reaching for something. He fell, crashing to the floor, before she could reach him.

“I thought ‘oh my god, he’s going to die or his ribs are broken’,” she says.

A friend came over to comfort the distressed teenager and advised her not to let him sleep, to ensure he didn’t have concussion. “I was lying in bed with him, crying, and every time he would go to sleep, I was waking him up. It was awful.”

There was no relief from trauma at school, either, where most of the students came from richer families. Unable to afford even basics such as shoes, Greyfer soon became a target for bullies, taunting her about the way she was dressed.

And there was no support from the adults there, either. One day Greyfer was called to the principal’s office and told she

needed to stop wearing her brown boots, the only pair of shoes she had left, because the school’s policy was dark blue or black.

“I explained my other shoes were broken and we don’t have any money,” she says. “She just told me ‘well, you know this school is for people who can buy the right things and follow the rules, so why do you keep coming? You don’t have to keep coming if you can’t do that’.”

Her extended family also offered little assistance. Her father’s side had never approved of his marriage to Jenifer, who came from a different background. “They always used to make jokes about me, being the ‘black’ of the family and things like that,” she says.

Greyfer remembers being brave enough to tell her cousin what was going on, who in turn told her mother. That aunt went to her sister, the matriarch of the family and a rich pastor, and asked her to help. “She says ‘please let me look after her’,” she recalls. “My other aunt, she says, ‘no, she is the daughter of her mum, let her look after her, you face the decisions you make’. The funny thing is she helps everyone who comes to her

house, but not her own family.”

Forced to grow up well before her time, Greyfer took matters into her own hands. With Jose only calling when he felt like it, and her mother’s depression deepening every time he did, she hid Jenifer’s phone.

Finally, after two months she answered one of his calls, angry, and told him he had to make a choice about whether he wanted his family or not.

They left to join him in Trinidad and Tobago in 2017, where they would spend the next four years.

Life was hard there, too. Jose worked as a chef because he wasn’t able to teach but he didn’t earn a lot. Greyfer went to school for a while, one her mother and other refugees from Cuba fought to be opened, although it was more about hanging with friends and learning English than any real education.

“For a while everything was perfect, and then I started to see things that were not good and I am not the type of person who will stay quiet if I see something is wrong,” she says.

Greyfer saw teachers pinching her friends and dragging children by the hair, and shaking them. And then her brother was sexually assaulted by another child.

When their mother went to the principal, she accused her of making things up, of being crazy.

After the school psychologist pressured Giorgio to say nothing, Jenifer withdrew her children. A few months later, the school was engulfed in a pedophile scandal, and was shut.

Jenifer became more and more determined to get them out of the country. She applied to Australia, the United States and England. It would be another anxious 18 months before they were accepted into Australia.

Greyfer was happy, but also sad at leaving the people who had shown her the most kindness in her life. She had been working in a vegetable shop for a few years by then and her employers,

I didn’t like to talk to people when I first came, to open up, but when I came here and they were so nice, I just felt so much better.

Clockwise from left: Greyfer celebrates getting a swim certificate in Australia; with her mother Jenifer and brother Giorgio in Trinidad and Tobago; with her grandmother in Venezuela.

impact on the 19 year old, Greyfer thought about becoming a psychologist.

Now she’s decided that law might be a better fit: “I really love talking to people and defending people; I get excited when I think about doing that.”

But first she must finish high school.

As she is loving her time at Cyril Jackson High School, where the teachers are so supportive, that shouldn’t be a problem for this bright young woman.

“People really help you here, people really care, I can finally see a future for me,” she says.

19 Greyfer

who had first hired her to care for their grandson, treated her like family. “The only thing I was worried about was leaving them, because I look at them like my parents.”

It’s almost a year since they arrived, first spending two weeks in quarantine in Adelaide, and everyone is doing much better. Her parents’ marriage has improved, with neither using alcohol or drugs as a crutch, and her brother is thriving. “He’s going to school, he’s joined the football team – he is so happy.”

Greyfer says she initially went “a bit crazy, going out partying with other Latin people”, perhaps trying to make up for the fact she never had a childhood.

But she was pushing down all the trauma she had experienced, and her case worker referred her to ASeTTS. The fact that Greyfer can sit and talk about her situation is a testament to how far she has come and how much ASeTTS has helped her. “I didn’t like to talk to people when I first came, to open up, but when I came here and they were so nice, I just felt so much better.”

In fact, they have had such a profound

Diego* Middle East

It was a simple message but one with so much meaning: “It’s good to be seen.”

D 20 Diego

iego was worried about the barista missing from his local café, one of the few places he ventures to from home.

“She wasn’t there for a week, and then I find out she was sick, she was in hospital,” he recalls. “So I make a little gift for her. And then she wrote that message to me.”

His small act of kindness clearly had a big impact. But then Diego notices things that others do not because he knows only too well what it’s like not to be seen.

“Even the person who makes coffee for you. Maybe they go back home and has a very huge problem, but she has to smile and give you coffee,” he says.

“It’s just a simple thing, but I find it is very, very important. Even if people don’t know what is happening to me, you just want them to understand that you deserve to be seen.”

It’s been more than two years since Diego arrived in Australia, after fleeing his home country, and he is still struggling to be seen. Significant trauma has been compounded by the forced isolation of Covid and the fact he is still effectively living in no man’s land – on

a bridging visa, waiting for his asylum application to be processed.

“It is a very, very complicated story,” he says, nervously looking around one of the counselling rooms at ASeTTS, which has become his second home. “And I have some mental health issues with my autism.”

Diego was diagnosed with autism after he was introduced to ASeTTS’ longterm psychiatrist Sue Lutton, though he believes he has had it for a long time.

“I didn’t know because in my country they don’t actually care about that stuff,” he says. “It’s not like here where you may go to the hospital or to psychiatrists or psychologists. Usually the family will decide what it is or sometimes they go to religious people and say ‘we will just pray for you’. And they think that will help you get better.”

Diego’s counsellor, who he respectfully calls Ms Anubha, has connected via Zoom to provide support. It is she who prompts the thoughtful young man to share the story of the barista. It is she who reminds him of his kindness to others. And how much he matters.

Diego knows the combination of trauma, severe anxiety and the physical

manifestations of his autism – difficulty making eye contact, his hands curled tightly inwards as if in defence – makes others uncomfortable.

“People think you’re doing this because you are rude or you didn’t like them, or maybe you don’t care, so it is easy to stay home all the time,” he says.

“I just go out if I want to buy something from the market or go and buy a coffee to drink at home.”

When Diego first arrived, the people helping him were unable to communicate properly because they had no understanding of his trauma or how to help him. Thankfully, they referred him to ASeTTS. “They have helped me with many, many things,” he says. “With the test for autism and trying to understand what is happening, with the counselling, and with giving me the medicine I need for my anxiety and trauma. They helped with my Medicare card and with other services.”

He has found kindness in unexpected places, too. “When I first arrived here, I have no one to talk to, I have no friends,” he says. “But then things change when I

People are so quick to judge. They hear from TV things about refugees or think we are evil or something, or they don’t understand what we have been through.

lost his protector, his best friend, his everything. His life since then has been a constant struggle, one that has taken him to the other side of the world, to a place he is almost too afraid to hope to call home.

Diego is grateful to be somewhere safe and warm, to have people who care about him and want to help. But he is also exhausted from living in limbo. From the constant waiting. From wondering whether he’ll be allowed to stay. He is worried about putting down too many roots, only to have them ripped out without warning.

“The government, they don’t give you a time; my lawyers Katy and Paige at (community legal centre) Circle Green gives me updates, but the government just makes you wait,” he says. “I want to study, to apply for university but what for if I can’t stay?”

He’d like to finish his degree in business management so he can get a job and be independent but doesn’t see the point in making plans while he belongs nowhere. “I am a person without a family, without a country, alone in this whole world,” he says.

Diego wants to build a future here, to be Australian. “I want this to be my

home, to be my country, to be part of the community. But I am not here, I am not there, I am just in the middle, which is very scary.”

When he is feeling overwhelmed, Diego puts on his headphones and shuts out the world. “I listen to music everywhere, I put on noise cancelling so I can’t hear anything else,” he says.

He listens to music that brings back memories, devotional Sufi music that reminds him of his mother, music that comforts him but also makes him sad. “I think being sad is just part of my life. I am just sad all the time.”

But even as he carries this cloak of sadness, Diego tries to be positive. “I have a place to stay. I have some people to talk to that I didn’t have before. After my mom died, after I left my home country, I didn’t have that,” he says. “So it is better.”

Perhaps because he has been through so much, Diego knows what really matters.

The intangible but essential connections we need to survive. A sense of belonging.

Of people caring. Of community. And those small moments of joy.

Diego likes to bring chocolates to staff at ASeTTS for “everything they have to listen to”, to see the smiles on their faces.

“It’s very important because maybe that day someone wasn’t having a good day and that chocolate might just be like a reward for a hard day,” he says. “It is not much, it is a small thing really, but it is a way to say thank you.”

It’s also Diego’s way of showing others that he sees them and he values them.

When asked what he’d like Australians to understand about refugees like him, Diego doesn’t hesitate.

“People are so quick to judge. They hear from TV things about refugees or think we are evil or something, or they don’t understand what we have been through,” he says.

“I want you to understand that everyone is human. We’re all human ... and we deserve to be seen.” *Name has been changed to protect the subject’s identity

21 Diego

come to ASeTTS or even the house I live in now, the owner is a very great person.

He has been helping me for a long time, even talking to me when I feel scared and helping me to calm.”

Diego’s landlord has also helped when he has been struggling with the rent. “They’re amazing people actually, because they look after me without any connection. Usually the relationship between the tenant and the landlord is very simple, you pay the rent and he gets the money. With this owner and his family, things are very different.”

But it is not, he stresses, financial assistance that makes the difference. It’s that his landlord ‘sees him’ and wants to help. “It’s about having someone that if something happened I know I can just call and I can ask for advice,” he says. “And he comes with his parents, they take me out for a coffee or a lunch because I am at my house for 24 hours a day.”

Diego’s world has shrunk to a welltrodden path from his house to the café or the market and up to ASeTTS each week to see ‘Ms Anubha’.

It is his counsellor who hears what he has been through since his mother’s death, trauma he is understandably reluctant to go into any detail for the book. It’s not so much reliving what has happened to him – that is with him constantly – but his fear of saying the wrong thing and being unable to stay in Australia. It’s why he doesn’t want to be identified, and why he doesn’t want his country of origin mentioned.

But the gentle soul is happy to talk about his beloved mother, a doctor who believed in him and stood by him through thick and thin.

“She was my whole life; I could talk to her without any borders,” he says. “She was the person who accepts everything from me, even if it was wrong, she will still accept, still help. She was a good listener and such a good person.”

When she died in 2016, from complications from diabetes, Diego

Norma Canada

Norma knew exactly what she was looking for in ASeTTS’ new home.

S 22 Norma

omewhere that the agency could grow. Somewhere warm and welcoming where clients would feel at home. Somewhere the sense of community she and her team had worked so hard to foster would flourish.

The CEO just didn’t expect to have to move in there so quickly.

It was a Saturday night in 2003 when the 100-year-old wiring in the jewellery shop underneath the old office in Bon Marche Arcade, in the city, finally gave up the ghost. Fire ripped through the building.

Devastated by all they lost — their only three computers melted, a valuable library of torture and trauma books was a charred mess — Norma was nonetheless very grateful that it happened when no one was there. “On the Wednesday night we were recruiting for the new volunteers; there would have been 30 people in the building at eight o’clock at night; we were so lucky.”

But suddenly she had to scramble to find a way to look after clients who still desperately needed their help. “The staff were amazing, we missed the first person coming in for counselling that Monday morning, but no other client was missed,”

she says. “The entire early intervention team under Sharon McFarlane worked out of their cars and in cafes and wherever they could find space for weeks.”

Counselling was a bit trickier because there was only one room they could use and the whole place smelt smoky. “But staff never said a word and just worked around it.”

Norma was also impressed by the architects who swung into action at the premises she had secured on Beaufort Street, not expecting to move in for at least another six weeks.

“They would have over a dozen workers all going at the same time, floors were going in, walls were being painted; they moved the schedule forward to accommodate us.”

Norma was determined that the new building would be so much more than bricks and mortar. “It changed us because we had doubled in size and we had a place where we could really do community work.”

The community space was named after Sister Bernice Tonkin, ASeTTS’ first life member who embodied the importance of community work in torture and trauma recovery.

Norma also worked hard to secure a long lease. “There’s no point in building an environment with nice gardens, and comfortable counselling rooms, or places where people can do activities and for children to play, if you’re going to have to leave that in 10 years,” she says.

“And especially with this community – it becomes really important to them, it’s their sacred place. The Town of Vincent was very supportive and gave us 21 years.”

Having established a client reference group early in her tenure, to ensure real feedback from the many cultures ASeTTS supported, Norma asked for their input into the new building, right down to the colour of the carpet.

“You know it was just seemingly simple things like not having a staff room, but a kitchen where everyone comes, clients, staff or visitors, to make their coffee or lunch,” she says.

“It fostered that connection that was really, really nice.”

The fire was one of many challenges Norma faced over her 10 years in the role.

She had trained as a social worker and worked in rehabilitation in Canada but her first job after emigrating to Australia in 1988 was at the water authority.

23

What was really awful was this was a time when there was a lot of stigma about working with people who came on boats, so-called queue jumpers.

24 Norma

After five years, she went back to her roots to work at the Disability Services Commission, from where she was seconded to Activ Foundation.

“From there, with a budget of $30 million and a staff of 550, I found myself at ASeTTS, which was just tiny at the time,” she says.

Norma was drawn by the prospect of working somewhere with an international flavour where she would report directly with a board and be responsible for taking it in the right direction.

Not long after Norma took over in 2000, the category of temporary protection visa was established. Suddenly, there would be eight or 10 men from Afghanistan landing in the lobby anxious for assistance after being released from one of WA’s detention centres.

“We just had to respond. We had to have a strong early intervention program, which at this stage was connecting them to the right resources and taking a holistic look at what we could develop. All of this really set the agenda.”

The increasing demand for support forced ASeTTS to address gaps in services, such as legal representation, and who the agency needed to work with to ensure clients got what they needed.

“The staff were wonderful; they were

just ‘we have to do it, let’s do it’,” she says.

“What was really awful was this was a time when there was a lot of stigma about working with people who came on boats, so-called queue jumpers. It really was a difficult environment.”

At the same time, the nature of funding – ever a battle – was changing, with moves to more tender-based contracts rather than grants. Norma had to push not only for strong teams in community development, early intervention and clinical work but to ensure all ASeTTS’ staff understood contracts and how to deliver the outputs of the contracts.

Once they were settled into their new home in Beaufort Street, Norma focused on ensuring the place was used in the way it was intended. It was one thing to have a community feel; it was quite another to ensure the communities who needed

their assistance were coming through their doors, especially the new African communities.

“We had to find the leaders out there, in those communities,” she says. “It was important to learn from our clients so that we could better help them, and that’s where the client reference group was so important. They encouraged that dialogue.”

Norma can’t speak highly enough of the first chair of United Voices, as the group was named.

She says Samer Aljanabi, who is now a lawyer and life member of ASeTTS, was instrumental in setting the tone for community engagement and involvement.

There were also, as is inevitable in the not-for-profit space, disappointments.

One of her most crushing times at ASeTTS was when they lost a big tender for early intervention that left a

One day she was working to meet a grant deadline while her daughter waited to be taken to netball. “She asked ‘how much is it for’?,” she recalls. “I said $150,000. And she said, ‘how many pages are you going to write’ and I said ‘don’t worry, they will only let me write three’ and she just looked at me and said ‘well, you can get $50,000 a page’! That was just such a great way to look at it.”

Norma’s advocacy obviously rubbed off, with her daughter going on to manage CARAD (Centre for Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Detainees), and her architect son doing his thesis on

service, as well as the breadth and depth of client participation in the agency’s development, that really makes her proud.

“Client participation was evidenced by high usage of the building daily and annually at the AGM or Human Rights Day celebrations where hundreds of clients and their families came to share their stories, songs, dance and, of course, their wonderful food,” she says.

“They were so appreciative of the safe space and kindness of ASeTTS. Staff, guests, funding bodies were always amazed and enriched by their strength, resilience and hope for a better life.”

living designs for people from different countries. Another son teaches high school psychology.

Her ASeTTS family, however, were the main reason she stayed in the role for a decade. “Our patron was Janet Holmes a Court; the chair of the Board, Dr Hugh Jones, and the managers were excellent,” she says. “We were such a solid team – without them it could have been a very lonely job.”

When Norma looks back on her time at the helm, and the many highs and lows from fires and tender losses to winning the 2008 Multicultural Award, it is the significant number of clients for whom ASeTTS was able to provide a quality

Clockwise from above: The burnout remains of ASeTTS’ former office in Bon Marche Arcade; Norma was determined to create a community feeling at the new premises that made all cultures and families feel welcome.

25 Norma

$500,000 gap in the budget and meant the likely loss of eight staff.

“We had all worked so hard on it and Sharon (by then the deputy director) and I had to tell the staff that we had lost it,” she says. “Everyone was sad and disappointed.

But they said ‘don’t worry, we did it the right way, you did everything’. So in one sense it was horrible but in the other it was so moving.”

It also galvanised Norma. She told the team she would understand if they wanted to find another job because she wasn’t sure if ASeTTS would be able to continue their employment but if they wanted to stay, she would try to find a way to fill that funding gap.

Within a year, the team had not only secured the necessary funding, they had diversified the funding base and were able to have a focus on youth work. “It was the worst time and it was the best time because we learned so much.”

The loss of that tender also brought organisational psychologist Jacque Hagan to ASeTTS. “Over an extended period of time, she did some of the best workshops with our staff in terms of removing all the fear and guilt at losing the tender,” she says. “Staff were also offered individual sessions where she would talk to them about their interests, what jobs might be available and help them to see other paths.”

Jacque, another life member of ASeTTS, also worked on the agency’s values, involving staff and ensuring those values of client focus, accountability and respect were incorporated into performance reviews. “The volunteer work she did I really think transformed us and helped us turn a bad situation into an opportunity.”

Norma found plenty of encouragement at home, too. Husband Bob was the honorary accountant for three years, and her children grew up with ASeTTS. They would come to the AGMs and were regulars at other community events.

Sarah Iraq

‘In a world where you can be anything, be kind.’

S 26 Sarah

arah is a very stylish and creative young woman. She likes to draw and shares her artwork – vibrant, colourful, abstract pieces with lots of detail - on TikTok. She takes pride in her appearance, pulling together interesting outfits with flair.

The 20-year-old is also a deep thinker, writing down her own thoughts and inspirational quotes, such as the one above (and those peppered throughout this story).

Some of those thoughts helped inspire the direction of this book. If you’re going to celebrate the work of an organisation such as ASeTTS, who better to ask about its impact than some of the thousands of people who have come through its doors over the past 30 years.

People like Sarah who have benefited from ASeTTS’ assistance but have also enriched the community it has built with their experiences, cultures and unique perspectives.

‘Love comes from within us. If we love ourselves, we can then love others. If we don’t love ourselves, how can we love others?’

Sarah arrived in Australia with her parents and four siblings in 2016, having spent two and a half years in Turkey after the family fled Iraq.

“It was a big culture shock when I arrived in Australia. I was in a big city in Turkey, with lots of students and this was very different. I was a bit scared,” she says.

“But even in Turkey, it was scary, I didn’t know what was going to happen in my life.”

She didn’t speak Turkish and found it very hard to communicate. Although her father’s heritage is Turkmen – their language Turkic is similar to Turkish - the family grew up speaking Arabic.

“We had to go to school, me and my younger brother – it was run by the United Nations and it was compulsory for us to go, so they did not cut off the money,” she says.

“But it is not easy to learn in another

language and even if they speak in English, they explain in Turkish.

It was so hard.”

‘Understanding the truth is much better than living in the imagination of a lie.’

While her father was able to communicate to a degree, more complicated interactions, such as medical issues the family had to navigate, were a different story.

When her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the family didn’t really understand what they were being told.

“I remember we were praying so hard that God would save our mum because we were thinking about losing her, she was so sick,” Sarah recalls.

Fortunately, she made a full recovery but the experience only compounded the family’s desire to find a place they could all call home.

There was no way they could return to Iraq for “lots of complex problems” that Sarah does not feel comfortable sharing,

27

Sarah

“I had thoughts that if I didn’t get the ATAR (the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank that gives graduates access to university, depending on their score), that maybe I will not have many possibilities to get into what I want,” she says. “But then I heard there are different ways you can go.”

‘How many people inhabit this world? All of them strive to achieve their dreams and wishes, so do not stop until you reach what you want because your pursuit of it is the basis of your goal in life and your existence.’

so they applied to come to Australia with the assistance of the UNHCR. “When I arrived, I thought maybe I was going crazy or there was something wrong with me because of the quietness,” she says. “It was just so different. Every time I was thinking ‘why do the streets look this, why are all these roundabout’!”

She laughs.

Despite the strangeness of her surroundings, Sarah says her family all finally felt safe. “There was a future. In Turkey, there is no future, because you are limited,” she says. “You don’t feel that you’re living actually when you are not learning, because the human is not limited.”

28 Sarah

‘Firstly, learn how to respect and then learn how to love’ ♥ ASeTTS was one of the services offered after Sarah’s family arrived in Australia and she enjoyed being involved with the youth group.

But what she has really been focused on is her education. She was nervous but happy to start learning again, although the first high school she was sent to with her older siblings wasn’t a good fit and she moved to Balga Senior High.

“It was much more relaxed and the students were more my age,” she says.

“There were a lot of older students where I was before, and I missed being with my younger brother, too.”

When language barriers hampered her progress in mainstream schooling, Sarah moved into the school’s Intensive English Centre (IEC) program that supports so many refugees and migrants.

Sarah is now doing a bridging course at university, studying four subjects, to enable her to study a Bachelor of Arts degree, and then hopefully go on to study law.

“But first I have to get good results,” she says, though she has already decided that no matter what happens, it will not hold her back.

“I talked to my Dad and I said if I don’t pass for some reason, then I can always find another way. He is happy for me, no matter what.

“And I am not going to give up, especially when I live in a country where there is no fence of age!”

You don’t feel that you’re living actually when you are not learning, because the human is not limited.

and was very encouraged. This is what I want to do, wherever it takes me.”

‘Don’t say anything about anything unless you try it.’

Clockwise from right: Sarah loves to be creative in her spare time, sharing her artwork on TikTok; family photos make her heart sing.

‘Many things in life don’t need to read wisdom books to know about them.

All you need is to feel them with your sense of humanity.’

When the dedicated young woman isn’t studying, she likes to draw or make

things. Sarah usually has a sketchbook on the go and even thought about dabbling in fashion design.

“I just like this sort of thing, the art, the drawing, the fashion,” she says.

“It just makes me happy and keeps me interested.”

Her initial plans to become a doctor changed when she went to health science class and thought, ‘oh no, maybe this is not for me!” She laughs. “So I talked to my friend about being a lawyer

‘A girl has to be as strong as a sword and not everybody is able to carry that sword; only the brave ones.’

If anyone has the strength to carry that sword, it’s Sarah.

29 Sarah

Sarah is grateful to have such a supportive family, who go out of their way to help each other whenever they can, and her father’s encouragement means the world.

It is not hard to imagine her succeeding. Though Sarah was initially unsure about being interviewed for the book, and very nervous about being photographed, she faced those fears like she has with everything in her young life.

After taking direction from the photographer and checking the results on the monitor, it wasn’t long before she was making suggestions about how she should pose.

When other participants came in to be photographed, Sarah stayed next to the photographer’s assistant, pointing out what she liked, or what she didn’t think was working, and making suggestions.

It is clear she has an artistic eye. But she also has strength of character that comes through in everything she does.

“I say that a girl has to be as strong as a sword,” Sarah says. “I don’t know how to say it, maybe you can explain better, but it’s not everyone who has the strength or can carry that sword, only the brave ones.”

Ghulam Afghanistan

Ghulam holds up his mobile phone to show a photo of his wife Anis.

S

“

30 Ghulam

he is a good wife, a very good wife, I love her.” he says, sadly.

“Who else wait this long for me.

Any other wife would divorce me by now.”

It’s a vastly different man from the joker who happily posed for photographs only minutes before, taking instructions so effortlessly he barely needed his interpreter.

As the photographer clicked away, Ghulam looked all the world like the kind of cheeky grandfather kids love to be around. “Don’t send this to Taliban,” he said with a laugh at one stage.

But the jokes are a mask for so much pain. The physical pain that still racks his body, decades later, from a horrific beating at the hands of the Taliban. And the much deeper, psychological pain of trauma and separation. Of not knowing where his wife and five children were for 10 years. And then being kept apart for much of the next nine years.

“I tell you, I go crazy without ASeTTS, I lose my mind,” he says. And he is not exaggerating.

The father of five was at Curtin Detention Centre in Derby in 2012, when

he first heard of ASeTTS; counsellor Gertrud Millidge was one of the people supporting the detainees. He is so anxious to convey his gratitude, he speaks over his interpreter. “Gertrud is very, very good woman.”

His English may be broken but Ghulam cherished the common language of kindness at a time when he so desperately needed it.

“Ever since I met Gertrud, she’s been very helpful, very nice, very generous,” he says, through the interpreter. “Even when I come to Perth, she brings food and fruit for me.”

Life has not, by any measure, been kind to Ghulam. Certainly not since the Taliban tore his family apart almost 20 years ago.

“They took over our house, they confiscated everything and abducted my father,” he says. “They beat me up so badly, I was very badly injured, and everyone was telling me to go, the Taliban are after you.”

Ghulam fled to Pakistan, via Kandahar. While he was still in Kabul, where he was in hospital after being stabbed in another encounter with the

Taliban, he received a message from his wife; she told him not to return because the Taliban were still searching for him.

Anis later fled with the children to Iran, via Iraq, but Ghulam did not where they had gone and would not find them again for another nine years.

In Pakistan, Ghulam worked underground in a coal mine for eight years, he and so many other Afghan refugees treated as little more than slave labour. Dark and damp, the mine took its toll on lungs and his hearing, though one ear had already been damaged when the Taliban beat him.

“My sister in Pakistan she told me my brother in Iran had passed away so I went there for a year, but it was too difficult, I couldn’t go by, so I went back to Pakistan,” he says. Little did he know his wife and children were not far away.

Unable to see a way forward, Ghulam used the money he had saved to create an ID card and passport and made his way to Indonesia, and onto a boat to Christmas Island. He spent three months there before being transferred to Curtin Detention Centre.

“When I was in Curtin I got in contact

31

Clockwise from left: Ghulam’s wife Anis in Iran; Anis with three of their children, Mariam, Mahsuma and Asghar; Mahsuma with a dress she made.

32 Ghulam

with my sister (another sister, who was living In Iran) telling her I arrived safely and she was very happy,” he says. Ghulam still had no idea where his family was, but his sister promised to investigate.

Incredibly, a few months later, she found them, and Ghulam was able to speak to his wife for the first time in a decade. It should have been a joyous occasion, but they were still separated by oceans.

Ghulam was now living in Perth after being released on a bridging visa. Within a week, he had been granted a permanent visa, but without his family he was a shell of a man. He travelled to Iran as soon as he was able, spending three months with them.

Happy to be with them finally, he also despaired of their situation. They had no life in Iran, everything was so expensive; Ghulam knew he had to return to

Australia and apply for them to join him.

A decade later, and two more visits to Iran later, he is still trying. His application for citizenship hasn’t been processed, more than five years since he applied.

He shows pictures of his youngest daughter Mahsuma, posing in a flowing bridal gown – it’s one of the budding dressmaker’s creations. She wanted to study computing but was told she would need a special letter from the Foreign Ministry of Afghanistan, something that was far too dangerous to go back to get.

Ghulam holds up his phone to show another picture, this time of a document.

“This is from the Iranian Government saying they don’t have the right to work because they are not citizens,” he says.

Unable to work himself because of poor health, Ghulam sends everything he

can from his Centrelink payments to his family. It means going without himself, including food. “Everything is very expensive in Iran, the currency is very inflated, and my family, they struggle so much,” he says.

Ghulam feels very guilty, blaming himself for coming to Australia by boat, even though he knows he would never have been able to get here otherwise. The constant worry and stress have added to the physical toll, with the doctor prescribing heart medication.

“I’m so appreciative of the help I get here,” he says, again indicating ASeTTS. “Gertrud took me to the migrant agents at Circle Green to help me do the paperwork to try to get citizenship.”

With his quest for citizenship seemingly stalled, the now 63 year old

ungrateful. He thinks Australian people are very good and very kind. “They smile and want to help, they don’t treat you badly, not like in Afghanistan or Iran,” he says. “No one is asking where you are from, everyone is from different backgrounds, everyone living together.”

He just desperately wants his children to be able to experience that, too. He is also worried about his wife’s health; she has constant pain in her knees and receives no help in Iran.

But it is the toll on the family’s mental health that is so hard to bear. “I have

a lot of pain; if I did not have ASeTTS, where they ask me questions here with discretion, if I could not tell them what happened to me inside here, safely, I would go outside in the streets and just scream,” he says.

“The counsellors here, without them, it would be much worse. If I did not find them 10 years ago, I would have lost my mind then.

“I want to thank ASeTTS for considering me worthy of this interview and taking the time to make it happen. It means a lot.”

Everything I do, I do for my children; I’m trying to stay strong, to do my best to make sure my wife and my children are together with me again.

33 Ghulam

asked his migration agent to withdraw the application and apply instead for reunification.

Ghulam doesn’t know much about politics in Australia; even in Afghanistan, he says, he didn’t have much of an education.

He supported his family with odd jobs, labouring, anything he could do to get by.

It was barely enough to make ends meet.

But Ghulam didn’t want the world.

He just wanted to live in peace, to look after his family and build the best life he could. He doesn’t understand why that hasn’t been possible anywhere he’s lived.

That even when he is finally in a peaceful place, he can’t have the people he loves most in the world with him.

“I’m just by myself, I have heart problems, if I have a heart attack, no one will know. Who will care?” he asks.

He may have to undergo heart surgery in a few months if a recent change of medication does not help.

Ghulam jumps out of his chair and lifts up his shirt, revealing the scars from that brutal beating so long ago. As he reaches his arm up, he winces with pain.

“Everything I do, I do for my children; I’m trying to stay strong, to do my best to make sure my wife and my children are together with me again,” he says.

Do Australians not think, he asks, after eight or nine years in Pakistan and almost 10 years here, he deserves to have his wife and children with him?

“I just want to be with my family, like everybody else. I have had so much difficulty, I’ve gone hungry, I’ve been beaten by the Taliban, and I fled from them to come home just so I can get a better life for my children,” he says.

“I want them to learn the culture here in Australia, not to learn how to shoot guns and kill people. I want them to learn how to speak English, how to treat people, and to have an education. I didn’t have any education at all in Afghanistan, I want them to have that. But I am here and they are in Iran.”

Ghulam doesn’t want to seem

Eva Kenya

The bang was deafening. Without thinking, Eva leapt out of her chair, screaming, grabbed her handbag and ran out of the meeting.

S 34 Eva

he kept running into the carpark where her boss caught up with her.

“Eva, what happened, are you okay?” Eva was crying and shaking uncontrollably, her mind a blur.

“What was that noise,” she asked him.

“Remember, they’re constructing the road,” he replied. “Oh my God,” Eva said, still shaking. “I thought it was a bomb; it just went BOOM!” The sound of the road being cracked open had taken Eva back to August 7, 1998. She was working as an administration officer in Nairobi, Kenya, when a bomb went off outside the American Embassy next door.

“When the bomb went off, the buildings around it collapsed – I heard this big boom and then, the glass in my office shattered and the office partitions collapsed,” she recalls. “I grabbed my bag and I ran for 5km to my dad’s office.

I didn’t even really know where I was going but I was running past people covered in dust and blood.”

The bomb was set off simultaneously with one outside the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in attacks

later attributed to Al-Qaeda. More than 220 people died.

Eva had worked with refugees and asylum seekers for most of the time she had been in Australia but had never thought of herself as being traumatised.

Until that otherwise ordinary day in suburban Perth.

“I realised I had PTSD and I sought counselling,” she says. “It made such a difference, not just to me but for my family and clients. After that I realised I had lived experience and I was really able to see clients who had experienced it and refer them straight to ASeTTS.” Long before this experience, ASeTTS had already had a profound impact on her life. Eva arrived in Perth with her husband, who was here on an international student visa, and their two little boys in 2002. When the boys started school, and with her husband working and studying full-time, Eva felt increasingly isolated and lonely.

“I looked where to find help and ASeTTS came up – I joined their FICT program, which is the Families in Cultural Transition program,” she says.

“They help people settle into Australia,

with practical skills like setting up a bank account, but also understanding the culture. I really, really enjoyed it.”

So much so, she became a facilitator.

“To start, I had a small group of Swahili speakers, my other languages is Swahili, and I ran this little group for a time and then I got a job!” She beams at the memory.

She worked on the Strength-toStrength program, a partnership between Relationships Austrailia and ASeTTS. “I was working with people who had been in refugee camps and who struggled with English and I was grateful that I came from a background and country which were pretty stable,” she recalls.

“It started me thinking about other people and the journeys they’ve been on.

And that began my career. I feel my time with ASeTTS was my foundation for what was next.”

When her husband finished his master’s degree, Eva went to Edith Cowan University to study a graduate diploma in teaching. “I went to teach at an early childhood centre for two and a half years but this wasn’t for me, I missed working with people from different cultural backgrounds,” she says.

35

Jumana Jasim Eva

Clockwise from right: Eva with her husband Bobby, sons Shaun and Tikki and daughter Zillah; her parents Eliud and Sarah Kihara; her cucus (grandmothers), Karira Kariuki, Nyambura and Njeri Warunge.

36 Eva

When Eva fell pregnant with her third child, now 14, she left teaching and eventually found her way back into the community sector, this time at the Independent Living Centre, which supports the elderly.

“They employed me in a program called Partners in Culturally Appropriate Care (PICAC), helping aged care providers to take care of people from different cultural backgrounds,” she says.

“In partnership with ASeTTS, we delivered a workshop to health and aged care staff called ‘Supporting elderly people who have experienced trauma’.

When people get dementia, for example, they often revert back to their first language and can no longer communicate in English.”

And as their memories are increasingly from the distant past, deep-rooted trauma rushes to the surface without warning.

“The workshop featured a case study video of elderly Jewish community who had experienced the Holocaust and they

would wake up at night, terrified, because they said they could hear the wagon wheels from when they were being transported to the camps,” she says.

“That’s really where I learnt more about PTSD. You would hear their stories and what they went through maybe 50 or 60 years ago but it would just come up again, right there, where they’re sitting or sleeping.”

Eva has been with the City of Stirling since 2013, where she started working on the Settlement Grants Program (SGP), now the Settlement Engagement and Transition Support (SETS) program, at the Welcome Hub in Mirrabooka.

“It meant I could work with new arrivals again, like I did with ASeTTS, and help people on humanitarian visas settle into Australia,” she says. “That is what I like to do, I like to help people.”

Now the project lead, Eva says the biggest barrier is the battle for ongoing funding to maintain the kind of services their clients need to become independent.

New arrivals who come through the human settlement program (HSP), run by the Red Cross, are transitioned to SETS after six months to a year, where they remain for up to five years, when they are deemed to be settled.

“But I felt like it took me seven years to settle in Australia and my English was okay, you know, I could be understood and find my way around,” Eva says.

“For a lot of these people, who are so traumatised, and then have to learn English and try to make sense of this new world, sometimes five years is just not enough.”

It’s one of the reasons why the Welcome Hub’s partnerships with organisations like ASeTTS are so important.

“As the lead agency, City of Stirling does capacity building, where we work with community groups to build them and empower them, in whatever area they need,” she says.

Workshops could include how to start a small business in Australia, how to run a community association, or lessons on how to download and use the WA Safe app.

“So we do the capacity building and then our partners, like ASeTTS, deliver client services. When I see trauma I am immediately able to refer to ASeTTS because they are the experts and their counselling is so incredible,” she says.

Eva has seen many traumatised people of all ages and from so many different backgrounds come through the doors.

“It can be difficult for them, because they don’t all come together and they have guilt that their life is peaceful here, but the family left behind aren’t safe,” she says.

Eva is constantly impressed by the resilience and strength of her clients, something that was very evident during the Covid pandemic.

“It was a small thing compared to all the things they have been through, but it was such a panic for the Australian community with everyone rushing to buy toilet paper,” she says.

“Clients told me, ‘Tell them to get water, tell them to get canned beans, don’t worry about toilet paper – you can always use newspaper’. It was funny, and I was so proud, here they were giving us advice on how to survive a crisis.”

And it’s not just their resilience but their ability to find joy in any circumstance that is admirable. “We can be stressing about an event, ‘oh this hasn’t come, where are the caterers’ and all this, and they say ‘relax, look at the sun, isn’t this a beautiful day’,” she says.

“They have taught me so much and I am so grateful to be in this community.

We walk the journey with them, we are working together.”

And when she sees them not just

survive but thrive, Eva couldn’t be happier. While it’s often harder for the older generations to settle, watching their children succeed is its own reward.

“We’ve had young South Sudanese boys go to America and get scholarships to play basketball, another is a manager at Woolies here in Mirrabooka,” she says.

“Even just seeing them driving around in their car or coming back to say, ‘I bought a house’ or ‘we have a citizenship ceremony’. The real beauty is seeing our clients settle well in Australia, because now we’re all Australians.”

For Eva, that journey to settlement really began at ASeTTS, almost 20 years ago. “There is so much warmth and care.

I love that you can start there as a client and then you can get employed,” she says.

“What can I say, it has been such a pleasure to be involved with ASeTTS over the years – they provide programs that truly assist people to rebuild their lives.”

They have taught me so much and I am so grateful to be in this community. We walk the journey with them, we are working together.

37 Eva

Wafah Syria

When Wafah goes to work each day, she is giving a voice to those without one.

I

38 Wafah

t’s a role she feels honoured to do and one she takes very seriously.

“I am a very overprotective mother,” she says. “And I’m also an overprotective interpreter, of their words. I am protecting their words. I want their truth represented. It is very important to me that what they are saying is heard as if they were speaking in English.”

An Arabic interpreter for more than 20 years, Wafah has heard so many shocking refugee stories, but it is important for her to remain strong, to act as a truthful conduit for the clients seeking help.

“When they come into ASeTTS, they can talk to someone about the horrible time they had, in their country, or in a refugee camp, or in another country after they ran away,” she says. “They’ve got so many wounds, these refugees, but ASeTTS is like the healing place.”

Wafah may have come to Australia as a skilled migrant, rather than as a refugee, but she has her own wounds, her own experiences of loss and trauma. And she knows the damage it does to your soul.

“I did not have ASeTTS, but when I

hear the refugee stories, and they pour their heart out, I think they are healing, and part of me is healing, too.”

Wafah and her husband were living in England, where he was doing his master’s in engineering, when her first-born died of cot death.

“He was one year and five months and five days. The trauma was horrendous,” she says, her voice breaking. “I knew nothing about cot death, I was just in shock. They gave me a pamphlet and even though I could read the words in English I just couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t process it.”

Her husband and parents back in Syria encouraged her to have another child as quickly as possible. “I was like, ‘no, he’s gonna die’ because I couldn’t trust babies any more, they just go to sleep and don’t wake up,” she says.

When she did have her second child soon after, Wafah could barely sleep, lying on a mattress next to him, ever watchful.

After eight months, Wafah knew she could no longer cope and the family returned to Syria to live with her parents.

With news bulletins constantly showing shelled buildings and people

fleeing Syria, the picture Australians have of her birthplace could not be more different from the one Wafah loved.

She describes a vibrant city, with lots of parks and nice restaurants. Her parents – dad was a doctor and mum a psychologist - were well-off, so they enjoyed a high standard of living, with regular holidays to the seaside.

“Damascus is beautiful, I still miss it,” she says. “But when we went back after England, we couldn’t afford our own place because it was so expensive.

I thought I can’t live with my family forever, that is not right.”

So she applied to come to Australia in 1989 with her husband and two small children. “I used to love Kylie Minogue, listening to her songs, watching the videos, and I’d look in the background and it was so gorgeous and sunny,” she says. “The winters are freezing in Syria, it snows, and I used to be sick all the time. I wanted somewhere warm.”

They wouldn’t arrive until 1993, however, because her husband’s family did not want them to leave and put pressure on him to stay closer to home.

The compromise was Dubai, where

39

Jumana Jasim

You do feel like someone has unplugged you from the earth and thrown you into the ocean.

Wafah worked as an English teacher until she finally convinced her husband to move to Australia.

Wafah initially felt quite isolated in Perth’s outer suburbs. The couple bought a block of land “in the middle of nowhere” opposite a school and she only had a few neighbours, but Wafah was determined that this would be her home. Her resolve only intensified as war flared up again in Syria.

40 Wafah Clockwise from above: Wafah enjoyed a good life in Syria; the area of Damascus in which she lived.

“I was not going to let my kids suffer like I had in the war; it was such a scary time,” she says.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when Israel seized control of the Golan Heights from Syria, was the foundation for ongoing tensions in the region, with countries constantly fighting for territory. In October 1973, Syria joined a coalition of Arab states to fight Israel in the Yom Kippur or Ramadan War. More than

11,000 people, mostly civilians, lost their lives. Wafah was a teenager.

“I remember one day, there were 95 air raids, aeroplanes shelling, just on one day,” she says. “We would run to the shelter and then go back up and then we said ‘we’re just going to stay here’, there were so many.”

When that war ended, Wafah remembers thinking even then that there would be another. “And there was, and still to this day,” she says sadly. “I always tell my kids ‘I’m terribly sorry, I know you will miss your cousins’ because it’s really nice to have family around you, but you make sacrifices as parents for good reasons.”

Like most of the refugees Wafah gives voice to every day, she has lost many family members left behind. She was able to spend a few months with her mother after she broke her hip but could not return for the funeral when she died. Her father died soon after. Then her sister got cancer.

Wafah hasn’t been back to Syria since 2007, though her daughter went to spend time with her aunt when she was sick.

“Most of my family there have died, my brother is in Dubai, there are cousins I

she first started interpreting for ASeTTS, she was shocked by the stories she heard.

“You have to be neutral. You’re not allowed to show emotion, but sometimes you can’t help it,” she says. “You have to be strong and you don’t interfere, no matter what the subject is, even if someone is cursing your country and religion. You’ve got to accept that is their opinion and you are only the voice.”

It may not have been the career she planned but Wafah loves interpreting. It also gave her the flexibility to be available for her children before and after school; without any family support, she thinks teaching would have been hard.

The fact that her children have gone on to achieve so much – her son has a doctorate in engineering, her daughter will soon have a doctorate in chemistry – makes the sacrifices all worthwhile. “They are really my greatest achievement.”

Interpreting has also taught her a lot.

“You interpret in all fields, in medicine, law, science, so many things,” she says.

“And there are 26 countries speaking Arabic, so there are so many people from different places. Every single day is a

41 Wafah

could see but it’s very sad, so I’d rather not go back.”

Raising her children in Perth, though, Wafah made sure they kept up their first language. “Every time they talk to me in English I say ‘what, speak to me in Arabic’,” she says with a laugh. They might have been annoyed at the time, but they are grateful for that extra language now.

Wafah had hoped to continue teaching in Australia but after being accepted into the Diploma of Education course to enable her to do so, her then husband refused to allow her to leave their two children while she did an intensive week on Rottnest Island.

“I tried again a few years later but by then I was working as an interpreter and it just got too hard,” she says.

Wafah’s experiences have given her a great deal of empathy for the people she has been interpreting for over the past 20 years. “You do feel like someone has unplugged you from the earth and thrown you in the ocean and some people really can’t survive that.”

On any given day, Wafah could be asked to interpret at the hospital, or Centrelink, or with immigration. When

learning experience.”

Despite the often-confronting nature of the work she does with ASeTTS, Wafah says she fell in love with the people there.

“This organisation in my opinion is the most important for the refugees, I don’t think they would survive without them,” she says. “You know, I’m a skilled migrant and I know English, so it wasn’t a barrier, but it was still hard for me.”

Wafah recalls not long after arriving in Perth, they went into the city looking for the Medicare office. They were pointed to a building, the wrong one as it turned out.

“I thought, why are these people going inside the rooms and coming out with milk and bread and so much food, and I was thinking ‘does Medicare give food’,” she says with a laugh.

“And this lady came over and asked ‘are you OK for food’? So I looked at my husband and he said ‘nobody goes hungry in this country - we did the right thing coming here.’”

While her family did not require the assistance of the charity they had mistakenly stumbled into, Wafah’s heart sang at the help available to those who have nothing.

While food and shelter are essential to sustain life, Wafah maintains the wrap-around emotional, psychological and social support ASeTTS provides is what enables traumatised people to live again.

“You can go miles and miles from your home and you are in a country where you don’t speak the language but once a week you can come into this place to meet people from your culture and connect, and if you are feeling terrible you can see a counsellor,” she says.

“They surround them with love and care and kindness, and also show them the way forward. Seriously, no matter how much I praise them is not enough.

ASeTTS is a place where you go and you feel good. It’s a sanctuary.”

Kevin Singapore

Kevin knew one of his government shadows so well they would wave to each other.

“

42

T

Kevin

he same guy, he had been following me for seven or eight years,” he says. “I’d get off at the bus stop and he’d be waiting, or when I was at the shops or meeting a friend, he would be there, following me.”

The former refugee lawyer had been through so much for his social activism, including a total of about 18 months in prison in the 1980s, but the constant surveillance was a factor that pushed him to leave Singapore.

“It gets so tiring, your mail is opened, your phone is tapped and the security people are keeping an eye on you all the time,” he says.

Kevin’s journey began in the 1980s as a university student when he got involved with the Catholic Students’ Society, an organisation that focused on the Catholic Church’s teaching of a “preferential option for the poor”.

Together with other church organisations, they campaigned for the rights of workers, improving policies for the poor, and the right to political participation.

It was activity that drew the attention of the Singapore Government led by Lee

Kuan Yew, who had been prime minister since British rule ended in 1959.

“The government destroyed the students’ union in the mid-1970s with mass arrests, many were jailed or had to leave the country,” Kevin says. “In the 1980s, the Catholic Students’ Society was one of the few organisations in the university that sought to create an awareness of social injustices and to advocate for others.”

In 1987, Kevin was working as a student organiser when he was arrested for supposedly being part of a Marxist conspiracy to overthrow the government.

“This was a complete fabrication,” Kevin says. “We were not an underground group but legitimate organisations exercising our democratic rights.”

Kevin, who joined the ASeTTS board a year ago, is loathe to compare his experiences in detention to the trauma that so many of ASeTTS’ clients have experienced. He doesn’t like to use the word torture to describe what happened to him and other activists in prison but it’s hard to see it as anything else.

“You are interrogated non-stop for days, you don’t have any underwear or footwear - you’re in a very cold room and

everybody else is in sweaters. It’s very traumatic,” he says.

“And then you’re physically hit. Not to the extent where you’re beaten but enough to say ‘we can go further’. Or they would bring another person to your room and hit them in front of you and say ‘he has confessed, why don’t you’?”

Although Kevin didn’t think his life would be in danger, he was very fearful.

There was the prospect of being detained indefinitely; it was not uncommon for political prisoners in Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s to be held for years without trial.

When he was released with other political prisoners, many got together and wrote a statement to say the government’s allegations of a Marxist conspiracy were false and they were illtreated in prison.

“I remember hearing on the BBC that former political prisoners in Singapore had released a statement and I thought ‘oh no, tomorrow we will be arrested’.

And the next day I was arrested again.”

He was in prison for about a year as a team that included celebrated Australian human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC fought to overturn detention orders.

Kevin remembers the court ordering

43 Jumana Jasim

their release and being driven and released outside the prison gates, where a plainclothes police officer was waiting to serve him with a new detention order.

When the young law graduate was finally let out, it was with severe restrictions. “I couldn’t speak in public, I couldn’t mix with other detainees, I couldn’t write anything.”

One good thing did come out of his imprisonment, though, he says with a laugh. “My girlfriend, Lucy, was also involved in the Catholic Students’ Society and I was a bit surprised when my case officer said that my fiancée was here to visit me,” he says. “I thought ‘wow, relationships change quickly when you are in prison’!”

Lucy and Kevin were married soon after his release. Kevin says he is forever grateful for Lucy’s love and constant support during the dark days of detention.

Kevin returned to legal practice, trying to get on with his life with the everpresent shadows.

The couple left Singapore for Hong Kong where he worked as a refugee lawyer with the UNHCR. While Kevin worked with Vietnamese boat people whose claims for resettlement had been refused, Lucy worked with the women’s group in the refugee camp.

“In Hong Kong, only between four to eight percent of the asylum seekers were

44 Kevin Clockwise from right: Kevin speaking in Hong Kong at a memorial for victims of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor; a newspaper report of Kevin’s arrest in Singapore; with his wife Lucy and children Caitlin, Joshua and Leanna in Australia

accepted, the rest were deported,” he says.

“There was a refugee review tribunal and my job was to prepare the appeals, to prove under the UN Convention that they were refugees on the basis that they had been persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group.”

Kevin, who also previously advocated with Amnesty International for political prisoners, was drawn to the work because of the support that he had received while he was in prison.

“Family, friends and many others in Singapore put aside their fears of reprisals to support us in prison,” he says. “Many international groups organised a sustained campaign for our release. Ronald Lee and George Lim, my lawyers in Singapore, at great risk to their personal safety, visited

me every week, just to let me have someone else to see rather than the interrogators and the guards – that support and care has an enormous impact.

“The work I did was standing in solidarity with asylum seekers, that you are not forgotten and to show them the respect they deserve, and that they matter in life.”

Kevin worked in Hong Kong for three years before returning to Singapore where he eventually started his own law practice. But he was always wary of what might happen.

“A journalist would interview me and I would wonder if they were a plant – were they asking questions because they were writing a piece for the newspapers or were doing the government’s bidding,” he says. “The suspicion weighs you down almost as much as the surveillance.”

Kevin and Lucy were also concerned for their young children. “We didn’t want them to go through the same painful education system in Singapore that we had to go through, and it would be worse for them as it had become highly competitive,” he says.

Kevin wonders how different things might have been if his parents’ application for migration to Australia in the mid-1970s had proceeded.

“I remember attending an interview at the Australian High Commission with my parents when I was 14,” he says, praying that the family would be accepted.

“Back then, the Vietnamese boat people seeking asylum at that time pushed my family’s application back, and my mother was also told she had to improve her secretarial skills to be approved for migration.”

By the time all the paperwork was approved, Kevin had been conscripted for military service and couldn’t leave the country. When his parents asked him if he’d still like to go some years later, the young man had started to plan a future in Singapore; he had a girlfriend and was studying law at university.

In 2003, almost 27 years after his

The work I did was standing in solidarity with asylum seekers, that you are not forgotten and to show them the respect they deserve, and that they matter in life.

in contributing. He knew it was a good fit for both his skills and his passion for helping others.

“Without this type of support, you’re leaving everything to chance,” he says.

“There are language issues, cultural issues, mental health issues - who is going to work with them to navigate their early years in Australia so that they can rebuild their lives?”

Kevin also knows the importance of trauma counselling, having been through an era when the terrible things people endured weren’t really talked about.

“At my wife’s urging, I had counselling myself to understand better how it impacted me then and today,” he says.

“Sometimes I get flashbacks. And I get angry, angry at myself for not being strong, for not standing up to them.”

There are also feelings of guilt for those who remained in jail, people like former politician and university lecturer Chia Thye Poh who was imprisoned in Singapore for more than 20 years without charge or trial.

“He refused to cooperate with them; to a large extent we cooperated, we wrote statements, we appeared on TV and said what we did,” he says.

“They didn’t ask us to admit we were communists, they are far more sophisticated, they would splice in footage of the former guerillas in the

jungle, talk about how the communists infiltrate universities and students, and now they’re infiltrating the church, to justify the arrests.”

Kevin wrestles with the guilt that he didn’t dig in his heels, even though it would undoubtedly have meant indefinite imprisonment.

And then there is the guilt Kevin feels for leaving the country. “I couldn’t continue; by leaving, you are taking the easy path and giving up the struggle.”

These are complicated emotions common to the people ASeTTS helps.

“You are coming to terms with the trauma you faced in your home country, the flight to Australia, the trauma of detention in Australia,” he says. “ASeTTS is there to help people rebuild their lives.

What is better than that?”

To him, this is part of building bonds of human solidarity.

Kevin is reminded of a book he and fellow detainees wrote in Singapore. “I wrote that the Singapore Government did not realise that by slamming the prison doors shut that those doors actually opened the hearts of many to solidarity and compassion,” he says.

He carries on with his journey motivated by the prophet Micah in the Old Testament. “I have always tried to live by this: To act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God.”

45 Kevin

parents had applied to migrate to Australia, Kevin, Lucy and their children migrated to Australia.

With his legal qualifications recognised in Australia and English being his first language, Kevin and his family did not find resettling in Australia daunting, but he wasn’t done with helping those with more complicated paths to settlement. “I’ve always believed that we have to contribute to the community,” he says.

Kevin was on the board of Case for Refugees, now part of Circle Green, for five years. “It was started to provide legal service to temporary visa holders, making appeals to Immigration so that they could have continuing protection” he says.

“They also helped those who already had refugee status but who wish to bring other family members to join them on a humanitarian visa.”

He discovered ASeTTS not through his pro-bono legal work with refugees but his daughter, Leanna. “She was playing in an orchestra, and I drove her to the concert at Koodoola Community Centre,” he recalls. “I wondered why there were all these Burmese refugees going to the concert and it turned out the concert was supported by ASeTTS.” Lucy saw that the organisation was looking for board members and suggested that Kevin might be interested

Moe Myanmar

Moe loves to unwind with a bubble tea watching a good K-drama or listening to K-pop.

A 46 Moe

passion for popular Korean culture and boba is common among her age group. But her journey to being able to enjoy such simple pleasures is anything but.

Moe was seven, living in a small village in Myanmar, when she discovered nothing was as she thought.

“I tried to wake my mum to go to the toilet, because in my culture it was far from our house, but she didn’t answer,” she recalls. “So I go into her room and call again and shake her, but she won’t wake up.”

Cold, the little girl climbed into bed next to her mother and snuggled up to her until morning. When she still couldn’t wake her, she started screaming, and the neighbours came running. Her mother had died.

This was when the traumatised child found out that the only mother she had known was actually her grandmother.

Her mother and father had fled to Malaysia with Moe’s older sister, Aim, when she was a baby, leaving her in the care of her grandmother.

“I call her Mum, she was so nice, she

played football with me, she taught me to be a good girl and not do bad things,” she says.

The shock of losing ‘Mum’ was compounded by the appearance of her biological mother, Mi Aye Win, who came back from Malaysia to get her. She was told that not only did she have an older sister but a father and two younger siblings.

The journey back to Malaysia was difficult, distressing and very dangerous.

While they started off in a vehicle, they soon had to go by foot. Moe’s family were part of the persecuted Karen community and Myanamr’s junta were always on the lookout for people trying to flee the country.

“We walked for like eight days and we often had to hide in the jungle; I was so scared and hungry, and tired,” she recalls.

“We had to drink dirty water and there was hardly anything to eat.”

The little girl’s distress worsened when her mother got sick, and she had to help her along the way. They got lost a few times, but Moe tried to keep close to other groups of Karen people finding a route out of the country.

When they finally made it into Malaysia, Moe’s mother was very unwell and the father she had never met before was no help, either. He had a motorbike accident earlier and was still recovering.

In just over a week, Moe went from living a simple but happy life with her grandmother to becoming the carer for her parents, and a little brother and sister she had not even known existed. Her older sister Aim was at school in Kuala Lumpur, thanks to the sponsorship of the United Nations, and refusing to return home.

“I don’t know what sickness she had but it was really bad,” Moe says of her mother.

“And my dad, he recovered but he didn’t work, he would just go out with his friends.”

Moe had to walk each day to get water for the family and bring the heavy pails back, while her mother would shout instructions about how to prepare what little food they had from her bed.

Was she angry with her parents? “One day I saw my dad take medicines and I think it’s a bad drug and I saw he gave it to my mum,” she says. “And my siblings were crying. And that’s when I got really mad because we had no rice to eat.”

restaurant, her sister in a hair salon before joining her in the restaurant. “We weren’t close, we always arguing,” she says.

Then someone from the United Nations found them again. It turns out their mother had started an application to come to Australia years ago. “They asked if we would still like to come and we said yes.”

Moe knew very little about where she was going but she says the promise of being able to go back to school, to get a proper education, was a big factor in their decision.

“And they say that we would be looked after, that we wouldn’t have to worry, we could just go to school.”

Moe was 14, and Aim was 18, when they arrived in Australia on July 24, 2018. They were settled into a house with

me feel better. They help me so much.”

She has also grown much closer to her sister since they settled in Perth. They don’t live together any more – Aim goes to school a few days a week and works part-time at a barber shop, building towards a hairdressing apprenticeship but they talk all the time.

Things are undoubtedly so much better for this brave young woman, but she knows her trauma runs deep.

“I dream of my grandma, but mostly my dad, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way,” she says.

In one of her recurring dreams, she’s walking across a river behind her father, who is carrying her little brothers, and she loses her shoes. They reach her mother, who is waiting at the door, but Moe has to run back to find her shoes.

By the time she was nine, Moe was not only looking after her entire family, she was supporting them as well, laying tiles for a building company.

24-hour support and started school. Moe was nervous but says within a week she felt settled.

“Everyone was very welcoming, I actually had friends, which I never had before,” she says with a smile. Like any teenager, she spends way too much time texting her friends, but then she has a lot more time to make up. “I didn’t even know what a mobile phone was until just before I came to Australia.”

Moe started seeing a youth worker from ASeTTS, first Nicole and then Julien, who came to visit her at school.

“After I talk to them, I feel so much better,” she says. “I felt like someone might actually care about me and it makes

But it is her waking dream that drives Moe forward. She desperately wants to bring her younger siblings, who she thinks might be about 11 or 12 now, to Australia. They are still in Myanmar, living with a relative she believes is not looking after them properly.

“They were living with my mum’s older sister, who was nice, but she died and now they are with the other aunty,” she says. “They only call us for money, they don’t even care about my siblings.

They can’t even go to school.”

For now, Moe has to focus on herself, to grow stronger every day. “I feel so much better than I was, and than where I was,” she says.

47 Moe

By the time she was nine, Moe was not only looking after her entire family, she was supporting them as well, laying tiles for a building company. “My hands hurt, I cried so much but I had no choice.”

Not long after, her father fell ill with the same sickness, possibly syphilis. “My mum never told me, but I heard from my mum’s friend that my dad had a wife that had that sickness,” she says. “And then they got divorced and he gave that sickness to my mum.”

Unlike her mother, who battled for years, Moe’s father died three days after going to hospital. Moe’s older sister had returned from Kuala Lumpur and the girls were trying to earn money making bird’s nests for tourists.

Her grief-stricken mother took their younger siblings back to Myanmar, promising to return, but she never did. “I think she knew she was going to die and wanted to die at home,” Moe says.

She has not seen her little brother and sister, Mehm Lyih Sahai and My Lyih Chai, since.

The quietly spoken young woman, who turns 18 in August, has a lovely gentle air about her that would be well-suited to nursing, the profession she is thinking about entering when she graduates.

She’s in Year 11 at Balga Senior High School; her older sister is in Year 12 at Cyril Jackson. The pair are very close now, though that wasn’t always the case.

“The night my mum died I wanted to call her but my sister said ‘no, don’t make her feel worried,” she recalls. “But I was like ‘no, I miss her’ so she got mad at me and broke the phone, so we have no phone.”

The next day a man came to tell them their mother had died. “I was so mad with my sister at the time.”

With the assistance of one of her sister’s former teachers, they were taken to Kuala Lumpur where they boarded at a school run by the United Nations for a while.

At 12 or 13, Moe started to work in a local

Bonnie Hong Kong

When Bonnie started work as a counsellor at ASeTTS in 2007, she didn’t know much about the refugee experience.

B 48 Bonnie

ut as a recently arrived migrant, she did understand how hard it can be to settle in a new country, even when you speak the language or have the support of an Australian husband.

“I really was feeling quite depressed for the first year - even though I came here with some English, I was still struggling,” she says. “So you can imagine with all the issues refugees have, what they would be struggling with; they have language problems, trauma, cultural issues and even racism. It’s huge.”

In her early days at ASeTTS, Bonnie would go out to visit clients where they were living and talk to them, just to see how they were going.

“I didn’t touch a lot on their trauma then, because if they were struggling to even go to a counsellor, it was better to just talk about their current situation or anything they bring up,” she says. “I just was guided by them and how they were on any day.”

Bonnie and her colleagues provided short-term counselling for about six months and then would refer clients on to ASeTTS’ long-term team if they were

still struggling. She would also connect them with the women’s group, or the men’s group, or other services.

“It is good for them to have a sense of community, to show there are so many ways they can be supported,” she says.

In Hong Kong, after studying social work and working as a teacher for a couple of years, Bonnie worked in correctional services and with people with drug and alcohol addiction.

“I was actually working as a correctional services officer first, and then because of my qualification they asked me to do this other role,” she says. “It wasn’t so much counselling but checking on them, making sure they hadn’t gone back to drugs, that they had found work and helping them to resettle into community.”

An inveterate traveller, Bonnie had also been accumulating silver jewellery and clothing as she explored Thailand, Nepal and India, and eventually opened her own shop. She ran it for two years before coming to Australia with her husband.

ASeTTS was her first job here and the scale of the suffering she encountered was quite overwhelming initially.

“They brought the world to you, I guess you’d say, and oh my God, people suffer so much,” she says. “At the beginning I have my own adjustment issues as well.”

And it wasn’t just because of the trauma her clients had been through.

“It’s such a different group of people to work with here and you don’t really know much about their cultures and their way of thinking,” she says. “And then there was working with interpreters, so there was so, so much to learn.”

Over the next three years, Bonnie worked with many different people from all over the world, including Somalia, Burma, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Iran.

It was also incredibly rewarding and enriching work, so much so that when Bonnie left to work elsewhere, she was back within 18 months.

ASeTTS was looking for counsellors to help support people in detention.

Bonnie found herself doing fly in, fly out, spending a month at a time in Derby, counselling at Curtin Detention Centre, before returning to Perth for respite.

This led to work supporting families and children at the Leonora Detention

49 Jumana Jasim

It’s more about providing a safe space. Whatever they bring up, I will sit with them and listen and I will meet wherever they are emotionally.

50

Centre, which was closed not long before the Abbott Government came to power in 2013, and then back to Curtin until it was also shut in 2014.

Bonnie was then asked to support asylum seekers being held at Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre in Northam. She has now been doing this for seven years, driving up every Monday and returning on Wednesdays.

“And then Thursday and Friday I am here, attending meetings, supervision and seeing clients in the community as well,” she says.

While many would find it confronting to see traumatised people under such strict, confined conditions, Bonnie says her work in the correctional system in Hong Kong gave her some insight into what it would be like.

“I was quite used to being watched and having cameras everywhere,” she says.

“For me, it’s about giving a break to the people who are coming to see me, so they

Bonnie

can feel safe and talk about whatever has happened to them.”

She tries to create a calm, inviting space in the counselling room, with personal touches and some pictures, to give clients some relief.

“It’s not about recovery because they are still in very uncertain and unpredictable environments,” she says.

“It’s more about providing a safe space.

Whatever they bring up, I will sit with them and listen and I will meet wherever they are emotionally.”

Bonnie understands that not everyone embraces counselling, that their culture is not familiar with such concepts. “They don’t want to be labelled crazy and it can be quite stigmatising for them,” she says.

The sessions are usually for an hour but again Bonnie goes with the flow.

“Often because of their internal state, they can’t stay too long in the room, it is hard for them to sit there and talk, they get too distressed,” she says.

Bonnie talks about slowing everything down, not overstimulating clients because their nervous systems are already so heightened.

It is not uncommon for them to come to see her in the first instance because they think she might be able to help with immigration or get them medical assistance, and she has to explain that is not her role and refer them to other services.

While acknowledging the challenges of her work, the senior counsellor says it is about being aware of her own boundaries and limitations.

“I have to be clear with myself, to know that this is what I can do in my capacity,” she says. “And then I have to explain to my clients in a way that they won’t feel rejected, because they are already in a very vulnerable position.”

Bonnie might see some people only once while others she builds a relationship with over time. “I’m seeing

From far left: Bonnie with her father; with her parents and younger sister and brother in Hong Kong.

of hope and the possibility for them because when they are in that dysregulated state they are only looking at the negative,” she says. “We are sitting in the unknown and waiting to see together what will happen.”

When they know someone listens and bears witness to what happens to them, it really does make a difference.

As a counsellor constantly hearing the pain of others, how does she maintain balance for herself? “I do a lot of movement,” she says with a smile. “We do a lot of sitting and listening, we absorb a lot, so I do a lot of walking, move the body.”

She also grounds herself when she’s with clients, paying attention to how she is sitting in the chair, and her bodily sensations.

“I track my internal state to make sure I am present, so that I have the capacity to listen but not absorb their trauma,” she says.

The support of her colleagues and

the supervision groups overseen

by ASeTTS’ long-time psychiatrist Sue Lutton also make the world of difference. Good supervision is important.

“Because we are doing similar jobs we are able to talk and share the load,” she says. “There’s also the diversity of the roles, not only working in detention but providing supervision and line management as senior counsellor, as well as working with clients in the community.”

Self-reflection is also essential. “After work in Northam, I always walk along the river, it’s a time for me to process, to move and relax.”

And the greatest feeling of all is when a client is released from detention. Often, Bonnie doesn’t know where they have gone, but those who settle in Perth might continue to see her after their release.

“It’s just such a joy to see them in the community, to be able to build a life,” she says.

51 Bonnie

one man twice a week because he has such high needs and he wants to come and talk because talking is so important for him,” she says. “They don’t want to burden their families.”

Trust is the key. “When they find they can trust me, they feel they have relief in their hearts,” she says. “We listen, we join with them and we validate what they say, we reflect on what they say, and you change their physiology when you do that, even though you haven’t fixed anything.”

The softly spoken counsellor has a gentle manner about her that you can see would help people open up, however cautiously.

“Sometimes they feel worse than animals, so the approach is to rehumanise,” she says. “It’s just about being, human to human, with them and seeing them as they are.”

Bonnie knows how easy it is to give up hope of being released but she can’t change their circumstances.

“But what I can do is hold a glimmer

Safa Iraq

Safa packed a backpack and left in the middle of the night.

H 52 Safa

e woke up his mother and told her he was going.

He didn’t really know where. He just knew it wasn’t safe to stay.

“She was shocked, she didn’t know what to say but she knew I have no choice. Already one of my brothers was missing,” he says. “Even if I was not killed, I could be put in jail at any time.

There was no future, nothing.”

It was April 1991, and Saddam Hussein’s regime was brutally crushing anyone even perceived to be supporting the Shia-led uprising. Men who refused to be conscripted into his army would disappear or be killed. You couldn’t trust your friends or neighbours.

“Anyone could be killed, they just killed people on the road,” Safa says. “50,000 people were buried alive, 50,000 people.

You have no choice but to leave. Some people escaped to Iran, some of them escaped to Kuwait, some to Saudi Arabia.”

Safa fled with a friend he had studied with. The 26-year-old had only recently finished university and was looking forward to starting his career as a veterinarian. Instead, he found himself in the desert in a makeshift camp in

Saudi Arabia. For four terrible years.

“There was so much dust. You couldn’t see your own hands some days,” Safa says, holding his right hand up not far from his face. “It was thick, so thick, for two or three days. You can’t eat, you can’t drink, you can’t do nothing. You just close the tent and stay inside.”

When he first arrived, there were about 60 or 70 people in the Rafha camp; its numbers swelled to more than 30,000 during his time there. Families, children, women. All living in fear that they could be sent back to Iraq at any time. It was clear the Saudis didn’t want them there, either.

After Safa had been there for 18 months, the UNHCR came into the camp to register its occupants. They were now officially refugees but nothing really changed. The hardest thing, Safa says, was not to lose hope.

“If you’re in jail, like for five years, you can count the days and you know that one day it will be five years,” he says. “In the camp, we did not know. Every day was the same. There was no book you can read, no trees, no birds, nothing. Just the camp and that’s it.”

Safa is a quietly spoken man whose frequent smiles and gentle demeanour

hide a wall of pain and a deep well of regret. For what he has lost and for what might have been.

As the years passed, he watched others leave for humanitarian settlement elsewhere – for America, Finland, Sweden, Canada and Australia.

Cruelly, his first chance to leave was crushed early on by the friend he had arrived with.

Doctors at a caravan outside the camp needed someone to help translate Arabic to English and both Safa and his friend, who could speak enough English to get by, volunteered. When they were told the doctor only needed one person, Safa stepped aside. His friend was severely depressed, had almost lost hope, and Safa thought the change of scenery – however minor – might help lift his spirits.

This selfless act put his friend in the right place to apply for an American visa. At his interview, he did not mention that he was with Safa. When Safa asked him why, his friend said he was afraid he would not get a visa.

“I said, ‘I don’t think so’ and he promised, ‘next time’. When next time came, I could see he was happy returning from the interview. Again, I asked if he

53

Jumana Jasim

had mentioned me and again he said no.

He was too afraid he would be rejected.”

His friend left for America not long after. Safa would spend another two years in the camp.

Throughout all this, Safa never lost his faith in God. “It’s a big power that lives inside of you, to make you continue otherwise you just give up,” he says. “I never lost hope. But sometimes I lost my heart.”

Such as the time his brother, who was living in the UK, tried to sponsor him.

Safa was taken in a taxi for an interview but there had been some violence in the camp, after a soldier killed one of the refugees, and his interviewers were only interested in what he knew about the incident. His application was rejected.

Safa eventually had an interview with the Australian High Commission, which he passed, but they told him he’d have

Safa with a friend in the Saudi Arabia camp where he spent four years.

54 Safa

to take a medical in a month or two. It was another eight months before anyone contacted him. He would be going to a place he had never heard of: Perth.

He arrived in May 1994.

While he was naturally grateful to be out of the camp, Safa was also in shock.

Everything was different, the world had moved on and Safa had been trapped in a time warp. Even something we all take for granted, like a shower, could bring him undone.

“In the camp, there was a shortage of water, and we had a bottle we have to fill.

That is what we drink from, what we use to shower,” he recalls. “Everybody from four to six o’clock was all lining up to fill the bottles and keep it inside the tent. So when I came here and I went to get in the shower …” His voice trails off. “I felt like I had lost my civilisation.”

His family did not even know he was alive. When he called them for the first time in four years, his mother burst into tears. He learnt that the sanctions against Iraq had caused a whole new type of suffering for not just his family but everyone.

The future he had dreamed of as a young would-be vet would never eventuate. “When I arrived here, I felt that I am a very different person,” he says.

“I have to work, I have to do something about my family, they need support. I can’t go back to study.”

Even if there had been the opportunity, Safa doubts he would have been ready. “My brain was not clear from the trauma, I just needed to do something, to work, to help my family.”

With his limited English, he walked up and down Osborne Park, knocking on the door of every factory, every warehouse, asking if anyone had any work. Perhaps taken aback by his unorthodox approach, no one said yes.

Eventually he secured a trial at a place in Malaga. Asked what he thought after the first day, Safa said it was easy.

The manager laughed. Crawling around inside roofs in the heat, installing insulation, is not most people’s idea of easy work but after four years in a hellhole. Safa had no complaints. He worked hard, sending as much money as he could back to his family in Iraq.

It wasn’t the physical toll that made him look for another job, but the isolation. “I was working all by myself, so I wasn’t learning. I wanted to communicate with people so I can improve myself and understand the culture,” he says.

When someone suggested he learn to drive a taxi, he juggled the course, and then his early months as a driver, with his factory job so he could keep sending money back home.

Safa still drives a taxi. His lost profession hurts him deeply. He knows people he studied with who stayed behind in Iraq because they belonged to a different sect or religion and were safe from persecution, or who moved to other countries. As they built their veterinary careers, he was ferrying people around Perth in his cab.

“You have to have a career to be successful in life,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be a vet, but a career. I don’t have that.”

Safa was too busy trying to survive.

Once he had saved enough money, he travelled to Jordan to marry Ahlam, who he had met at university - he was still not safe in Iraq – and soon had his own young family to support.

All the while, he was also working to sponsor his siblings to come to Australia.

Though his mother did not want to leave, two of his sisters and a brother eventually joined the family in Perth; two of his nephews are now doctors, his son is studying medicine, his daughter is well on her way to becoming a lawyer.

Safa is proud of them, and happy that they can fulfil the dreams that eluded him. But that doesn’t stop him from wondering what might have been. Those years in the camp robbed him of so much more than his freedom.

He recalls the passenger he picked up one night who apologised for being a bit drunk. He’d hurt his leg and was bored after being stuck at home for four days. “I said to him ‘four days, just four days’? I then went on tell him about my four years.”

Safa smiles. “He said ‘I am so sorry’.”

Safa has returned to Iraq twice to see his mother since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 but says it is no longer his home. “Australia is home, this is my home,” he says. ”I count myself as lucky. I lost a lot but I have a lot, too.”

55

Safa

Jumana Australia

“My dad is a superhero,” Jumana says, her eyes welling with tears.

A 56 Jumana

nd the lawyer-to-be doesn’t mean in the caped crusader saves the world kind of way.

No, Safa’s superpowers are more subtle. And far more meaningful.

“He has been through so much and done so much for his family,” Jumana says. “He has sacrificed so much for us to be where we are now.”

Indeed, this proud daughter says Safa is the reason she applied to join the ASeTTS board.

“I’ve been in the refugee advocacy space for a while and whenever people ask me why I got involved, I say I don’t have much of a story, but I’m obligated to do so as the daughter of refugees,” she says.

“My father, on the other hand, his story needs to be heard, what he went through and what thousands of people in his position went through. It’s not discussed as much as it needs to be.”

Growing up in Perth, Jumana said she and her siblings were given the privilege of a ‘normal’ childhood, going to school, playing in the park right in front of the house, and chilling with friends.

She was aware, however, that some people considered her an outsider.

‘There were moments it was clear we weren’t like other children – when you would be translating for family members at school or when you would notice your food looked different to other children’s,” she says.

“However, this difference became very prevalent when I put on the hijab; when I became visibly different. Overnight, I became the spokesperson for over 1.7 billion people.”

She first heard the word ‘terrorist’ when she was nine. “I remember a boy coming up to me and saying “’9/11, you don‘t know what 9/11 is’? Am I supposed to know what it means?”

Jumana researched the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September 2001 and was naturally horrified.

Then with the rise of ISIS in 2014, Jumana and her family felt the sting of rampant Islamophobia.

“I would be walking to school and have my younger cousins with me, and strangers would roll their window down and call us ‘terrorist’ and yell other obscenities. This was not normal for other people our age.”

She asked more questions of her father and as she learned more of his story - his flight from Iraq, his four hellish years imprisoned in Rafha camp in Saudi Arabia, his struggles as a new arrival in Perth - it became the fuel that drove her forward, on a pathway to law and advocacy.

At just 22, Jumana is already a veteran advocate. She has volunteered with CARAD, the Red Cross youth committee and been a UNICEF youth ambassador.

But it was the few visits to Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre before Covid hit that really shook her.

“That was a rude awakening. You see and hear about the horror of the camps on the news but to meet the people suffering at the hands of these structures, it’s completely different,” she says.

When Jumana saw that ASeTTS was looking for people with lived experience of torture and trauma to be on the board, she knew she had to apply.

“One thing that wasn’t on the board, which I thought needed to be emphasised, was the intergenerational impact of trauma. It’s real - I feel it, my cousins feel it, my friends that are part of

57

Jumana Jasim

I need to use my blessings as a source of assistance to other people who may be going through even the slightest degree of what my parents experienced.

58 Jumana

diaspora communities feel it,” she says.

A lot of it remains hidden because refugees like her father have managed to build a life in Australia and many don’t talk about what happened because mental health is a taboo in their culture and, to a certain extent, in society in general.

“But there are repercussions when these wounds are ignored - what has happened can’t be disregarded.”

Jumana is passionate about ensuring that when refugees arrive in Australia their needs are attended to, particularly those who have experienced torture and trauma. But she’s also concerned for their children.

“There are children who have grown up seeing their parents suffer and face the disadvantages because of this. When trauma is not tended to, it can have ongoing effects on your children, your grandchildren - we see this with the Indigenous Australian community, too.”

She was drawn to ASeTTS’ vision to help those who have lived the refugee experience but also those who have been impacted by what has happened to their loved ones.

“I need to use my blessings as a source of assistance to other people who may be going through even the slightest degree of what my parents experienced,” Jumana says.

She is anxious not to speak for her

dad. His story is not hers to tell, she says, but Jumana remembers slowly trying to pry it out of him.

“I would sit Baba (dad) down and ask, ‘how did you come to Australia’. I could see it was difficult for him to talk about, but for me it was like putting the pieces together.”

She also feels his pain for what might have been. “He is one of 13 children, my dad’s father passed away at a young age and their mum couldn’t even read but they were all educated,” she says. “She raised doctors, vets, lawyers, pilots. What an incredible woman she is. They all felt like they had the ability to contribute meaningfully to society.”

Jumana hates that her father feels somehow inferior because he was unable to follow his chosen career. She says while it’s great that refugees are offered English lessons when they arrive in Australia, it’s often not the priority.

“When you come here, you’re in a state of survival. You’re in a state of poverty and thinking of your family you have left behind who remain in a state of sanctions and desperation,” she says. “You’re not going to choose slowly learning a language over survival.”

When her mother Ahlam, who had studied with Safa back in Iraq, arrived in 1997, things were a little different. She had Safa. But it was still a struggle, as a new mother on her own with a baby and no family support, her husband working all the time.

“But my mum, she would never stop, we always laugh about how many courses she has done. She’s the go-to translator

generation to ask, ‘what exactly happened here and why were so many people robbed of so many precious years?’”

While she is constantly reminding her parents of their worth, Jumana also shows it through action. “My older brother studies medicine, I study law.

I think it is an unspoken promise that we have made to make their sacrifices worthwhile.” Her voice breaks, the tears flowing again.

“I was the one who was always asking questions, who always wanted to know more about what happened to them, but all my siblings just know within themselves how much our parents have given us.”

She says Safa will talk about people he studied with who went to the UK or to Sweden, and were able to restart their careers.

“He’s like ‘why wasn’t I able to do that?’” She looks at her father. “It’s the circumstances you were given. I’m just so proud of you. It wouldn’t matter if you had your own clinic or if you’re a taxi driver, my love could not be any greater.

You are my superhero.”

Clockwise from far left: Safa with friends during his university days in Iraq; Safa’s sacrifices have enabled an extended family to make a life in Australia; Jumana with her siblings.

59 Jumana

in our family, she did an interpreter course, she did a pharmacy course, so many things. She continuously amazes me,” she says.

The clearly proud daughter hates that either of her parents would think less of themselves because of what they do or have been unable to do.

“They express that they are disappointed in themselves that they both hold vet science degrees, yet haven’t been able to use them in their careers.

This hurts, as I tell them all the time, they are the epitome of everything I aspire to be. I aim to implement even half of the selflessness and love they have always shown us.“ Their experience is what drives Jumana, who has recently started work in a legal firm, to advocate for refugees and why she’s passionate about the work ASeTTS does.

“It doesn’t end and doesn’t start at English class - it’s a multi-dimensional issue,” she says. “I think back to the moment my best friend throughout school casually mentioned to me midconversation that she was born in a detention centre and that her mum went into labour on a boat.”

There was another friend who told Jumana that she would have loved to have her cousins with her in Australia but their family’s boat sank. “We know people whose entire families, three generations, have sunk on a boat and there’s been only a daughter or son who has survived. How are you supposed to overcome such tragedy?”

Jumana wants to address not just the trauma but the reasons for it. She speaks of an Amnesty International report into the Rafha camp, which finally closed in 2009, and the push for legal action against those responsible for compounding the Iraqi occupants’ trauma.

“The report goes into devastating facts,” she says. “Lots of the people who left that camp are still in a state of recovery and I think sometimes it takes the next

Margaret Sudan

The family was desperate, as most families Margaret knew in Sudan were at that time.

W 60 Margaret

hat she didn’t know was that her uncle, who had raised her like a daughter, was preparing to marry her off to an old man to help ease their financial woes.

When she figured out what was happening, Margaret asked a neighbour to come over as a witness and told the man in no uncertain times that she would not marry him.

“First of all, this is my uncle,” she told him. “Yes, he is a like a father to me, but he has no right to sell me off to anyone.

If he really wants to give you a daughter, these are all his children. I’m not going to get married to you or anyone. If you force me, the night I spend with you, one of us will be dead. Either you or me.”

Margaret was 12. “He said to me ‘you can’t talk like this, you’re a child’. I said ‘a child? A minute ago, you were going to marry me. How are you supposed to marry a child?’” The man decided Margaret would be too much trouble and left.

How did a mere slip of a girl stand up so bravely to two grown men? Margaret says a distant cousin had taught her to pray and she found her strength growing

as she prayed. “I knew only God could have empowered me to stand up for my rights.”

The last of seven children, Margaret was two when she was taken from Juba in the south in 1992, to live with her uncle east of the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

“My mother passed away after she had buried all her children. Two of my siblings drowned, and I don’t really know what happened because my uncle would not talk about it; he was too traumatised.”

Margaret settled in with her uncle, safe from the civil war raging in the south. She did well at school and got involved with her local church youth group.

She was with the group, on her way to a youth conference in 1996 when their bus collided with another. “Many people died and I was terribly injured so I had to move to Khartoum, I had so many medical appointments,” she says.

Margaret stayed in the city with another uncle and his grown-up children, undergoing multiple operations. Aside from chronic back problems that linger today, Margaret had ongoing issues with a badly injured eye.

“The first few days I couldn’t see at all, one eye was swollen and the other

completely damaged,” she recalls. “I had to sleep for years with it open, it would dry up and then you wake up in pain.”

Margaret had more operations, including two at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in the past year, to enable her to close that eye. “But I thank God that I survived because many people died; it could have been so much worse.”

By any measure, Margaret has been through hell, but the mother of two is anything but defeated. Tall, with an almost regal bearing, she has a smile that lights up the room and an infectious laugh to match.

“I think this is my nature, since I was a child I would just laugh,” she says. “I didn’t have any mentality of anything that’s doomy and gloomy.”

Her youngest daughter, Rose, is at school and her eldest, Liza, pops out to take a delivery of a cabinet she then spends the next half hour looking for tools to assemble.

It’s a long way from her own childhood.

In Khartoum, Margaret managed to go back to high school. “But it wasn’t easy and sometimes I would go a week without going to school. because I couldn’t afford the transport,” she says.

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Clockwise from below left: Margaret not long after she arrived in Khartoum; with her daughters, Liza and Rose; as a young woman in Egypt; with her daughters in Australia.

62 Margaret

She did well enough to get her high school certificate and study English language and literature at university.

Margaret cooked and cleaned for a nice family who paid her, and covered her tuition, until the woman she had thought was her friend wouldn’t let her take a day off for a family funeral.

“I just decided I needed to save money and leave, go somewhere else,” she says.

“I didn’t see the war ending and I don’t see a good future.”

Margaret heard she could go to Egypt as a tourist and apply there for refugee status with the United Nations. She met her husband, who was from the same tribe, in Egypt, and they both found sponsors in Australia. By the time their visas came through, Margaret was seven months pregnant with Liza and unable to travel. She had to wait until her daughter was born and then apply for a separate visa for her.

They arrived in January 2016 when Liza was four months. Within a few months of arriving, someone from ASeTTS came to visit her.

“I remember he brought us green blankets, which I still have,” she says.

“But my partner said ‘no, we didn’t need counselling’. It is not something that is part of our culture because we have a collective community and everybody is supposed to help.”

Margaret had no community to draw on, however, when the domestic violence that had begun in Egypt flared up again.

“First everything was happy, we were in a new place and then it started,” she says. “So I ran, I remember being in one of the offices in Ishar (Multicultural Women’s Health Services) and I couldn’t talk because I was in too much pain.”

Everything that had happened to her came flooding out. “I went there two or three times, but every time he would ask me something I would just burst into tears,” she says.

“I just cried and cried and cried and just thought ‘well, this is useless, there is nothing he can do.’ And it was just too traumatic to talk about.”

Margaret returned to the relationship.

When she was pregnant with Rose, she had a checkup at the hospital where routine questions about the support she had at home brought her fear to the surface and she found herself crying again.

“I said ‘I don’t know whether I’ll be able to stay in the relationship, it’s just too much abuse’,” she recalls.

“She gave me a pamphlet and said ‘just keep it with you, when you’re in need of health or safety, or anything, just call this number and they will come to your aid’.”

Three months after Rose was born, she left for good. Staff from Ishar helped her to leave and find a refuge, where she lived for a year. It was the refuge that connected her with ASeTTS. “I would spend more of my time crying, crying, crying,” she says. “The first time Samira (a former ASeTTS counsellor who also features in the book) came, we just had tea and chatted, and I said, ‘OK, I’ll have counselling but I can’t drive and the children are young’, so she said she would come and do the counselling at my place.”

Samira helped her enormously. “We just talked and talked and talked, we really got along well,” she says. “She really encouraged me to go back to study.”

Margaret, whose first language is Arabic, had started English at TAFE not long after her arrival in Australia but her husband refused to keep looking after the children in the afternoon while she went to class.

When she was at the refuge, she went back to TAFE and was told to wait until her children when in school. The determined mother was having none of that and managed to convince them to let her do the English course by correspondence.

Margaret soon moved onto the next level of English and then did a certificate in education support and another in special needs.

By now, Samira had also got her involved in United Voices, ASeTTS’ client reference group, where clients

It’s not possible for clients to feel safe and to recover if there is a lack of love and support.

working with it, and I was helping in a domestic violence program.”

Margaret spent about three years at ASeTTS working on different programs, where she says she learnt so much.

“They created a culture of peace and harmony that was conducive to recovery,” she says. “It’s not possible for clients to feel safe and to recover if there is a lack of love and support. The leadership really supported the people who worked there and saw them as valuable to the organisation, and that love and support flows out to the clients.”

When funding cuts forced an end to her time at ASeTTS, Margaret went to work for Communicare in the humanitarian

settlement program, and continued interpreting as and when she could.

But she says it was ASeTTS that changed her life, who helped her when she needed it most.

“They supported me a lot, especially Samira. I give all the thanks to her because she believed in me. And actually what they did, it empowered me and they loved me,” she says.

“That gave me the strength to carry on as a single parent with no family here. I don’t honestly know what I would have done without them. It’s like the family I never had in Australia.

Whatever I do or say, I could never repay what they did for me.”

63 Margaret

gave feedback about how to improve the service or programs to help the community. It was through this connection that Margaret met someone from WA Interpreters.

It was late 2010 and her first job in Australia. “I was very nervous, but I came to love it,” she says.

Before long she was working as an interpreter for other organisations and government agencies.

“And then Samira called me and said they had a program to help new arrivals and she thought I would be good to facilitate the cooking sessions,” Margaret says.

“It was a nice program, I really enjoyed

Mariam* Pakistan

Mariam’s little girl is playing with dough in the background as her mother talks.

C 64 Mariam

ovid has struck another teacher at her school and plans for the day have been thrown into disarray.

Like any young child who loves going to school, Anna* is upset but her distress is amplified by her autism. The dough has a calming effect on the eight-year-old, her mother explains, and she is able to talk about her own childhood without interruption.

Mariam wants Anna to have the kind of childhood she was unable to have in Pakistan. A childhood that was turned upside down when she was barely 13.

Her father, a well-known businessman, had become a target for the Pakistan Taliban, a separate but allied group to the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.

“We got threats all the time - my father didn’t want us to go outside or even go to school, so we did everything at home,” she says. “It changed our lives completely and the trauma, it changed our personalities. It was like we are living but we are not alive.”

The trauma of effectively being trapped inside affected Mariam’s family

in different ways. Her brother was sent to a hostel, her older sister got married and quickly left the city, her younger sister changed her name so people wouldn’t think they were related.

Mariam had nowhere to go, nothing to look forward to until Ali, who had fled for Australia in 2009, proposed marriage in 2011.

When he came to get her two years later, there was no celebration; the wedding had to be held in secret. “It was hidden, there was no function or anything.”

With things getting worse for her family in Pakistan with every passing day, Mariam and Ali left for Australia.

She was terrified for the family she left behind – with good reason. Mariam was seven months’ pregnant when her father was kidnapped by the Taliban.

“He was kept for more than two months,” she says. “We didn’t know what was happening, if he was alive. It was really shocking and depressing.”

When he was finally released, the Taliban continued to threaten his family, demanding money, Mariam’s father was also coming under pressure

from the Pakistani military to identify any of his kidnappers.

Frightened but with nowhere else to turn, he finally agreed. On one condition: That the military would protect his remaining family. They were taken into a camp for their protection, where they are to this day.

“It is in really bad condition and they don’t have any help for health or education and my family really struggles,” Mariam says.

The family had some money from government contracts they had completed but every time they tried to access it, the threats would start again.

With no way of getting out of their situation, they stopped trying.

Mariam’s mother had a breakdown and receives no help for either her mental health, or the many physical effects of her trauma.

Almost the entire time Mariam has been in Perth, her family has been in the camp.

Eight and a half years without hope. She feels terrible guilt for their circumstances, even though she knows it is beyond her control. Mariam doesn’t even have any

on call for her daughter. The school could call at any time asking her to come and get Anna or to help calm her down.

“With her condition it happens a lot – if they have a little bit of different pressure, they can get very upset,” she says. “I just have to run to her and make sure she’s not feeling unsafe or alone.”

Although she has difficult days, Anna has settled into her special needs school.

“She loves going there, she goes with a smile on her face,” Mariam says. “Every time she smiles, I feel relaxed in my heart.”

And with Mariam and Ali expecting a new baby soon, they are even more anxious to settle.

“I don’t feel like Pakistan is home any more – it took so much from me,” she says. “In Australia, they give me so much.

I feel freedom, I feel safe.”

is like that, my social skills are not really that good,” she says.

When Mariam feels overwhelmed, two things help calm her. “I take my medicine, because there is so much need now. But sometimes when I get really depressed and really nothing is helping me, I just hold my daughter and hug her.”

She laughs. “But she’s growing now and doesn’t want to be hugged so much!”

Mariam finds it hard to be happy sometimes. “We have been fighting for it for a really long time, and still we are not here or there, it can feel hopeless,” she says.

The constant battle to ensure Anna gets ongoing support for her condition is particularly distressing; they are in the process of filling out the paperwork for another year of support for Anna.

“When you hear how other people are

I don’t feel like Pakistan is home any more it took so much from me. In Australia, they give so much. I feel freedom. I feel safe.

Despite the anxiety and depression, the constant worry about her family in Pakistan, Mariam says she is blessed.

“I am here and my daughter is here. We are getting something for her instead of nothing and we are fighting for our daughter’s future.”

The counselling Mariam has received through ASeTTS has helped rebuild the strength needed for her to even think about a future.

“There was a time when I could not talk to anyone. I did not have any balance in my life, any voice to show my emotions or express my feelings,” she says. “I feel just like my daughter before she was diagnosed because she cannot express her feelings and she was always scared of everything.”

She has also drawn a lot of support from her husband because it is not easy for her to make friends. “My condition

able to help their children and you can’t go to that type of organisation because of my situation, because we are not an Australian citizen, that hurts a lot.”

Mariam doesn’t dare to dream too much for herself. Her attempts to improve her English, which is very good, had to be abandoned after a few months because Anna’s needs were so high.

“If I have to choose between one thing for me or for my daughter, of course I choose her,” she says. “But, yes, when, if, I get accepted in Australia completely, I will definitely do some studies.”

And she can already picture where she would like to work. “There are lots of needs in my daughter’s school. I talked to the principal and I said ‘one day I will study and I will work free for you’,” she says. “It would just be fun to help people who have faced the same situation.”

65 Mariam

pictures of them because they burnt them all to protect their identities.

“I talk to my mother but I don’t talk to them too often because it depresses me a lot and sometimes my anxiety goes really high,” she says.

It is also often difficult to get hold of them because they have to change their phone number for safety reasons.

“They are in this condition where no one can help them, no one can give them medical help or education help.

My father is a really good person - It’s really depressing to see that nobody can help,” she says.

Mariam would love to bring them to safety but right now she must fight for her own little family’s right to stay in Australia. She doesn’t understand why the application process for permanency is so difficult and the hurdles so many.

Just when she thinks they have done everything right, they are let down again.

They have had their case remitted twice in the Federal Circuit Court because of errors in judgment in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. In her last interview, Mariam says they paid no heed to her mental and physical health issues, refusing to give her a break over four hours and not allowing her husband to support her in the room.

“They didn’t research properly and they reject us and we show they made an error, and they say ‘yes, you’re right’ but we have to go back and start all over again,” she says. “This is based on someone’s life and someone’s future.”

More than anything, she is fighting for her daughter’s future. Since arriving in Australia both Mariam and Anna have been diagnosed with autism.

“I’m level one and she is level three and every time we have to fight for her funding and for her services, there are so many things we need for her that we can’t get because of the visa situation,” she says.

While Ali is able to work – something he has done every day, despite a severe lower back injury - Mariam needs to be

James Sri Lanka

The Jegasothys didn’t want to leave Sri Lanka.

R 66 James

everend John was a prominent minister in the Methodist church; Shanti was a female pioneer in the banking industry; they had two young sons.

But when the civil war started, John was soon in the firing line. He had been the chair of a human rights organisation in the east of Sri Lanka and became a voice for the persecuted Tamil minority.

His life was under threat almost from the time his eldest son, James, was born.

“It was a terrible and violent time in Sri Lanka, a traumatic time for many people including my family. and then my baby brother nearly died,” James says.

“Due to crossfire just outside my home, he suffered febrile convulsions. To save him we had to get him to hospital, with my dad using a nappy as a white flag.”

Though Edward recovered in hospital, his parents knew they could no longer protect their family; Shanti was also recovering from violent encounters of her own.

At the time, the Australian Government was granting humanitarian visas to Tamils in danger if they had a sponsor. Shanti’s sister in Canberra had

sent them the paperwork some time before; they finally applied.

Sitting in his office in the city, James reflects on his parents’ momentous decision almost 36 years ago. Now the executive director of the Office of Multicultural Interests (OMI), he has a deep-rooted understanding of the people ASeTTS assists and is passionate about ensuring support for its work.

“No one wants to leave their country, the place where they have built their lives,” James says. “And my dad was the head of a civil rights organisation; he was supporting so many really vulnerable people, particularly internally displaced people, who relied on him.”

As a reverend, John felt like a shepherd leaving his flock, but there was pressure from his supporters to leave, too, knowing that he could be killed at any moment.

The family arrived in Canberra in 1986. James was four. “They went through a lot of grief, a lot of guilt, and they had their own trauma counselling when we came to Australia,” James says. “There were all kinds of emotions, and it was a really difficult time for all of us.”

They first settled in Parkes, in rural

NSW, where it wasn’t long before the counselled were counselling others.

“There was a lack of opportunities and support, especially for young people affected by drugs and alcohol. Under his leadership, Dad ended up running innovative youth programs for thousands of people in the region,” James says.

“He worked with local government, the police and even the defence services to organise youth field days that presented employment and training opportunities to young people; and he brought the community together— including local farmers and businesses — to solve social issues through community programs.”

James laughs as he recalls that his father even ended up on the sevenmember tourism board in the area.

The fact that he was able to do all this in a small country town in the 1980s, having only just arrived as a refugee, is a testament to his character.

“You can imagine what a regional town would have been like in the 80s, but it was also welcoming, and I think Dad broke down a lot of barriers.”

His mum ended up leaving banking to work in the public sector, but Shanti

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Jumana Jasim

Clockwise from below: James with his mother Shanti and his father John in Sri Lanka; with his wife Alexandra and daughter Winnie in Perth; with his parents and younger brother Edward.

68 James

also wanted to spend more time with her children, recovering from the trauma of those final few years in Sri Lanka.

Young James faced his own challenges, ones that would shape him as much as his parents’ experience and example.

With his father now a minister in the Uniting Church, the family were often moved from one town to the next. When they settled in Sydney, James was sent to a boys’ boarding school.

“It was very monocultural. They didn’t really care a lot about refugees, and you faced lots of issues coming from a background which doesn’t have wealth,

which is not caucasian,” he says. It was not always an easy time, despite the educational opportunities.

But it was also when James first came into contact with STARTTS (Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors), ASeTTS’ sister organisation based in NSW, where his dad was heavily involved, chairing the Friends of STARTTS and supporting unaccompanied minors.

James had long been going to visit

asylum seekers at Villawood Detention Centre with John, who had become well-known for his refugee advocacy in NSW, and somehow, managed to arrange a program at his school to get Christmas presents donated for children in detention.

STARTTS would distribute them.

In the late 1990s, the Howard Government started to release refugees on temporary protection visas, but without much in the way of support for settlement. It seemed only natural to James’s family that their home would become a halfway house for so many after they were released.

“We would take people into our home and find them accommodation, find them jobs,” he says. “It’s a tough rental market in Sydney at the best of times, but if you have limited English, no rental history or local employment history, it can be impossible. Dad would often put his name down on the paper to secure a lease as a co-tenant.”

The Jegasothys themselves had come to the country with not much more that a suitcase each and they knew what it was to need help. James says his parents placed no expectations on their children, it was just the example they set.

“And I guess I remember living in Sri Lanka and the experience of displacement, so I had different points of comparison (to other classmates),” he says.

Those experiences pushed James towards law. “I wanted to work in this area, I could see things weren’t getting better for refugees,” he says. “I studied law and politics and then worked in refugee advocacy for a long time, alongside my dad, largely supporting people in immigration detention and those who had run into issues settling in the community.”

In January 2012, James and his wife Alexandra moved to Perth, primarily to support Alexandra’s change of career from law to medicine. James managed a program for the Australian Red Cross that supported asylum seekers who had just been released from detention, many of whom had experienced significant torture and trauma.

It was here that he first started working closely with ASeTTS, even advocating on their behalf. He recalls working with federal government agencies to ensure that the evidence provided by ASeTTS torture and trauma counsellors was taken prima facie in ongoing care referrals.

“ASeTTS counsellors build safe and trusting relationships with their clients and it is important that people aren’t asked to relive their stories unnecessarily,” he says.

It’s not just about six hours of counselling here, 12 hours of services there; it’s about giving people a community who might not otherwise have one.

there; it’s about giving people a community who might otherwise not have one,” he says. “It shows they really do have a deep appreciation for the clients they work with and what they need.”

James believes ASeTTS should be celebrated more widely, and not just because the organisation is turning 30.

“They hold a very special, a very important and unique space in Australia,” he says. “The average person doesn’t think about torture or trauma; it’s not something we would even necessarily understand. But we need to turn our eyes to people like ASeTTS and our hearts to those they serve.”

69 James

James still works alongside ASeTTS through his role as executive director of OMI, which is part of the State Government’s Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, though in a different way.

“One of the things we do is look at systemic issues; it’s about ensuring that government services are responsive to the needs of all Western Australians, that their vulnerabilities, experiences, cultures and aspirations inform policies and services.” he says.

This includes ensuring that relevant people are consulted and that decision making is properly informed. “An organisation like ASeTTS helps facilitate that by being the source of those insights, by being connected to those affected, and being a specialist authority,” he says.

OMI also works closely with the Australian public sector agencies and their counterparts in other States and Territories.

“We primarily focus on the issues impacting their clients, but also the industry… because we need to ensure that organisations like ASeTTS are viable, and that they are able to provide holistic services.”

James describes the relationship with ASeTTS as a two-way street, with each helping the other to do better, but all with the same goal: to support vulnerable people from refugee and migrant backgrounds.

He knows from experience that these issues are more acute at the coalface than in government.

“You’re one step removed. When I was working in the sector, many clients had terrible outcomes. Mental health was pivotal to someone’s survival.” he says. “For the public sector, we need to appreciate how these experiences affect those in the community.”

Having grown up in a family that embraced people from all over the world, that fostered kinder communities, James is impressed by the warm community ASeTTS has created.

“It’s not just about six hours of counselling here, 12 hours of services

Norma Australia

When she was growing up on a farm in Gutha, Norma’s parents didn’t have much in the way of money.

B 70 Norma

ut what they did give their seven children was worth its weight in gold.

“My parents were very active in the community and believed the community was what you made of it – it wasn’t what ‘they did’ but what ‘we do’,” she says. “And they just considered everyone to be equal.”

If the post-war Mid West seems an unlikely place to foster feelings of equity and inclusion, Norma is quick to dismiss the stereotype.

“The government sent up refugees – the ‘refos’, as we kids called them – to work on the farm, many of whom weren’t really suited to the work, but my parents were always welcoming,” she recalls. “We had a lot to do with different people from different backgrounds, and people who had complicated lives, I guess you would say.”

When she was later sent to boarding school, the nuns also fostered the principles of social justice, fairness and equity – principles Norma has carried through her career in education and into community service, including almost six years as board chair of ASeTTS. Norma jokes that she accidentally

matriculated. She didn’t really know what she wanted to do but was told she should do teaching or be a nurse. “No one ever actually suggested to me ‘well, you could be a lawyer’,” she says. “But I loved education, I still do.”

Indeed, education is front and centre of all she has done – whether it’s teaching children, shaping curriculum and policy, helping to give the most vulnerable access to university, or educating organisations about the importance of governance and accountability.

Norma started teaching junior high school students in 1963, work she continued until she had her own children, before returning to study and work as a teacher librarian.

After being recruited to central office as an advisory teacher, Norma held a variety of jobs at the Education Department before moving to the Curriculum Council, now SCSA, as a policy officer. Before long, she was running the place.

She was later seconded to Curtin University as a researcher, where she remains one day a week, despite officially retiring in 2013.

A lot of the research she has done is around disadvantage. “I was the first in my family to go to university, so I understand the difficulty people have in adjusting,” she says. “In some families where everyone’s a doctor, or a teacher, it’s just expected, but so many people don’t have a clear path.”

While the modest researcher is quick to point out it wasn’t all her work, Norma was thrilled when Curtin University introduced portfolio entry on the back of papers she wrote. She was then responsible for implementing it as policy.

“That program is now underway and I am also involved in our StepUp to Curtin program, where students can get extra ATAR credit if they go to schools where there’s a lot of disadvantage,” she says.

“The disadvantage is compounded by the socio-economic profile of the school – the kids are not just personally disadvantaged but if 90 percent of the school is disadvantaged then those who want to study ATAR don’t have many like-minded students to study and interact with.”

It is this passion for equity that drew Norma to ASeTTS, too, though she was

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Jumana Jasim

It’s very important for the board to have cultural understanding and to be aware of the trauma that people have been through.

72 Norma

initially approached to see if she could ask her sister, former WA premier Carmen Lawrence, to join the board.

“I said if she can’t do it, I’m interested,” she recalls. “I didn’t know much about ASeTTS beforehand, but it connected in many ways with the work I was doing on disadvantaged students. People like its clients, the youth who come here when they are 14 or 15 and may not be very literate even in their own language – finding alternative pathways for them and looking at options for them.”

It is fair to say that ASeTTS went through a bit of turmoil not long after Norma joined the board in 2009, but she is not one to back away from a difficult situation.

“I guess what I brought to it was that I had been in the Education Department for a long time, and it sounds very bureaucratic, but I tried to help with the gaps in governance,” she says.

“This organisation is very compassionate; it is rightly so focused on the clients and their wellbeing, but you can lose sight of the fact the funding

might be reduced and you can’t afford to actually run the program.”

Norma provided a diagram which was developed halfway through her tenure that shows the scale of ASeTTS’ work to support victims of torture and trauma.

“It’s quite amazing – it shows you the complexity of what the organisation does. At the centre is counselling for the individuals who are traumatised, and then family therapy and youth support programs for those close to the traumatised person,” she says.

“And then you have the social support network, like starting cricket teams or creating that extended family, or community. And then we try to connect them with what we call mainstream services. So a lot of the decision making is often about getting the balance of this right, and that is not easy.”

Trying to keep all those balls in the air was the CEO’s job, not the board chair’s, but during her tenure Norma made it her business to understand more about that balancing act.

As a researcher, she believes in doing the hard work to find out what the root causes of problems are and then using that work to help find solutions.

“It was really important for me to do this because if there were funding cuts or you had to change direction, then you had to know what you were doing, and why.

The work ASeTTS does is so important that any sudden change, no matter how well-intentioned, can have big impacts.”

Clockwise from far left: Norma enjoyed the many events held at ASeTTS, including those celebrating Human Rights Day and other cultural celebrations.

many years ago, Norma wasn’t quite able to let go. “I had relationships with people and felt invested in the work, so I wanted to do what I could to help,” she says.

Norma continued to work behind the scenes with others who shared her passion for ASeTTS to help reshape the constitution to avoid some of the

problems of the past, and ensure its vital work continues well into the future.

Sometimes change takes longer than desired but Norma is pleased to see a more diverse board in place.

“That was one of our aims, to have a board that better reflected the diversity of the clients,” she says. “And it’s very important for the board to have cultural understanding and to be aware of the trauma that people have been through.”

Aside from bringing appropriate skills, such as experience in governance, law or not-for-profits, Norma believes board members need to care about what they do.

“You have to care enough to put in the time and know the reason why they need our particular skills, and to use those skills for the betterment of the organisation,” she says. “The people ASeTTS supports deserve that.”

73 Norma

With Norma’s background in governance also came a strong sense of accountability. “It’s never great to talk about money but I was responsible for policy and accountability in the Education Department, so I was very big on emphasising accountability,” she says.

“When we were granted money, we really had to deliver on what we received the money for and report back on it.”

But it was the sense of community she felt whenever she visited ASeTTS, the knowledge that the organisation was really helping traumatised people with complex problems, that kept her focused.

“I think I had to wait until a ripe old age to really understand cultural difference, to really understand that people who come from a different place may think very differently,” she says. “But we need to know that, and we need to keep working on it, so that we can better support people.”

Norma’s decades in the education sector come to the fore again when she talks about the need to engage teachers in this process.

“There are schools where there’s great diversity and the teachers need support and training to understand the students from these backgrounds,” she says. “I worked to ensure that ASeTTS kept a strong training program for those teaching these students to know enough about their trauma and community to help them.”

Although their time at ASeTTS only crossed over briefly, Norma always carried a picture of the diversity of the complete and holistic program that former CEO Norma Josephs and her team built when ASeTTS moved from the burnt-out office in Bon Marche Arcade to its current home in Highgate.

She was also acutely aware that this place was so much more than a building – it was a sanctuary where traumatised people felt safe and supported.

Her respect for all that has been done to help refugees since ASeTTS began meant even when she stepped down as chair

Danial Iran

Danial was a natural at martial arts – he was awarded his black belt in taekwondo at just 11 – and loved nothing more than practising with his friends.

B 74 Danial

ut unlike his friends, the rising star was unable to take part in major competitions. “I couldn’t understand it because we were all the same, I was born with them, raised with them – why could they do that and I could not,” he recalls.

Danial’s family are Kurdish, people long discriminated against, socially, economically and culturally.

This repression extended to the classrooms and the sporting fields that Danial loved so much.

In order to compete in taekwondo at a high level, he needed a certificate, similar to an identity card or social security number. Something that was not easy to come by for marginalised Kurds in Iran.

“My coach was very close to my family and he was eventually able to get me the certificate but every time you’d go for a competition, they’d say ‘who is this guy, where is his identity’, it was hard,” he says.

“I competed in amateur fights in my city, but I was never able to go higher because of who I was and, honestly, that killed my motivation – to train, to go to school.”

It was at school that Danial first became aware there was something

amiss – not in the playground, but in the classroom.

“It was obvious the way the teachers would talk to you, the way they treat you,” he says. “The students were fine because they were my friends but when you’re young, you don’t really know racism, sometimes you think ‘maybe it’s my fault’.”

Danial quickly learnt he needed to filter what he would say in the classroom.

“That is a very stressful thing for a 10year-old to monitor.”

His whole family was under constant stress. His dad Javad was a house painter and whenever he’d start a job, someone would inform the authorities that a Kurd was there and put yellow tape around the building, effectively shutting down the site.

“Obviously if you’re a home owner and that happens you wouldn’t give that person more jobs, so it was very difficult for him,” he says. “My uncle he had a shop and they put a lock on it and if he broke the lock, they would come and take him away.”

It became very clear the family had no future in Iran. “If you asked me when I was younger what I wanted to be, I didn’t want to tell you because I couldn’t go to uni, I wasn’t able to do anything,

I genuinely had no answer,” he says.

“There was no hope.”

When Danial was 12, his increasingly desperate parents made the decision to try to get the family, which now included sixmonth-old brother Ermia, to Australia.

They bought forged passports and headed to the capital, Tehran, terrified they would be arrested at any moment before boarding a plane for Indonesia.

There the family remained for 99 days, crowded with seven single men in a house in Jakarta, as promises after promises were made about when a boat would be available.

“They would just say ‘next week, next week’ and then next week nothing happens,” he says. “After 30 days our visa expired, which meant we couldn’t really show ourselves on the street, or we’d get stopped by the police. Everything was expensive; we just lived on boiled potatoes and eggs.”

A few weeks before they finally left Indonesia, a fishing boat carrying asylum seekers hit rocks near Christmas Island and sank.

“I was scared but I kind of knew that it couldn’t get worse than it already was,” Danial recalls. “My parents had to risk our

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76 Danial

lives to go on the ocean - no one does that if they have a good life; it’s just what you had to do. Yes, we were scared about the trip but more scared that we would be deported.”

When they reached Christmas Island in similarly dangerous conditions to the fatal day a few weeks earlier, it was Christmas 2012. “We called them to say ‘we are here, come help’, but they said ‘no, you can wait til morning’,” Danial says. “We were right next to the rocks and we just kind of had to hang on for five or six hours.”

The family spent the next 30 days on Christmas Island before they were transferred to the detention centre in Adelaide. After the conditions on the island, where Danial said many people suffered from severe depression, the former army camp felt like a holiday.

“There were villas and lots of big hills, and space to play outside,” he says.

“And it was nice because we all went to school. I was scared because I thought it was going to be the same, with the discrimination, maybe they won’t like me, but it was amazing.”

Danial didn’t speak any English but forged a strong relationship with his teachers and made friends. When their case worker asked the family where they would like to go when they were released, Danial’s father said ‘wherever’. As far as he was concerned anywhere was better than when they had come from.

But the move to Perth wasn’t easy. All their friends from the detention centre went to Melbourne and they felt very isolated. Javad went to English classes for a while but as soon as he was able to work, he did; he needed to provide for his family.

He was also dealing with his own trauma.

When Danial started refusing to go school, it was suggested he try counselling.

He remembers vividly the first day he came to ASeTTS, though it was for his mother Monireh, rather than himself.

“I was sitting outside with my brother, my dad and I was just so lost because I didn’t really know what counselling was,” he says. “But I eventually started talking

Danial as a little boy in Iran.

to (ASeTTS counsellor) Anubha and she gave me solutions – if you do this, you can do this. And I could see she cares about my future, she cares about what I do. She’s not just doing her job.”

Danial couldn’t count the ways Anubha made life easier for him. “I didn’t have the best relationship with my mum, and she helped with that,” he says. “And with fear. I was scared to sleep alone in my room and the techniques she taught me, I remember like it was yesterday, I actually teach it to my little brother.”

He made good friends and worked hard. The family were still on temporary protection visas, but Perth was finally feeling like home. When he graduated with good marks, and with a strong letter of support from his school, Danial applied to study psychology at university.

“I got a call to come into uni and they said ‘you have to pay like an international student’; it was $156,000 and I had to pay $13,000 by Friday,” he says.

His visa situation meant he could no longer afford to go to university. “I thought ‘what am I doing here! So I had to drop it because it was impossible.”

It was 2019 and Danial had to reset his dreams again. He worked in a butcher shop for six months before he obtained his licence to work as a security guard.

And then, out of the blue, he received an email from Murdoch University to say he could apply for a scholarship.

When he was awarded it, joy was quickly dampened when he was told it didn’t apply to the course he wanted to study. Instead, he had to find $4000 to pay for two units at Curtin University, and get marks of 80 percent or above, to secure the scholarship.

Danial is a determined young man.

A mixed martial arts aficionado, he is physically imposing but it is his inner strength that keeps pushing him forward against the odds.

“It has cost me so much money so I have to work more and I’m staying up til three or four in the morning to get assignments done, but I’m very motivated,” he says.

Amid all his own challenges, Danial has also managed to find a way to help others, including as a bi-cultural worker delivering a program for ASeTTS. “There was four of us from each community and we’d run workshops, sport, anything to engage them and raise awareness about family domestic violence.”

Danial knows how quickly the trauma experienced in refugees’ country of origin can rush to the surface and drown them if they are not careful. “All the stress and mental health problems, it wasn’t built here, but it catches us here, if you know what I mean.”

His experiences and the sacrifices his parents made to give their children a better life have made him all the more determined to succeed, to set an example for his beloved little brother.

Initially, Danial thought he might be a police officer after finishing school but he needed permanent residency to apply. So he set his sights on psychology.

“I’ve always wanted to know about how the brain works, and I just like helping people, protecting people,” he says. “I’ll get there somehow. My mum says, ‘you always find a way’ and I will.

I believe in myself.”

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Danial

Anubha Nepal

Anubha vividly remembers the lost little Iranian boy who first came through her door 10 years ago.

H 78 Anubha

e was only 12 and had already been through so much.

He was also angry and digging his heels in. He would not go to school. And he didn’t want to be in Perth, where he knew no one; he wanted to go to Melbourne where all his friends were.

What young Danial couldn’t have known when he sat down with Anubha that first time was that he had just met the best kind of friend, someone who would be with him through thick and thin.

Someone who would listen, encourage and support him, no matter what.

“It takes time for a person to trust and I was accepting of that fact,” Anubha says.

“He really didn’t want to be here, not just in the room with me but in Perth. He wanted to be in Melbourne, where all his friends from the detention centre had gone.”

Anubha told him that his parents would get into trouble if he didn’t go to school, it was the law, so they needed to work out solutions.

“It was unpacking everything with him. Why didn’t he want to go school? He said it was too far away, he got too tired.

I told him a volunteer would take him

then, but he would have to go to school,” she says.

“I think soon he didn’t have any excuses and through the process he probably started to think this person will help me.”

But Danial really started to trust his counsellor, and open up to her, when she wrote a letter to support the family’s request to be moved to Melbourne.

“I wrote that it would be the best idea to move the family because this child was really connected with the people there and those connections would help with his mental health issues,” she says.

“I got all the family together and I read the letter out. After that, I felt the relationship changed. And he was okay to go to school.”

A decade later, Anubha sits opposite the now strapping young man, confident and composed, at peace with himself.

Danial never went to Melbourne.

“I knew once he was going to school, he would start to make friends and the feeling of needing to go to Melbourne would reduce, that was my strategy,” Anubha says with a smile.

“We can’t control what the

government decides so I thought, ‘let’s just work on what we can’. If the government then says they can move to Melbourne, he can then choose. But I thought once he went to school he would connect with people and be happy.”

By the time he reached Year 10, Danial was “so happy to be in school every day”; he made lots of friends and studied hard and continued to share his fears and his dreams with Anubha.

She gently pushed him outside his comfort zone, encouraging a teenager frightened of leaving his parents for more than a night to go on a five-day trip to Camp Kulin, an experience he loved so much he would return as a camp counsellor several years later.

“ASeTTS doesn’t just help you, it empowers the client, connects them to the community and to society,” Danial says. “That’s what Anubha did for me.”

With her open, kind face and calm, gentle manner, Anubha has helped so many refugees and migrants through the challenges of settling into a future in Australia as they struggle with the trauma of their past.

As a migrant herself with family back

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Clockwise from below: Anubha with her husband Jagannath Adhikari and their two daughters Sadichhya and Kripa in Nepal; with her parents, Tirtha Raj and Sharada Devi Parajuli, and her siblings, Anjita, Anjan and Archana; Anubha and her daughters.

80 Anubha

in Nepal who she couldn’t see for the past few years because of Covid, Anubha understands what it’s like to be so far from what you know and how much you miss loved ones left behind.

Indeed, when she first came to Australia in 2010 to see if she could live here, Anubha wasn’t sure it was the place for her. “I came first to Sydney and it seemed like everyone is running, so I told my husband ‘if life is like this I really don’t want to stay’,” she says with a laugh. “But then we went to Canberra, which is quiet and quite relaxed and I changed my mind.”

Her husband was doing a PhD at the Australian National University and was offered permanent residency, something she finds incredible in retrospect, knowing the hoops so many of her clients have to jump through to obtain it.

“He said ‘why not, let’s take it’ but then he had to go back for family reasons and it was another 10 years before we decided to return,” she says.

Initially, they returned to Canberra but when Anubha came to Perth to support her niece after a tragedy, she started to apply for jobs here.

“When I came across the ASeTTS website, I just got this very strong feeling that I wanted to work there,” she recalls.

Anubha applied for a job as a counsellor and volunteered while she waited for her qualifications to be assessed. She started work in November 2011.

“It just felt right, straight away. I felt like the client group I could connect to,” she says. “I didn’t have the interest, or the courage, to go to mainstream services because I didn’t understand the

culture. But with this client group, I knew I could connect with them. I belong, I understand and it felt good.”

Almost 11 years later, it still feels good, despite the terrible stories Anubha hears behind closed doors. She knows the importance of the work ASeTTS does, although she is too modest to talk too much about the part she plays as one of the counsellors providing a safe space for traumatised people to unload, to cry, to share experiences that would be almost unfathomable to the average Australian.

Anubha sat through several of the interviews for this book in her capacity as counsellor, supporting clients who had volunteered to share their stories.

She knows that it is one thing to want to tell your story, but another to be able to do so without causing more pain. She sat

you will probably be a better person.”

She looks again at Danial. “If someone has come here like Danial said, risking their lives to get here, then definitely where they come from was terrible.

That’s why they made that decision.

Otherwise, why? No one would do that if they were not in such a terrible situation,” she says. “To be able to understand that,

too, that it’s not really a choice - it’s about survival - is important.”

No matter where they come from in this world, no matter their circumstances, as they struggle to find their way through the darkness, Anubha will be there, listening, encouraging and supporting. And hoping that, just like Danial, they will find some light.

When you see this person has gone through these difficulties and even small changes that I can make in their lives will be quite significant for them, when you see that effect, it’s just happiness.

81 Anubha

quietly, speaking only when necessary to support those brave enough to bare a little of their souls, and encouraging them to share their successes, as well as their heartache.

And there are so many successes, big and small. How does it feel to see someone she has helped cope with such trauma do so well?

“It’s happiness, pure happiness,” she says. “When you see this person has gone through these difficulties and even small changes that I can make in their lives will be quite significant for them, when you see that effect, it’s just happiness. All those negative feelings, like you’re having a bad day or whatever, just go away.”

Perhaps partly because of his youth and partly because Anubha had not long been at ASeTTS herself when she began counselling him, Danial holds a special place in her heart.

“Typically, it is not true with clients, because you don’t relate to clients in this way, but Danial, for me, is like my child,” she says. “I see him grow and I want to know what he’s doing. I want to know he is happy or is he reaching his dreams.”

What is more common in a place where connections are so powerful is for clients to keep coming back to ASeTTS long after they have stopped using its services, whether it’s simply to say hello, become a volunteer or employee, or to work on a project, as Danial did.

“The first day I heard Danial was going to do this program and be a bicultural worker at ASeTTS, I was so proud,” Anubha says. She gives him a smile that would do any mother proud.

How does she think Australians could better support new arrivals like Danial and his family?

“I feel like I see fear here, fear that they will take our jobs, that they will take our wealth, but you don’t have to fear,” she says.

“Whatever you have will stay with you, if you can share that would be lovely, but they won’t snatch it away. I feel if you can understand that is not about taking away,

Esther Venezuela

Esther was just 11 when her world became very small.

W 82 Esther

ith the dire economic situation in Venezuela making even the basics unaffordable, her mother Lynette had taken her to Trinidad and Tobago in search of work.

The retired teacher’s pension was simply not enough to live on. “You couldn’t even buy a chicken, everything was so expensive,” Esther says.

But Lynette had not expected to be so concerned for her daughter’s welfare. “I was only a kid, a child, but the men there did not see me that way,” Esther says.

“She was scared for me all the time.”

She was so worried that Esther was basically confined to her home – which was little more than a room – and the school the Red Cross had set up for humanitarian refugees.

“It was a school with other people who speak Spanish,” she recalls. “It wasn’t a proper school where you get a certificate for passing but one where you learn a little bit of English, but it was good.”

Esther enjoyed learning English and made friends with girls from Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, but even she could not see a future for herself in Trinidad.

Her sister Carmen, who is 18 years older, had come to Trinidad first but was deported. A security guard where she worked reported her as an illegal immigrant, after she rejected his advances.

But Carmen had made many friends in Trinidad during her first stay, working as a cook in a local restaurant, and Esther’s mother was able to use her contacts to get work in the same restaurant.

“They were a very nice family, very kind,” Esther says. “And our room was right next door to the restaurant, so Mum didn’t have far to walk.”

In the three years they lived there, Lynette was reunited with her high school boyfriend, Cesar (fondly called “Chino”), and the family scraped to earn enough to get by.

“They weren’t paid the same, because they were from another country and they didn’t dare complain, they didn’t get very much money,” she says.

Even young Esther knew that there was no future in Trinidad.

Carmen, who spent time in Colombia and Venezuela before returning to Trinidad to be with her family, had

already started an application for resettlement through the UNHCR. “Because she suffered mental health issues, they say to her you can’t go by yourself, you need help,” Esther says.

“And that’s why I come with my sister and my mum, and my stepdad, to support my sister.”

She clearly adores Carmen. The large age gap hasn’t affected the strength of their bond, either. “I love my sister so much, we have a really nice relationship.”

The youngest of three – her middle sister Andreina stayed in Venezuela – Esther is wise beyond her 15 years.

“I knew it was dangerous for me to stay in Trinidad,” she says. “I did not know much about Australia or what would happen but I knew we could not stay there.”

It took two years for the family’s application to be accepted. “They told us many times that you will come, that you will spend Christmas here but then there was Covid and it kept changing,” she says.

So when it was finally confirmed that they would be coming to Australia, Esther didn’t quite believe it.

“For me it was the first time flying,” she says, her voice rising with

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Clockwise from left: Esther loves spending time with her family, big sister Carmen, mother Lynette and stepfather ‘Chino’; the family poses for another selfie; Esther with her mother and stepfather.

84 Esther

excitement. “We took a boat to Trinidad, it took five hours, so I had never been on a plane.”

But the excitement was about so much more than the plane trip. “I was like ‘oh my God, I can improve my English, I can go to school, I can make friends,” she says.

They arrived in Australia with other families from Venezuela and Cuba.

“There were 30 of us, as a group, and the Red Cross helped us to get to know things,” she says. “They helped us find somewhere to live and see what other help we needed.”

It was through the Red Cross that Esther was introduced to ASeTTS. “My mum told them about what happened in Trinidad, that I didn’t have many friends, that I was in a little room by myself a lot,” she says. “My mum think maybe I need counselling and the Red Cross contacted ASeTTS.” Esther has regular sessions with youth worker Julien, who comes out to the school to check up on her and chat about what’s going on in her life.

“It’s just really nice to have someone to talk about how my week is going, or

something going on in my life,” she says.

“I feel like the stress has gone down so much. I can talk to him about my problems and that just relieves it.

Nothing feels as pesado (heavy).”

Esther was anxious when she first started at Balga Senior High School and, as the only Spanish-speaking girl in the

school’s Intensive English Centre (IEC), she struggled initially.

“I had to work harder to communicate because there was no one like me, but now there are four of us, and we have similar experiences, so we understand what we have been through.”

A year on, Esther is settled and happy.

I can have friends, and I can go outside with friends. It is so good to be able to be outside and be safe.

comfortable talking to people about what she has been through. But she is also very focused on her future.

“I would like to go to university,” she says, although she is not sure what she wants to study there yet. “I think about maybe being a vet, but I also love HASS (humanities and social sciences), I love history and I love writing.”

Esther tries to write in English but sometimes finds the meaning isn’t quite as good, or as impactful, when it’s translated from Spanish, but she perseveres.

“When you find something you love, you just keep working and trying,” she says.

85 Esther

“I can have friends, and I can go outside with friends,” she says, her face lighting up. “It is so good to be able to be outside and be safe.”

Now in Year 10 she loves school and receives good feedback from her teachers about her work. “They say it is good, so I hope so,” she says. “My English is still hard, with the spelling and writing. I need to know so much more. The other day we were learning about weather/whether and I was ‘what is this language’!”

The family have recently moved to another house in the suburbs, and all the adults are attending TAFE. “My sister knows more English than me, but she wants to improve, so we are all studying,” she says with a laugh.

“We are happy that can learn, that we can improve, and we can do this where we feel safe.”

They are trying to bring the rest of their family, including Esther’s other sister and grandmother, to Australia so they can have the ones they love around them.

“My sister (in Venezuela) has two babies now and my mum really misses them,” Esther says. “We have only seen them on the phones, and it is very difficult not to be able to hold your grandchildren.”

Despite Esther’s family being permanent residents, the process for family reunification is complicated. Their loved ones must go to another country, like Esther did, before they can apply for resettlement. Not an easy ask, especially for her grandmother.

Over the past year, Esther has built up her confidence to the point she is

Sue Australia

Sue pulls up a picture on her laptop. It’s a powerful sculpture of a figure with a hollowed-out body, carrying a battered suitcase.

“

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I

Sue

give a lecture on PTSD to registrars, and this is what I show them - it represents what our clients are going through,” she says.

The sculpture is one of Les Voyageurs (The Travelers), a series of incomplete figures created in 2013 by artist Bruno Catalano, whose own family was forced into exile from Morocco in the 1970s. They explore the sense of loss that comes with migration, as well as the need for belonging.

Sue likes to work with imagery. “I’m quite visual myself but I also think people get imagery, it helps explain difficult things.”

And as the psychiatrist at ASeTTS for 26 of its 30 years, Sue has a lot of difficult things to try to explain.

Speak to anyone who has worked with her, or who has been helped by Sue and the team of counsellors she oversees, and the superlatives flow: “Kind, generous, smart, warm, caring, wonderful, amazing …”

Ask Sue how she came to be here, however, and she gives a wry laugh. “I just got roped into it!” She had been director of postgraduate education for psychiatrists and was wanting to get back

into clinical work when she got a call from Angela Fielding, then the director at ASeTTS. “She said we’ve got this small refugee service and we need a psychiatrist for a session a week or something,” she recalls. “I had done a lot of psychotherapy and trauma work, especially with the trauma of child abuse, but I had no idea about refugees.”

Angela was persistent, so Sue finally agreed to a trial. “I thought I’m well trained as a psychiatrist, I’ve got a lot of skills and it should be used to do something worthwhile.”

It didn’t take her long to realise this was a very under-resourced and underserviced group of people. There was nowhere else in mental health services meeting their needs and they desperately needed help.

“I don’t really think any of us knew what we were doing, we just knew it had to be done,” she says. “And I really connected with it.”

Even for someone as accomplished as Sue, it was a steep learning curve.

“You had to make your own rules; it was a level of trauma that you don’t normally

come across,” she says. “And it’s made me think deeply about the moral injury of this trauma. There is a level of injustice and persecution that has happened to a person that you must hold in this work, or you will miss an essential component.”

The clients who sit across from her week in, week out, have wanted, needed, to understand how another person could do what they did to them and why.

“It overrides their physical injuries,” Sue says. “I’ve had discussions with people about ‘what is evil, what is revenge, what is hatred’ ... it takes you to a deeper level of trauma holding because this is trauma that has been persecuted by others.”

These are also people who have been made to feel they are a lesser human being, that they need to be destroyed, that no one cares about their home or their children. “I’ve had so many people who’ve sat here and struggled, wondering, ‘What is that about? Why would anyone want to do this to me and my family?’”

In the early days at ASeTTS, Sue counselled a number of Bosnian

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For me, to resolve trauma, you have to make sense of it. You actually have to get a story for yourself that makes sense.

88 Sue

refugees, who remain one of the most traumatised groups she has seen.

“They were so unprepared for trauma.

Some grow up or are born into trauma, and there’s a resilience sometimes that is already in place because it’s the world you’re born into,” she says.

“But in Bosnia, there was no warning, one minute they were living a peaceful and normal life, and the next ... they were so traumatised.”

One of Sue’s earliest challenges was learning how to work with interpreters, how to create trust and safety with a client that is not compromised because the work must be filtered through a third person.

“Now I do really complex psychotherapy with an interpreter,” she says. “They are essential to ensuring our clients get the right care and support. They are part of the team and they are brilliant.”

How do you get traumatised people to open up? To trust a stranger enough to be able to build a strong relationship, particularly when there are cultural and language difficulties? The answer is often time, stillness and wanting to know.

Sue prescribes a lot more medication in this work, not because it’s the answer, but because it helps traumatised clients reach a point where they can be helped.

“You’re only really addressing their symptoms, not the whole trauma, but the right medication enables you to be able to start,” she says.

“For me, to resolve trauma, you have to make sense of it. You actually have to get a story for yourself that makes sense.

‘Why did this happen, why did I feel the way I did’ and can we get a narrative that will eventually allow this event to exist more easily in the past than remaining continually active in the moment.”

When you have a traumatic incident, she explains, the brain doesn’t process the memory. “It’s not functioning in that moment, so the memory sits there unprocessed and when you go near the trauma, it’s immediately active,” she says.

“For most of our clients, they will go straight there and the trauma is happening all over again. And they can’t tell their brain that that happened five years ago, or 10 years ago, and they’re safe now, because in that moment it is real again.”

What counsellors try to do is slowly, and ever so gently, get the client to process their memory, so that they can go back and help them find a story and a meaning. This can bring some understanding or acceptance that they may not be able to change what

happened, but it is in the past, and they can look to the future.

Chronic PTSD, however, is a real issue.

“We do have a group that is chronically traumatised,” Sue says. “I think about them all the time, what can we do, how can we help them.”

There is a lot of “magical thinking” that can be helpful to reframe. “Clients think ‘why didn’t I stop those soldiers from entering my house and killing members of my family’,” she says.

“Survivor guilt is very real, as is a magical belief that they could have stopped the horror somehow.”

They torture themselves with distortions of reality: Why was I not strong enough? Why did I not protect everyone?

“It’s about working with them to try to get some compassion for self, to reframe those thoughts, and understand that burden of guilt,” she says. “To tell them.

‘No, you couldn’t, nobody could, you couldn’t have done anything different.

Nobody could have’.”

The question she always asks ASeTTS’ clients is: How did you survive?

“They all look at what they see as their failures but I also say ‘look at what you’ve done, you’re here, you’ve brought your children here, do you know what a gift

Left: Sue uses this sculpture, part of Bruno Catalano’s Les Voyaguers series, to help show her registrars what ASeTTS’ clients are going through.

How does someone listening to such trauma every day not become overwhelmed? How does she prevent her team from coming undone by what they have heard?

“Some of it is a bit like if you worked in an Emergency Department and someone comes in from a car accident and it’s just horrific. You can be really

89 Sue

you have given?’” She wants to remind them of what they have achieved, not to just focus on the damage.

Sue struggles to put a finger on the number of clients she’s seen over the years – in the many thousands, undoubtedly – or how many hours she has spent listening to their stories of loss and pain, and guiding others to do the same.

traumatised, or you can look at it and think ‘what’s broken, what do I need to fix here’,” she explains.

“You try to think ‘what do I need to do’. What could help here and how can I understand what’s happening in this interaction right now, what level of trauma am I dealing with.”

Once you examine a situation from the perspective of trauma, she says, it becomes easier for a counsellor to prevent themselves from being flooded.

Sue has also developed supportive supervision groups to help counsellors deal with whatever they encounter.

“We really have such lovely supervision groups, where anything goes, whatever you’re struggling with, everyone struggles with,” she says. “I always think that whatever it is, we will find a way to work with it, I trust that, but bring it and let’s examine why this is so stuck.”

Her own self-care includes anchoring herself in literature and arts. “When I first started here, I went back and did a PhD in Classics and Ancient History, just for me,” she says. “I needed another world, one with richness.”

She gives a rueful laugh. “It was about a Roman historian who wrote about the civil wars and of course I was putting his life back together, so I guess I’m not that separated from my work!” she says.

“But it was nourishing, and you do need something to nourish you. You need a world that’s still got beauty in it.”

As to what has kept her at ASeTTS all these years, it’s a combination of the challenge of the work and the fantastic people she works with. “I love the clients, I truly do.”

Mu Lay Myanmar

Mu Lay grew up knowing that she might have to run and hide in the jungle at any moment.

P 90 Mu Lay

art of the persecuted Karen ethnic group in what was then known as Burma, her family lived in a small rural village that was constantly being raided by the military junta.

“The head of the village would keep watch and tell us when the military is close to our area,” she says.

In 1995, the raids happened so often the villagers started to hide basics in the jungle in preparation. “We would hide some clothes, rice and other food because we could not carry them when we were running.”

Sometimes they would spend weeks there. School, which Mu Lay loved, became a makeshift blackboard in the jungle, with teachers doing their best to keep the children distracted with learning.

Mu Lay’s family, like so many others, lived in fear, with no end in sight. “I just thought this is my life forever, I didn’t know I would have the chance to come to the refugee camp in Thailand.”

One day in 1997, the military stormed through the village, burning everything in sight, leaving them with nothing.

“They attack our civilians, and then

they burned down my family house, my father’s rice barn, killed our animals, burned everywhere in the village and take all our belongings,” she says.

“After that I couldn’t live in the village, so we have to hide ourselves in the jungle until my brother came back.”

One of five siblings, Mu Lay’s older brother had escaped to the camp on the Thai-Burmese border and returned to the village to get his little sister. The rest of the family stayed behind.

“I was 14 and the only girl in a group of six or seven boys,” she says. “I wanted to study and my family know there is no opportunity for me if I stay in the village.”

It was very difficult for the teenager to leave her family behind, but she was desperate to get an education.

“My brother was studying in the refugee camp, and I always want to learn.

It was very hard for me to separate from my parents, but if there is any opportunity to learn, that’s what I need to do.”

The journey to Thailand was dangerous, taking about a week as the group tried to avoid the military. “We spent many nights in the jungle, hiding, waiting,” she recalls.

They arrived at the camp in December 1997. Mu Lay would spend the next 13 years there, the rest of the family joining her after a year. Local teachers, and sometimes volunteers from other countries, would help satisfy the young girl’s thirst for knowledge.

The family of seven lived in a small bamboo house. “You weren’t allowed to go out of the camp, there was barbed wire all around us, so it was like a prison,” she says. “We were learning but there was no freedom.”

Nor was there an opportunity to apply for refuge in another country. “It wasn’t until about 2007 the resettlement process started and people were able to apply to other countries.”

While Mu Lay and her siblings studied, her parents tried to keep themselves busy making clothes to sell.

They also kept chickens and pigs and attended community events.

“It was quite social in some ways, all the community mixed, you would just go to one person’s house, there were no boundaries,” she says.

When the UNHCR advised the community that they could finally apply

of my community did not have any, and they don’t understand what’s happening and they have very small children, I help them,” she says.

“Sometimes I take them to the bank to open an account, sometimes to Centrelink. And I am also learning everywhere we go.”

In December 2011 Mu Lay returned to Thailand to marry her boyfriend Kamchart, who she had met in the camp, and bring him back to Perth. The couple now have two children, May and Messi, aged seven and eight.

Kamchart got a job in a factory and Mu Lay started as a support worker with PVS, a humanitarian settlement program now run by the Red Cross.

“I loved this work because I help refugees from all over, not just from Burma, to settle into Australia,” she says.

More recently, ASeTTS called on her expertise for the FICT (Families in

She has seen how difficult it is for the older generation like her parents, in particular, and takes comfort in the knowledge they get some assistance.

“They have their children but you can’t rely on them because they get busy, have to work and build their own lives,” she says.

“If I can be the person who connects them to services and lets them know what they can access and how to access it, because they don’t know where to go, or who to contact, that is a good thing.”

Mu Lay has told her children as much is appropriate for their age about her long and difficult path to Australia.

“When I told them that we had no toilet in my village, they could not believe it – they laughed,” she says, laughing herself.

“When I said to them that I had no shoes or thongs and I had to walk and hours to get to school, they would keep asking ‘why, why’.”

The children spoke Karen at home,

In the camp you finish high school but then there is nowhere to go. What do you do with what you have learnt?

Cultural Transition) program, employing her as bicultural worker to help members of the Karen community better understand the Australian way of life.

The busy mother of two is now back at MercyCare, where she works as a case worker part-time, and has recently started training for another part-time role at Ishar Multicultural Women’s Health Services.

She has been employed at Ishar to help give health information to the Karen community, particularly in relation to navigating Covid and women’s health issues.

Mu Lay’s experiences have naturally informed her work because she knows how important that support is for new arrivals.

and still do with their grandparents, but since starting school they only want to speak English. When she looks at them, playing happily with their friends and enjoying school, she knows she made the right choice to come to Australia all those years ago.

“In the camp, you finish high school but then there is nowhere to go. What do you do with what you have learnt? There is no opportunity to further your education.”

Mu Lay hasn’t lost sight of that young girl who dreamed of an education in Myanmar, either. She still has a thirst for knowledge.

“I plan to finish my diploma in community services, but first I have to find time!”

91 Mu Lay

for refuge overseas, many did not know what to do. They were worried about language barriers, cultural barriers and if they would be safe.

Mu Lay applied for resettlement in Australia because she knew a little bit about the country. “I have a volunteer teacher from Brisbane for two years and she always encouraged me to apply to Australia,” she says.

“Also we know that it is a beautiful country and the government is, you know, not like in Burma. And,” she adds with a laugh, “the weather is not bad, we didn’t want to go somewhere very cold.”

Mu Lay’s parents let their daughter guide them. “They depend on me because they don’t speak English at all and by then I spoke a little,” she says. “They say ‘okay, if my daughter goes, we go’.”

Her sister had her own family by then and would join them a few years later.

Her older brothers were applying at the same time but were accepted into the United States, rather than Australia.

“Everyone tried to get out of the camp so you want to grab every opportunity they can,” she says, sad that they would not join them but understanding the need to act quickly.

Mu Lay and her parents arrived in Perth in May 2010. Aged 26, she had spent half her life in the refugee camp.

At the time there was a tiny Karen community, most of whom lived a fair distance from their first home.

“I could see my parents were very lonely and I tried to connect them with the Karen people,” she says. “I showed them how to get the bus to see families there, and I could see they started to feel much better.”

Mu Lay went to TAFE to do a certificate in English and then another in community services. Her first role was as a volunteer support worker at MercyCare. More and more Karen refugees were arriving in the community in need of support.

“Because I had some English and some

Khouloud Iraq

The heady scent of spices and something freshly baked wafts through the room as Khouloud opens the door to her home.

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92 Khouloud

he mother of two, and soon to be grandmother of three, has been baking. Biscuits in delightful crescent shapes filled with magical mixes, including cardamom, coconut, dates and walnuts, are served with tea, and later bundled up in plastic containers for her guest to take home.

Khouloud loves cooking for other people – she later brings a delicious date and walnut cake to her photo session – and has spent her life caring for others. Even when there has been so little care for her.

Life has been one battle after another since she fled for Jordan in 1999 with her two children, Amjad and Norris. It wasn’t always this way.

Like most Iraqis during Saddam Hussein’s long grip on power, Khouloud had endured the terror of air raids, seen her suburbs shelled and families torn apart. But her little family of four had slowly managed to build a comfortable life from the rubble.

“We had a good life, my husband had a truck and made really good money, and I had a lady who came to clean for me,” she says.

“My kids go to a good private school, they study hard and in the summer I put them in summer school. And me, I do

sewing, not because I need the money but because I like to do it.”

But Khouloud was growing increasingly worried about her son.

The family were Shia Muslims, which although in majority in Iraq, were persecuted at will under Saddam Hussein, who was Sunni Muslim.

Khouloud says they usually prayed at home, but her 13-year-old son was spending more and more time at a mosque, mixing with people who she suspected were trying to radicalise him.

“There were some very bad people and you just don’t know what they are doing, they teach him very bad things,” she says.

At the same time, her marriage was falling apart. Sick and exhausted from fear and worry, Khouloud reached out to her younger brother, who she had supported to immigrate to Perth years before. He agreed to help her apply to join him, but first she had to get to Jordan.

It was 1999 and Khouloud would spend the next eight years trapped in no man’s land, sewing and cleaning houses to support her children, relying on the kindness of strangers and terrified that she could be turned in at any moment and deported back to Iraq.

“One day, someone living in the same

apartment block, someone I share my food with, she tells the police and they come to get me,” she says. “Thanks God, I am working for a Saudi prince then, cooking and cleaning, and he speak to police and say, ‘no, she is with me’.”

All the while, Khouloud kept trying to get to Australia, constantly visiting the embassy where she says the Jordanian staff treated her like dirt. Increasingly desperate, she lost count of the money she paid to people who said they could help with a visa, only to let her down.

In 2003, her brother came to visit her in Jordan with his father-in-law. When he flew back home, he told Khouloud that his father-in-law had fallen in love with her and wanted to marry her. She didn’t know what to do.

“I couldn’t go back to Iraq, especially after my husband divorce me, life is very hard for a woman alone,” she says.

“And in Jordan, I had no papers, I always worry ‘will they send me back, what will happen’. This was the only way.”

Her intended returned to Jordan in 2007. Khouloud couldn’t get a marriage certificate until he converted to the Muslim faith. They married in December and immediately took the certificate to the Australian embassy in Jordan.

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Jumana Jasim

Clockwise from left: Khouloud with her son Amjad and daughter Norris in Jordan; Khouloud with her son; with her mum in Iraq.

94 Khouloud

It was another six months, however, before her application was approved.

Six months while the embassy staff alternated between ignoring her or demanding more paperwork, including evidence that Khouloud had custody of her daughter, who was now almost 18. Her son, then 24, decided to stay in Jordan, later moving to Syria with Khouloud’s parents.

As her daughter’s birthday, on the fourth of July, drew ever closer, Khouloud started to panic. If Norris turned 18 before they were approved, she would be an adult and unable to come with her.

“This paper, this form they wanted doesn’t exist, my family in Iraq they go to the court, to the police, but there is no form that says this,” she says. “So I told my family to pay $100 to someone to just write this paper and send it to the embassy straight away.”

Two days later, they got their visas.

Mother and daughter arrived in Perth on June 22, 2008. They had to sign a paper saying they would never return to Jordan.

But Khouloud’s troubles were far from over. When her new husband came to her brother’s house to take her home, she didn’t object when they insisted she leave Norris behind – she thought she would be just around the corner from her daughter.

“But he just keep driving and driving, for three hours, I didn’t know where.” It turned out her new husband didn’t live in a nice house, like he led her to believe, but in a filthy, broken-down shack in the Wheatbelt.

“When I see this house, my feet start shaking so much I nearly fall down; I couldn’t believe it,” she says, shivering at the memory. “Everything was broken, dirty, nothing was working; I never see anything like it.”

She called her brother, crying, asking why he would let her come to such a place. He said they thought he had fixed the house up for her.

Khouloud spent the night curled up on a chair, freezing and frightened. The next day she went back to her brother’s house, never to return.

For the next 18 months, until her permanent residency came though, her husband would threaten to report her to immigration, stress compounded by the fact her sister-in-law did not make her welcome, either.

Khouloud knew she couldn’t rely on anyone else. She found shelter initially with a kindly Iraqi family, later renting a room from a Vietnamese friend, and started to pick up work as a seamstress. It was a constant struggle to get by.

Despite everything she had been through, Khouloud never sought counselling. She didn’t even know ASeTTS existed.

Then on May 7, 2013, as an Iraqi friend drove Khouloud to her citizenship ceremony, another car slammed into them.

Khouloud was initially sent home from hospital with little more than Panadol.

In agony, her friends took her to the GP, who sent her for an X-ray. Her neck was broken. She was sent straight to Royal Perth Hospital, where she spent two weeks before being released without any way of supporting herself as she recovered.

“I say ‘how I look after myself, I’m not a nurse,’ and then the social workers tell me about ASeTTS.” It would be another four months of physical therapy before she finally went to see a counsellor, initially once a week, then fortnightly, sessions she continued for another eight years. “They really, really help me.”

And it wasn’t just to deal with the aftermath of her horrific accident. As

We didn’t wait for ambulance or anything. I am holding my son and just running, I thought maybe the boom came from my family house.

And then in 1991, the bombing started again when a US-led coalition invaded Iraq.

When Norris was 40 days old, she spent two days under the stairs in the house, cowering as they heard planes overhead, bomb after bomb falling on Baghdad.

They escaped the city shortly after,

renting a house in the country until it seemed safe to return.

“Iraqi people, they really, really destroy this country. Why? No one knows,” she says. “All Iraqi family comes apart. I am here with my brother, but I have two brothers in Germany, one brother and sister in Iraq. We never see each other.”

Her parents died in Syria, unable to say goodbye.

Khouloud tries not to dwell too much on the past. Already a grandmother to her son’s two boys, who she has only seen thanks to technology, Khouloud can barely contain her excitement at the impending arrival of Norris’s first child.

At last, she will have a grandchild to hold, to nurture, to teach how to make the biscuits she taught her children to make.

The back room of her townhouse, which she bought with the settlement from her car accident, is a dressmaker’s dream – sewing machines, overlockers, acres of fabric. You just know her granddaughter is going to be one of the best-dressed children in Perth.

“I am so, so happy,” she says. “This, this is my future.”

95 Khouloud

Khouloud started talking, building trust, slowly everything came to the surface, all the trauma she had suffered. Trauma she had suppressed from as far back as 1987, during the war between Iraq and Iran.

“Me and my son, one day when he was four, we are visiting my brother and we hear this ‘boom’! We go outside and all the houses, they just come apart,” she says.

“My brother’s son is six months old and we just see blood, we don’t know where from. Everyone is bleeding. We were shocked.”

Her voice breaks as she recalls the devastation around her. “You see all the houses, you imagine, just imagine, all the people under all this,” she says. “We didn’t wait for ambulance or anything.

I am holding my son and just running, I thought maybe the boom came from my family house.”

Concerned people tried to stop the hysterical, bleeding mother, to encourage her into an ambulance. “I told them, ‘no you leave me, I need to see my family’.” Thankfully, none of them was seriously hurt, though Khouloud’s now 37 year old son still bears the shrapnel scars on one hand.

Hamdi Somalia

There is a nice villa somewhere in the Somali capital Mogadishu that belongs to Hamdi.

S 96 Hamdi

he remembers it well, though she hasn’t seen it in more than 20 years.

“It’s in a good area, a very rich area, it’s worth a lot of money now, like a million dollars,” she says. “But I can’t go back because Hawiye (Somalian tribe) have my house.”

It isn’t so much the property she has lost that still hurts – Hamdi has lost so much more to the ravages of her country’s civil war – but what it represents. Her beloved father, a doctor and minister who died when she was just five, left it to her.

“My father, he knows he has cancer and he love me so much, he make sure I have somewhere for me,” she says.

After her parents divorced, Hamdi had mostly lived with her mother Mako, but her father Hussein wanted to ensure his children were provided for.

“Still the house is in my father’s name. But the problem is I don’t have a certificate for my house because I run, I flee my home.”

Hamdi was living there with her young son, Abbas, when terror came knocking in 1991.

Somalia had been at war with itself for decades, as various tribes or clans jostled for power. Mohamed Siyad Barre began his reign of terror in the late 1970s, carrying out state-sanctioned mass violence against civilians to dissuade them from supporting opposition groups.

After the toppling of Barre’s regime in early 1991, the battle to succeed him brought even more pain and suffering. The United Somali Congress, led by Mohamed Farah Aidid – who would later become the United Nations’ first “wanted man” - began targeting the Darood clans, “cleansing” them in the name of the Hawiye.

The Darood, Hamdi’s clan, were painted as outsiders who had no right to live in the Somali capital. “They start killing us; they go door to door, raping, killing, taking everything,” Hamdi says.

No longer safe in the capital, she fled to Kismayo, in the south, where she had lived before her divorce.

Her mother had been running a small business in Kismayo for years, importing everything from Omo to mattresses and coffee from nearby Kenya. Hamdi took her son to stay with Mako and her much younger brother, Yusef.

But their persecutors soon arrived in Kismayo, too. “The Hawiye want to kill us all the time, too many, too many people die.”

An estimated 400,000 mostly middleclass residents were chased out of the capital and other southern towns like Kismayo, their properties looted, the women raped, and thousands of civilians killed.

Hamdi’s family, including her younger sister Foseya, fled to Kenya, where they would spend almost two years in a refugee camp in Mombasa. They were free to come and go from the camp, which is how Foseya caught the eye of a visiting American captain.

“My sister is much younger than me; she’s very beautiful, like a model,” Hamdi says. The American promised her sister the world, setting her up in a nice apartment in the city.

When he returned to America, Foseya was pregnant with their child. “My mother she does not want to see her, so I go and look after my sister every day, I help her,” she says.

The captain returned to the port city to find he had a son, though he initially refused to believe the boy was his because Mohamed was as dark his mother. The

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Jumana Jasim

Clockwise from below: Hamdi’s mother Mako and younger brother Yusef; the family received a warm welcome in Sydney; Yusef and Khalid; Hamdi with the four boys in Blayney, NSW.

98 Hamdi

American told Hamdi’s sister not to get pregnant again but promised to marry her when he returned.

When he came back, Foseya was pregnant with his second child. “He looked at my sister and he never came back again, he left with an African woman,” Hamdi says sadly. “And my sister, she become mad.”

Hamdi helped get her admitted to hospital for mental health, but they couldn’t give her medication until after Khalid was born.

“She very bad, when she was pregnant she doesn’t shower, she don’t change clothes, she’s very weak. I have to do everything for her,” Hamdi recalls.

“Sometimes she punishes me and I say ‘no, I’m your sister, I help you’, and she cried.”

Her sister could no longer afford her nice apartment without the support of the American, so Hamdi found Foseya a tiny room and came every day from the camp to help her.

She had to sell supplies provided by the United Nations in the camp to pay her sister’s rent.

When her second baby, a pale-skinned

replica of his mother, was born, she was able to be medicated and settled down for a while. But Foseya became obsessed with finding the children’s father and eventually disappeared. Hamdi was left with her two babies.

Hamdi now had two more children to look after in the camp, and she was soon in fear of her life. “The people they not nice, they see Khalid and he is very, very white,” she says. “They look at me and they use very bad words. The men, they want to rape me.”

Her application for resettlement in Australia had been accepted after six months, but the processing was taking a long time. Increasingly vulnerable, her case was prioritised and Hamdi and the boys were whisked away to Mombasa for safety, where they stayed until their visas came through.

They arrived in Australia in April 1995, the four boys – who all called her Mum listed as her sons. Her little brother was 13, her son eight, and her nephews were under three.

Sponsored by a Loreto nun who lived in Sydney, Hamdi’s first home in

Australia was in the small regional New South Wales town of Blayney. “The people were very, very nice, they support me a lot,” she says. “But I’m the only Somali in town and I can’t speak English, only Swahili; I find it very, very hard.”

She also found it freezing. “In all my life, I never see ice,” she says, describing the morning she woke to find the windows covered in it. “It’s so, so cold.”

Haunted by shocking nightmares from her past, Hamdi didn’t have anyone she could talk to, no one to help her with deep trauma, and she felt increasingly isolated.

Hamdi asked her sponsor if it would be possible to move to Perth, where a friend from the camp had settled. She knew it was warmer and thought it would be better for her worsening asthma.

On December 25, 1995, the family boarded the Indian Pacific bound for Perth. She stayed with her friend until Homeswest found her a place to stay and began the process of sponsoring her mother to join them. Mako arrived in May 1998, the family together again.

Hamdi found a second family at ASeTTS, however, not long after she

arrived. “Oh, my goodness, how many years have I been coming here,” she says with a big smile. “They are so good to me, I love ASeTTS.” It has been 21 years since Hamdi fled her home, but she still carries the past with her. At night, it will often come roaring back.

“This is why I come to ASeTTS. I hear this noise in my ear,” she says, making a whooosh sound. “Even when I’m lying on the pillow, I can’t block it out. And sometimes I wake up crying, because I see people killed right in front of me.”

Here, her counsellor Fleur provides a safe space where she can share what happened to her, share things she doesn’t want anyone else to hear. “She so good to me, she listens and listens, and this helps so much,” she says. “This is very private, what happened, and ASeTTS lets me speak safely.”

Not all Hamdi’s memories from Somalia are bad.

Her face lights up when she talks about her father, an accomplished man who spoke eight languages, including

This is very private, what happened, and ASeTTS lets me speak safely.

Italian, Arabic and Swahili. “Still, I remember his face; I never forget him, he such a good man.”

That beautiful home in Mogadishu she will never see again was a tangible link to the father she adored, but she knows it has to be left in the past.

“If I go to that area, they know me,

99 Hamdi

they know my father. But why can I go, it’s not safe. Even my brother he has his certificate but he can never go back; we’re too scared.”

Instead, she tries to focus on the future she has built for her family in Australia.

She shows pictures of Mohamed’s martial arts school, that he opened not long ago.

“He has own family now, two children, he doing very well,” she says proudly.

Her face saddens. She has lost touch with her biological son; it’s a long and complicated story, as so many family stories are, but it hurts her deeply, particularly as she hasn’t seen her grandchildren for several years now.

During the photo session for this book, Hamdi takes direction with ease. Sitting, standing, lifting her chin, adjusting her emerald-green hijab.

The selection of portraits on the monitor show a strong, proud woman.

But Hamdi can’t see it. “I feel so old, so old,” she says.

Reminded of what she has done for her family, how far she has come to ensure their safety, Hamdi smiles again. “Yes, I must think about that. I am happy for that.”

Remza Bosnia

The soldiers came on May 10, 1992.

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100 Remza

here was no time to gather up any personal possessions, photos of loved ones, anything of value.

The Serbs forced Remza and her three daughters, aged 16, 14 and 10, at gunpoint, along with so many others, out of their homes in Bratunac in eastern Bosnia, and into a stadium.

Neither Remza nor Samira can remember how many Bosnians were in that stadium, perhaps 10,000 people herded like cattle, terrified what would happen next. The women and children were put on buses and trucks but the men, Remza’s 17-year-old stepson Samir among them, were kept behind.

They just started driving. “We had no idea where we were going, where they were taking us,” she says, through her daughter Samira.

“And then eventually they stopped and we all got off the bus and walked. It was the middle of the night, and we were walking, walking; you could just hear children crying.”

Finally, they heard the words: “Don’t worry, we’ll take you, you’re safe now.”

They had been walking between two enemy lines and reached the defence of Bosnian Muslim soldiers.

Exhausted and traumatised, the group was taken to a community centre,

near Tuzla about 100km from their home, that had been converted into an adhoc refugee post.

“From there, they moved us to a primary school that was converted into a refugee camp; we basically just had mattresses to sleep on,” she says. “We slept in the gymnasium.”

They would live like this for another three years.

A few months later, Samir was reunited with the family – released from the concentration camp where he was tortured and saw hundreds of other men being tortured and killed. The joy of the family reunion was sadly short lived; later that year, Samir stepped on a landmine and died. He was only 18.

The family had already been through so much - they had lost their husband and father a year before the war began but Remza had to find a way to be strong for her daughters.

Initially it was all about survival, getting basics such as food and clothes, because they had nothing but the ones on their back. Like so many others, the family relied on support from the United Nations and charities such as the Red Cross.

Samira worked in the kitchen, the old school canteen, trying to make the UN supplies stretch as far as possible. “We only got bags of rice, lentils, bread and

sometimes dried beans; it was very basic food.”

With the war still raging, supplies were made even more difficult when Croatia blocked trucks carrying humanitarian aid and food from entering. The family and so many Bosnian Muslims like them were effectively displaced people, refugees in their own country.

In 1995, the family were able to move into local houses that had been extended with the help of international aid, but it was hardly a home, either.

“We lived in one house where there were many families, so each family had one bedroom and we all shared the bathroom and kitchen,” Samira explains.

“Downstairs were three families and upstairs were three families.”

And a new horror was unfolding in July 1995 – genocide in Srebrenica, where Remza’s family had always lived. They had been trapped there since the war started, surrounded by Serbian forces and under so-called UN protection, and they were slowly starving. Remza’s mother, three brothers and their families were among the suffering. Every day, Remza would go to the refugee reception centre to see if she could find her family among the people streaming in, exhausted and starved.

101 Jumana Jasim

102 Remza

Not all of them made it out. “Two of my brothers were killed in the Srebrenica genocide, along with more than 8000 others,” Remza says. “They were aged 34 and 25.”

When the war officially ended in December 1995, nothing really changed.

The killing had stopped but they could not go home.

“We lost our house, we couldn’t go back even if we wanted because it was knocked down, it was burnt out,” Remza says. “I didn’t have a job, I couldn’t get a job. My daughters didn’t have a future, and we lived on humanitarian support.”

During those years in limbo, Remza would hear of people leaving the country, going to Germany, or somewhere else. Her goal became to get her family out, too.

“Every mother will do everything for their children,” she says. “It’s not an easy step but you have to, to survive and save your children and when you see people leaving, everyone’s leaving, you have to try.”

One of her best friends, who she had worked with before the war, was now living in Australia and got in touch with her once regular contact with the outside world was restored. She sent the paperwork for them to fill out and send on to the Australian embassy in Vienna.

Between 1995 and 1999, they applied several times, each time they were rejected. They didn’t know why because the reasons were given in English.

“The second time we were rejected, I found somebody in the town who was an English teacher and paid her money to read the letter,” Remza says. “And the letter said ‘you are not classified refugees’.”

Samira says they learnt later that being internally displaced did not make you a refugee, even though you had no place to call home. “To us, this was mindboggling,” she says.

Remza then heard about a man who would take people to the UNHCR for a price in Zagreb, Croatia, more than 300km away.

“After the war had stopped for some

Remza with her daughters, Samira, Fata and Fatima.

time, children who were still at school were supported by a charity, so I was getting about $50 a month for my youngest daughter,” Remza says. “I was saving that to pay this man to take us all on the day trip to and from Zagreb to put in the application.”

Samira remembers spending hours in an office packed with people, filling out paperwork on the windowsill. “Mum said just write down everything that happened, how they forced us to leave, your brother was killed and where we are now.”

A few months later they were called back for an interview, and then have medicals.

“The whole process was about seven or eight months, we were lucky, it wasn’t very long, some people waited years.”

Clutching a white bag bearing the letters IOM (International Organisation for Migration) containing their visas, the family boarded a flight bound for Kuala Lumpur, and then on to Perth.

“I couldn’t believe it, I was happy, scared, lost,” Remza says. “They told us to look after that bag and carry it everywhere with us. They told us someone would receive us in Perth and they would recognise us by that bag; none of us would let it out our sights.”

They arrived in Perth in April 2001.

Samira was 25, Fata was 22 and Fatima was 19. None of them spoke any English.

Remza was introduced to ASeTTS via

the satellite office in Balga. She started counselling, having massages, and began joining some of the group activities run

by Jan Mantell. ASeTTS also organised for a volunteer to come to Remza’s home for regular chats, a form of social support as much as to improve her English.

“In the beginning it was not easy, everything is foreign,” she says. “And I didn’t really go anywhere; I was home bound and my daughters went to study and work.”

Samira had started university in Bosnia after the war ended, studying teaching, and was keen to return. But first, like her younger sisters, she had to improve her English. They took so many odd jobs, cleaning, delivering pamphlets, working in a kebab shop, all while planning their futures.

Fata went on to complete a diploma from TAFE as a laboratory technician and now works in the finance industry.

Fatima completed a dental assistant course and still enjoys dentistry.

Things really began to settle for Remza when her children started to have children of their own. She now has six grandchildren. Her mobile rings several times during the interview, grandchildren calling to check in on her, as they do every evening. Remza likes her own space but family is never far away.

As Remza says, this journey to the other side of the world was never about her. “I had my children with me, and they were safe, and that was what was important.”

Her children are certainly grateful for her sacrifices. “Even though I was 25 when we came here, I was 16 when the war started, I know I wouldn’t be able to think what was the best for me,” Samira says.

“But Mum, she could see there was no future. And the other thing I think that was critical for Mum was the fact we were all girls and she was a woman with no husband. She knew what it meant to not have a husband in a patriarchal society.

We can never repay her for what she’s done for us.”

103 Remza

Samira Bosnia

It was Samira’s mother who introduced her to the organisation that would have such a big impact on her life.

R 104 Samira

emza had long been telling her daughter about ASeTTS and how nice and kind the people were to her there.

“Mum was a client for a long time, she was always going on these excursions with the women’s group and telling us to come along,” she says with a laugh. “Then she was asked to a celebration, which turned out to be an annual general meeting. She needed a lift and insisted I don’t just drop her off but I come in with her.”

By the end of the evening, which was far more relaxed and family friendly than most meetings, Samira had signed up for the client reference group, known as United Voices.

“All the meetings were informal, but it was a very structured group, quite innovative at the time,” she recalls. “We had monthly meetings and someone from ASeTTS staff would facilitate, and it was mainly discussions around what clients needed, the different services, we would give feedback.”

Samira knew what really helped her mother, including the relaxed social occasions and services such as massage.

“The massage for her was really

healing, you know, because for a while – and Mum doesn’t like to talk about it – she suffered from chronic PTSD,” she says. “And she had panic attacks that would come out of nowhere. She was scared of everything.”

Seeing what ASeTTS was doing for her mother’s wellbeing, Samira kept volunteering and, in 2003, was offered a job starting a support group for refugees from the former Yugoslavia.

“At that point, ASeTTS had about 50 percent of clients from there,” she says.

“Most clients were like my mum’s age or older, people who grew up in communism, people who suddenly found themselves having to say ‘I’m Bosnian, or Croatian or Serbian’, where they never had before. We all spoke the same language.”

Samira was in her first semester of university at that time, doing psychology and children and family studies, and the job complemented her studies. She ran the group for 10 years, during which time she got married and had her son, Zak, and daughter, Uma. “I could not get rid of the group,” she says, laughing. “No really, it was a very happy time, very happy years. I remember

being very pregnant, taking people on excursions and things like that.”

Remza reminds her that she couldn’t leave because everyone loved her so much.

“At one time we had more than 50 people coming every week, it was wonderful.”

Samira worked at ASeTTS for 15 years in a variety of roles, including as a bilingual worker, group facilitator and counsellor, as well as working on many different projects, including strategic planning. By the time she left in March 2019, Samira was the manager of family and community services.

“With volunteering before and after that, it’s more like 17 years there,” she says. “At one stage, ASeTTS lost some funding and they were going to have to cut the (Yugoslav) group and they asked me to write a letter and get everyone to sign it. I remember giving it to (then CEO) Norma Josephs, and she said ‘this is our first petition from clients’.”

Her mother laughs, reminding her: “But you always got the money.”

The relationship with clients is one of the reasons Samira stayed at ASeTTS for so long. They not only cared about their clients, they listened to them, involved

105 Jumana Jasim

106 Samira

them and encouraged them to create communities within the community.

“After I graduated from university, I got a job as a counsellor and I kept running the group one day a week, and doing counselling four days a week,” she says.

“I then started engaging with so many other cultures. And then the more you learn and the more you interact with other cultures, you learn how many similarities there are among cultures.

It’s so enriching.”

Now general manager of multicultural support services at MercyCare, Samira continues to ensure some of society’s most vulnerable people have access to the right support.

Even growing up in Bosnia she always wanted to work with people. “I wanted to study teaching; I was always passionate about attachment and children and learning.”

Her experiences during the war, of the effects of trauma, made her more determined to help people directly. “I wanted to understand more about what each person carries and how to help, I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives.”

The rewards for the kind of work she

does are not always tangible, but they are deep and lasting.

“Often in psychology, they call us counsellors ‘wounded healers’, because for me it was a personal healing as well,” she explains. “Even though I never accessed trauma services for myself, I know I have trauma and I have lived with trauma.”

Samira says it is also gratifying to see the journey and the healing when you work with traumatised clients.

“Even with the Yugoslav group, it wasn’t meant to be a therapeutic group, but effectively when you put 50 people together and fill up a big bus, and they are all as excited as little children to see this new place, it changes how they feel, their outlook, everything,” she says. “I learned so much from them, too.”

With the many waves of humanitarian refugees she has seen over the years, each fleeing a new hell in a different country, Samira knows how difficult the work ASeTTS does can be, the challenges for the staff and for the people they help every day.

But it just makes it all the more important.

“You see a new conflict in the world and you think ‘oh my god when is this going to stop’,” she says. “Humans are always good at saying ‘us and them’, and

finding difference, but really when you work with people in that healing space all you really learn is how similar we are.”

There are different languages, different cultures, different customs but strip everything back to the raw human being, Samira says, and we are effectively the same.

“It doesn’t matter what skin colour, what language, because the brain operates in much the same way,” she says.

“And the trauma, it affects everyone, no matter where they are from.”

The supervision and professional development she received while working as a counsellor at ASeTTS, led by long-time psychiatrist Sue Lutton, was invaluable.

“She’s incredible; she implemented the structures and made supervision one of the key pillars of the organisation; she was a pioneer in that area, I didn’t realise it wasn’t happening at other places until I left,” Samira says.

And it was desperately needed. “There were times when it’s not easy to separate from what you heard; you needed to be able to talk about it, confidentially, and be supported.”

Samira remembers going to one of her home visits with an interpreter. There had been some conflict between the husband and wife and Samira had arranged for a family session. When they arrived, the husband told them his wife wasn’t there, the police had taken her somewhere, but he didn’t know where. The couple’s three young children were with him.

“I immediately knew it was to the women’s refuge because of what had been happening. I was saying goodbye, when one of the children, he would have been seven or eight, he tells the interpreter he wants to ask me something,” she says.

“This was an African family and I am always mindful I am a white person from a different background; it’s not easy for the family to talk to me. But this little boy he has the courage to ask me directly ‘when is my mum going to come back’.”

Often in psychology, they call us counsellors ‘wounded healers’, because for me it was a personal healing as well.

MercyCare, where she may not be working directly with multicultural clients, but she is definitely working for them.

“Being able to influence service provision for them, this is so important,” she says. “I know this is the kind of work I am meant to do. This is where my heart is.”

Clockwise from far left: Remza with her six grandchildren; with the family in Kings Park; and enjoying a picnic with her loved ones.

107 Samira

She holds her hand to her heart. “I went home, and I cried.”

The little boy was reunited with his mother, she found out later, though she knew the outcomes were not always good.

It was, nonetheless, enriching work, not the least because Samira was constantly learning. “I never had any contact with African people before; I learned so much about different cultures in Africa, different languages and customs, as well as the Middle East,” she says. “It is so good to be able to keep learning more, and then you can help more, because you have a better understanding.”

When she left ASeTTS, Samira had her sights set on working in the State, and then Federal, government one day. “I was asking myself ‘have I been too long in the multicultural space, should I diversify my experience’,” she says.

She moved to the City of Stirling, to work at the Welcome Hub on a multicultural program that was part of a much bigger project, thinking it would be a bridge to her future.

Samira soon realised, though, that she was more at home in the not-for-profit space. She is coming up for two years at

Gertrud Germany

Gertrud has never forgotten her oldest client, who also happened to be one of the counsellor’s first.

S 108 Gertrud

he was 90 and had experienced the Russian Revolution,” she recalls, her voice filled with wonder more than 30 years later.

“She was 16 in 1917, and the stories she told me, you cannot imagine, stories she had never told anyone before.”

It was, Gertrud says, the birth of her passion for working with refugees, and of trying to understand trauma so she could better support those carrying such a heavy burden. For as the elderly immigrant travelled back in time, sharing her life with Gertrud, longburied trauma came to the surface.

“I was so inspired by her; I will never forget her face after she had told me everything; it was so calm and peaceful.

I knew then, this was what I was interested in doing.”

Gertrud had community values instilled in her from a young age.

Her parents were always engaged in community events, encouraging their daughter to get involved with the local church, as well as projects that supported underdeveloped countries.

Helping others, you could say, was just part of her nature. But it wasn’t until

years later, when she was working with refugees, that Gertrud found out she also carried a strong familial connection to the displaced.

“They didn’t really talk about it but my mother was displaced during the war,” she says. Her grandmother had to flee (the former) Yugoslavia when she was pregnant, and she and her daughters spent six years in a camp in Austria.

Gertrud’s mother was 12 by the time they left the camp, and the family were sent to Germany. “So I guess I had this sensitivity to what it means to be a refugee.”

She was told that her grandmother had pushed to be sent to a city that had a good train line, because she wanted to be able to visit family. “My mum had 40 cousins, so it was very important to them to be able to stay connected,” she says.

After leaving school, Gertrud studied social work and pedagogy at the first “university of cooperative education”, which enabled students to get hands-on training in government institutions.

“I had training in all areas, from psychology, music therapy to social justice and legal issues, so it was very full and practical.”

Gertrud found what became her life’s passion almost by chance when she started talking to someone who was interviewing for the same job. What her fellow interviewee was doing sounded so interesting that Gertrud asked if she could be put in touch with her boss.

Before she knew it, Gertrud was working in Germany’s first remote refugee hostel. “It was a very challenging situation,” she says. “They had opened a little earlier, but they had real trouble trying to innovate and support the people, and I had all the political and government connections to get things done.”

Most of the refugees at that time came from eastern European countries, fleeing the likes of Nicolae Ceausescu’s brutal regime in Romania. It was 1988 and the floodgates would soon open with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As more and more arrivals needed their services, Gertrud was responsible for establishing outreach offices around southern Germany.

“I helped them to find more stable accommodation and then I established programs with a lot more community

109 Jumana Jasim

Pictured from left: Gertrud travelling in Berlin in the summer of 1999; with her portrait painted by a Ukrainian artist visiting her Ukrainian colleague; with some of the team at ASeTTS a few years ago.

110 Gertrud

focus,” she says. “We did a lot of activities and cultural projects to make them feel more at home.”

It was also when she first became aware of the depth of suppressed trauma among the people she worked with, such as her elderly client from Ukraine.

“They saw so many terrible things, the way these people were treated and how they survived, it was all suppressed,” she says. “Even their families had no idea and even now – I see it with my clients now – they try to protect the loved ones.”

With limited resources and interpreters thin on the ground, Gertrud did what she could to provide some counselling and support.

It was a lot for the young woman to handle but Gertrud was fortunate to be able to call on her professional “second mother”, a social worker who had trained in psychoanalytical therapy in the United States and Berlin and taught her about trauma.

“She picked me out at some training when she heard me talk about what I was doing and told me I could call her at

any time at any minute if I was upset or couldn’t deal with something,” she says.

“I can’t tell you how much she helped me on the spot. Nowadays it’s called supervision – and has been so valuable with (ASeTTS’ psychiatrist) Sue Lutton - but it was groundbreaking then. She’s now 92 and had such an influence on me.”

The leader of the Jewish community in Stuttgart, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, then asked Gertrud if she would help set up programs for Jewish refugees, mostly arriving from the Russian or Ukrainian capitals.

“It was a very sensitive issue at the time because people were like ‘if you’re Jewish, why would you come to Germany, with its history’,” she says. “I got a really good insight into another culture and another religion, but more specifically in relation to trauma and the impacts (of genocide) on communities.”

It wasn’t so much learning through training but through cultural awareness and providing culturally appropriate support.

“Someone who had been tortured by the Nazis, for example, would never ask

to see or doctor or get medical treatment from someone who did not understand their issue,” she says.

Gertrud worked closely in many ways with survivors of the Nazi Holocaust – known as Shoah in Hebrew – and helped connect them with the next generation of Jewish arrivals.

Aside from having a caring professional to bounce any issues off, Gertrud’s outlet was travel. “It was my healing source – I was always travelling, my second home was a Greek island, Santorini,” she says. “I was always backpacking everywhere, southeast Asia, Australia, so many places.”

When she was at the crossroads in her work, she decided to take another long break to help clear her head – and ended up following her heart.

“Australia had this magic in my mind, I had pictures of the beaches on my wall, so I came for another holiday,” she says.

“And then I met my now husband in the last week before I went back, in front of the GPO in the city in Perth.”

After a bit of back and forth, Gertrud

We created a safe space and I could see how people would come forward, how they were talking and how it helped them.

enabled the agency to adapt as new communities in need came through, including refugees from Myanmar, African countries such as Burundi, Guinea, South Sudan and Somalia, and the Middle East.

The team was constantly learning and sharing information - and creating a sanctuary.

“We had beautiful events and I’m very happy that we have the Place of Reflection in Kings Park – ASeTTS is everywhere in Perth, even if people don’t know it,” she says.

And the organisation has shone light in the darkest of places. When Gertrud was wondering if it was time to move on in

2010, she was asked if she would provide counselling at the Curtin Detention Centre, about 50km outside Derby.

“I thought it was something I would never do, and I had no idea if I could survive a week,” she says. “But I could see the value almost immediately. I put up a famous picture of Santorini in the room and I decorated it to create a space where people would feel calm and safe.”

She was still there when it shut two and a half years later, just her and a Serco officer watching as the last two buses of detainees left. “I will never forget. You can see trauma in faces, and to see that tension leave, and the sign of hope as we said goodbye and good luck – it was very emotional.”

111 Gertrud

decided to leave her career behind for a new life in Australia. “I always say yes to adventure, moving is not a big concern for me, but I definitely had a lot of knowledge of what was involved because of my work,” she says.

Gertrud had no pressure to jump into the next job on offer and took her time settling in Perth. In 2002, she applied to become a volunteer at ASeTTS. “It was really nice, I was helping this lady from Iraq settle in and really we were discovering Perth together,” she says.

Before long she was employed in the early intervention team. “I loved it, the excitement, the curiosity, the multicultural team, the home visits,” she says.

Over time, Gertrud built relationships with multicultural and other community organisations to encourage them to refer clients to ASeTTS for counselling and appropriate services.

More than anything, Gertrud was grateful to have time to spend on what she regarded as the most important issue of all: refugee-related trauma.

“We created a safe space and I could see how people would come forward, how they were talking and how it helped them,” she says. “Sharing the story, the trauma, is the key to healing.

And I got more and more into trauma intervention.”

She also appreciated the luxury of being able to use interpreters to help support such traumatised clients, professionals she had limited access to when she first started working with refugees in Germany.

“ASeTTS was an organisation that had professionals – this made such a difference to the client outcomes,” she says. On a global level, too.

“With our link to the IRCT (International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims), ASeTTS provided case studies, so that they could print evidence of the effects of trauma and torture, so we’re part of the global network,” she says.

Gertrud says this professionalism

Assadullah Afghanistan

It was an idyllic childhood. Assadullah smiles as he recalls his early years in suburban Kabul, playing with friends in the close-knit street.

“

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I

Assadullah

t was the most beautiful city. We had just like the Swan River in Perth, as children we were always asking out parents ‘take us to the blue river’,” he recalls. “And then on the sides of the river we had street vendors who sold good food, snacks and kites and toys for children.”

He also loved going to school. “The schools were very fancy and wellequipped and the government had allowances for students, with free books and uniforms.”

Assadullah, who now works for the Red Cross, says he didn’t realise until he left Afghanistan that people in other countries paid for education or health.

It’s a far cry from the Afghanistan that Australians have come to know through the news. The one that changed forever for Assadullah when he was eight.

“We were hearing about bomb blasts and terrorism and in those days it wasn’t the Taliban, or ISIS, or Al-Qaeda,” he says. “There were the Mujahideen, who were bombing schools, airports, buses, shops, anywhere that was crowded.”

It was 1992 and the Mujahideen, backed by the United States, had

taken control from the Soviet-backed Afghan government. A week after the government collapsed, civil war began.

Ethnic groups were pitted against one another, and neighbours could no longer be trusted. Assadullah’s family are Hazaras, an ethnic group with a long history of persecution.

“I didn’t know until then that my neighbour was a Pashtun family from Kandahar and my right-hand neighbour was Tajik from northern Afghanistan because it didn’t matter,” he says. “I was just wrestling with my Pashtun friend every day after school in the front of the house and then we would share an ice-cream.”

One day just after Assadullah came home from primary school, his mother sent him back out to get fresh naan bread for lunch.

“I opened the gate to go to the nearby bakery and saw these wild, brutal people outside with lots of heavy weapons and machine guns, tanks, armoured vehicles,” he says. “I thought I was dreaming, I couldn’t believe it. They threatened me with a weapon and said ‘go, or we’ll kill you’.”

The terrified child ran back inside to tell his mother. With Assadullah’s father

and brother trapped on the other side of the city, the young boy was forced to hide in the basement with his mother and younger siblings. His mother had been badly injured when their home was hit by shelling that killed another brother only weeks before; there was no way they could run.

It was a month before an uncle was able to come to rescue his three little sisters but with his mother’s leg in a bad way, it was up to Assadullah to bring her to safety. Under cover of darkness, shelling all around them, the little boy’s bony frame provided support for his mother as they walked 4km to another basement. “She still calls me her walking stick,” he says.

For 18 months, the family moved from one suburb to the next, seeking sanctuary wherever they could, as the Mujahideen swept through streets, ransacking homes and killing people at will.

Now a father of two young boys himself, Assadullah has seen things no child should ever have to see. One day, Hazara families in the west of Kabul were ripped from their homes.

“We were just a few hundred metres

113 Assadullah

Pictured from right: Assadullah with his boys, Ali Siraj and Salsaal; Assadullah and Salsaal in Sydney.

114 Assadullah

from Afshar district and we could see it live from the rooftop,” he recalls. “They killed over 3500 people. There was heavy shelling first and then whoever was left alive they killed. They just turned this one whole suburb to ashes. The wells we used to get water were full of bodies.” He was 10.

When the family fled to Pakistan, they were stopped at a checkpoint. Assadullah and his father were told to get out of the bus and taken to a hill to be executed.

Assadullah does not know exactly what his father said to make them change their minds – he spoke in the Pashto dialect – but he suspected he appealed to their humanity. Whatever he said, their wouldbe killers gave them a bag of fresh apricots and told them they were free to go.

The family spent the next 10 years in Quetta, where Assadullah estimates the number of Afghan refugees grew to over 100,000. His parents picked up whatever casual work they could to survive. None of the Pakistani schools would accept the Hazaras, so they took matters into their own hands and built their own makeshift school.

“The people loved education, so the community also started English classes and computer courses,” he says. “I was working at the same time and in the evenings studying English. I will forever be grateful to those teachers, even though my certificates were not recognised.”

With no future in Pakistan, Assadullah decided to go back to Afghanistan in 2002.

In the decade the family had been gone, the Mujahideen had been overthrown by the Taliban, who were then pushed out of Kabul by American forces.

“When I crossed the border the American patrol team were asking questions and nobody answered them because nobody spoke English,” he says.

When he answered back in English, the Americans asked if he’d join them as an interpreter. He started work immediately.

But it was dangerous work. “I lost a lot of good friends there, so I went to Kabul and was somehow going to uni in the evening to study a bachelor’s in political science,” he says. “Then I found work with the United Nations as an admin assistant.”

He had a range of jobs, including as provincial coordinator for the UN program aiming to disarm the Mujahideen and the Taliban – “that was very dangerous, trying to persuade killers to give up their weapons” — before returning to work as an interpreter for the Americans and New Zealanders.

“People were rebuilding their homes, and schools, roads and water dams, and the economy was getting better,” he says.

But the Taliban were still ever present and Assadullah’s job as an interpreter with foreigners made him a huge target.

“Many of my friends were killed by the

Taliban and you never knew who might be giving information to them.”

After being ambushed in his home, Assadullah fled to Pakistan once more, this time determined to go onto Australia.

His first attempt in 2009 landed him in a Malaysian jail before being deported back to Afghanistan. The second time, he tried to make it via Indonesia.

In January 2010, he joined 50 others on an overcrowded fishing boat for a four-week journey to Christmas Island.

After two months he was transferred to Curtin Detention Centre, where he spent the next 10 months.

Once he received his permanent protection visa, Assadullah was put on a plane to Tasmania before moving to Sydney.

“I have a foster mum I met in detention, she called me her son, she was a very lovely woman and helped me find accommodation and a job. And then I found a case management role with the humanitarian settlement program in Perth.”

He remembers the interview very well. “I was very blunt and said I don’t have Australian experience but I am 100 percent sure I can do this job because I’ve

It is really reshaping the lives of people in the community and when the mental health of people improves, so does the community.

“What motivates me is that you have a family who arrives with absolutely nothing and zero knowledge about life in Australia. They have poor physical health, poor mental health, so much trauma,” Assadallah says.

“Six months later, you go to visit them, and the children come home in their school uniforms laughing and happy and the mum is apologising for being late because they are so busy. You can see they are making a life.”

He stresses the importance of not making assumptions about their lives,

of taking the time to listen to them and learn. “Often, we are mistaken by thinking that refugees have been through so much they don’t have strength to lead a life. But, trust me, they have more strength. They are resilient.”

With the right support, they can live a full life in Australia, just like he is doing.

“What I take pride in living in Australia is its diversity,” he says. “I don’t feel any different to someone who has been here for generations, but I am thankful for Australia making a place for people to live in harmony.”

115 Assadullah

done similar work in the past,” he says.

Assadullah knows better than most that settlement is a journey. Though he considers Australia his home, it took him five or so years to settle. “You would like to embrace this new life and be part of the bigger community, but it is not easy.

Sometimes you have to go 10 steps back to go one step forward.”

He has also been on a journey with ASeTTS. The counsellor he saw in the detention centre was from ASeTTS, the woman who interviewed him for the settlement role now works at ASeTTS, and when he got that job he started referring clients to the organisation.

“At one point, I referred myself,” he says with a smile. “I was referring people I worked with to ASeTTS and they felt embarrassed to seek counselling, so one day I volunteered myself. I received torture and trauma counselling for nine months and it was very good for me.”

About a year later Assadullah came to work for ASeTTS as a case manager for newly arrived refugees, helping to settle them in the community. By the time he left to join the Red Cross four and a half years ago, he was a program specialist.

He says the work ASeTTS does is critical, not just for the individuals the organisation supports, but the broader community.

“It is really reshaping the lives of people in the community and when the mental health of people improves, so does the community,” he says.

“If I have a cut on my arm, I can pull out the stitches and it will heal, but if I have a million cuts in my head or my heart, it will not heal easily. It takes time and requires community and professional support.”

As a team leader at the Red Cross, Assadullah oversees case managers helping people just like him, including Afghans evacuated last year after the Taliban seized control once more and, more recently, Ukrainians fleeing war.

Does he ever despair that so many people continue to suffer as he did?

Priya Sri Lanka

Priya arrives right on time for her photography session at ASeTTS. She should be beaming.

T 116 Priya

he mother of two will soon be home in Biloela, the little town in central Queensland that has been fighting for more than four years to bring her family back, after the new Labor Government granted the family bridging visas.

“It’s people power,” Priya had said during this interview a week before. “It is such a relief. But it is also a victory for all the people who worked so hard. It is because of all the support and the love; I am eternally grateful for the Australian people.”

She could barely contain her relief at the thought of being reunited with the Biloela community.

But today, Priya looks sad and tired.

“My father died yesterday,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “I wasn’t going to come but I say ‘no, this is too important.’”

Instead of packing up the little unit in Perth that she and her husband Nades, and daughters Kopika and Tharnicaa, have called home for the past year, with a heart full of joy, Priya is in mourning.

She hadn’t seen her father for 10 years.

It is one more heartache for a woman who has been through so much.

Anyone who follows the news would

know at least a little about the asylumseeking Nadesalingam family.

Their battle to stay in Australia has been making headlines ever since Priya’s bridging visa expired and immigration officials arrived a day later, forcing them from their home in the early hours of March 5, 2018, bound for Perth and deportation.

A court order gave them a last-minute reprieve, but the Department of Home Affairs continued to maintain the family did not meet criteria for asylum.

Locals were so outraged at the family’s treatment, they banded together to form Home to Bilo, a grassroots campaign that kept the family in the public eye as they were shunted from a detention centre in Melbourne to Christmas Island and then back to Perth when Tharnicaa fell dangerously ill a year ago.

After she recovered, the family remained here, waiting to hear their fate, their supporters all the while lobbying politicians to allow them to return to Biloela.

With Labor promising to do so if they were elected, the lead-up to the federal election on Saturday, May 21 was a very anxious time for Priya. She could

barely watch the results come in but her daughters, who had been told the outcome could change their fate, were transfixed.

“I was in the kitchen trying to make tea, I was very tense,” she says through interpreter Leila, who has become a friend during their time in Perth. “And the girls were watching as the red blocks (for Labor votes) were going up. Kopika called out and said, ‘Mum, don’t stress, we are going to Biloela!’”

The little girl just missed celebrating her seventh birthday in her old home, but her little sister, who has only ever known one form of detention or another, will celebrate her fifth with all their supporters on June 12. Her last birthday was in Perth Children’s Hospital.

When the sisters went back to school on the Monday after the election, they told all their teachers and friends they were going to Biloela. “Kopika’s friends said ‘oh, we will miss you’ and Tharnicaa replied, ‘don’t worry, you can come too!’.”

Priya smiles, transforming her features. She has had to stay strong for her girls for so long, but her physical and mental health has suffered immeasurably.

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Clockwise from left: Priya and Kopika on the plane to Queensland; the girls were glued to the TV on election night; the family says goodbye to Perth on their way home to Biloela.

Pictures courtesy: Home to Bilo

118 Priya

She and Nades, who met and married in Australia, both thought they had arrived in a place that would give them safe haven when they came by boat in 2012 and 2013 respectively.

Part of the long-persecuted Tamil population of Sri Lanka, Priya had fled to India with her family in 2001, living in limbo for 12 years, while Nades had initially tried to escape by obtaining temporary work visas in Kuwait and Qatar.

None of those countries was a signatory to the Refugee Convention that says people who arrive seeking safety without applying for a visa first cannot be punished. Australia is a signatory.

Granted bridging visas, they settled in Biloela, where Nades worked at the abattoir, and had their daughters, grateful for the chance to build a better life. Until that terrible day four years ago.

Priya doesn’t blame Australians for what happened to her, just the former government. “They have caused a black mark on Australia and the Australian people, they are cruel, they do not have empathy,” she says.

Even when Tharnicaa was brought back to Australia for medical treatment, only Priya was allowed to accompany her daughter.

After huge public pressure, Nades and Kopika were finally able to join them

in Perth, where the family remained in community detention.

Priya was referred to ASeTTS for help navigating yet another uncertain landscape, where she saw a counsellor every week until she felt able to cope with less frequent sessions.

“Fleur was very good for me,” she says. “Being able to speak to someone independent really helped and the ability to open a heart and share all your worries and distress is such a relief.”

Priya is also very grateful for all

the support she received from Perth Children’s Hospital, including engaging her interpreter. Leila was a lifeline in a place where she was under guard by immigration and constantly watched.

“She came in the shape of an interpreter, but for me it was so much more; she wasn’t just someone who could speak my language but some who really cared for me,” she says.

Leila wipes away tears as she translates. Priya is clutching a tissue, trying not to cry herself. On the night of the election, after her husband came home from his job at a local supermarket, she wept in his arms. She is determined not to cry again until she is in Biloela.

“But those will be happy tears,” she says.

When the Biloela community called her family on Zoom at 9.30pm on election night, everyone was crying.

“That was a true representation of true love and affection,” she says.

Even in Perth, she was overwhelmed by the people who came up to her and apologised for the treatment of her family. “Australian people are very kind, very empathetic and they give a lot of respect for other people’s feelings.”

There was, she says, little empathy on Christmas Island, where they spent two years. The only family in the detention centre, they were isolated and treated

We never came here with the idea of living a comfortable life; we were escaping torture and trauma in our country. step out of detention an old person; in your thinking and the way you are. How long is it going to take you to recover?”

Her daughters, she says, have ongoing health issues because of their treatment. Tharnicaa was eight months old when they were taken to detention in Melbourne. With no fresh air, sunshine or fresh, healthy food, her baby teeth fell out early. “She comes home from school and asks ‘why have I got no teeth?’

She can’t enjoy anything like other children at that age.”

It is, naturally, the treatment of her daughters that upsets Priya the most – the lack of nutrition, lack of iron, lack of freedom. “Why should someone put a child through such punishment? It is not

justice, it is not fair for any country to do that to a child.”

Throughout it all, Priya has fought for her children to be treated as Australians.

“Our children are not detainees and should not be labelled like that. They should have every right and privilege, like any other Australian-born child.”

Fluent in Tamil and English, the girls are more excited than their mother about the journey ahead. Priya has been dreaming of that day for so long, she won’t believe it until her feet are firmly planted in Biloela soil once more – as they would be just a few weeks after this interview.

“When I am hugging my friends and sharing the love, then I don’t need any more dreams.”

119 Priya

“less than human” by authorities.

“They did not see me as a mother or as another human being, they never gave me that respect,” she says. “They would tell me ‘you’re going to return to your country’, and I would say, ‘no I came to this country seeking asylum and safety. I am going back to Biloela, I know definitely’.”

Priya’s belief is finally being rewarded.

She didn’t need to do this interview and no one would have blamed her if she didn’t show up for the photograph a day after losing her father. But Priya hopes by being involved in this project, she might help prevent another family going through the same torment as hers.

“We never came here with the idea of living a comfortable life; we were escaping torture and trauma in our country,” she says. “Everyone who comes here wants safety. Unless you have travelled that path you can never understand it.”

But Priya would like the government to show more compassion for those fleeing persecution.

“Instead, they put them in detention for 10 years, 15 years, make them become mentally ill,” she says. “Please don’t do that. If you give us the chance to establish ourselves, we will work hard, we will pay tax and we will provide for your community.”

Priya knows many in her situation will not speak up because they are worried about affecting their application to stay in the country, so they keep all their suffering inside. But even though her family’s fight is not over - Labor has granted them bridging visas, not permanent residency – Priya says she can’t stay silent.

“I don’t want to see any other mother or father or children go through this detention life,” she says. “Behind those iron bars all their feelings, their youth, their passion to live is crushed. Everything is eroded bit by bit; they lose everything.”

Priya finds it hard to articulate just how much she has lost. “I lost my youthfulness, my passion to enjoy life,” she says. “You

Our vision

Is for a more peaceful and just world where human rights are recognised, violations of human rights are challenged, and torture and trauma survivors are supported.

Our purpose

ASeTTS aspires to provide holistic services that assist refugee survivors of torture and trauma to rebuild their lives.

About ASeTTS

A

120 About ASeTTS

SeTTS was established in 1992 to provide specialist mental health and rehabilitation services to asylum seekers and people from refugeelike backgrounds who have experienced torture or trauma in their country of origin, during their journey to Australia, or while in detention.

Support is provided to people of all ages through individual, family, group, intergenerational, or community services.

Our services and supports are designed for people who have arrived as refugees, asylum seekers, humanitarian entrants, people with permanent protection visas and people from these backgrounds who have become permanent residents or citizens in Australia.

ASeTTS is a member of the Forum of Australian Services for Survivors of Torture and Trauma (FASSTT); a network of eight specialist rehabilitation agencies that support survivors of torture and trauma.

FASSTT services are united by a shared approach to working with survivors of torture and trauma, and together access Program of Assistance to Survivors of Torture and Trauma (PASTT) funding from the Commonwealth Department of Health.

Each FASSTT agency contributes time, knowledge and resources to support and develop the forum. In 2021, the network formalised their working relationship through drafting and finalising a

Constitution and registering the network as a Company Limited by Guarantee.

The FASSTT Network includes the following member agencies: • Association for Services to Torture and Trauma Survivors (ASeTTS) - WA • Companion House – ACT • Foundation House – Victoria • Melaleuca Refugee Centre – Northern Territory • Phoenix Centre – Tasmania • Queensland Program of Assistance to Survivors of Torture and Trauma (QPASTT) – Qld • Service for the Treatment & Rehabilitation of Torture & Trauma Survivors (STARTTS) – NSW • Survivors of Torture and Trauma Assistance and Rehabilitation Service (STTARS) – SA ASeTTS is also a member of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT); a civil society organisation that specialises in torture rehabilitation and has member centres operating across 76 countries.

ASeTTS’ CEO is currently a member of the IRCT’s Health Advisory Board and is contributing to the development of practical resources and guidance to support the implementation of the IRCT’s Global Standards on Rehabilitation of Torture Victims. These were developed and

adopted by the IRCT global membership of torture rehabilitation centres between 2016 and 2020. Guidance and training will be rolled out to IRCT members in October 2021 on the anniversary of the standards being ratified.

Our values

We place importance on: Respect Client focus Teamwork Inclusion Accountability Ethics

Our services

Our qualified and highly experienced staff provide a range of direct services to survivors of torture and trauma their families and communities. These aim to diminish the impact of torture and trauma on survivors and enhance their opportunities to rebuild productive and meaningful lives. ASeTTS’ services include:

Torture and trauma counselling

We provide psychological assessments, psycho-therapeutic interventions and specialised counselling services to people of all ages from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds. Counselling services are available to individuals, couples, families and children for torture

and trauma related issues.

As part of delivering counselling services ASeTTS’ staff also provide: • Advocacy support • Referrals to other specialist or mainstream service providers • Referrals to ASeTTS’ consultant psychiatrist.

Specialised torture and trauma counselling services are provided to asylum seekers who are detained in Western Australian immigration detention centres (IDC), and alternative places of detention (APOD).

Services to young people

Consultant psychiatric services

Cultural transition services

Many of their stories are deeply personal and traumatic. Their willingness to share even a fraction of what they have endured is yet another measure of their strength and resilience.

We hope their bravery will, in turn, open the hearts of others.

We remain forever in their debt.

Complementary services and programs

The editor would also like to thank ASeTTS’ CEO Merissa Van Der Linden for entrusting her with such an important project.

What a privilege. Thank you, also, to all the interpreters and counsellors who helped make the subjects of this book feel at ease. And a huge thank you to Tracy Worthington, Executive Assistant extraordinaire, for helping navigate the innumerable spreadsheets, interview and photography sessions. We made it!

Our consultant psychiatrist brings 24 years of skill and experience to providing diagnosis and treatment to our clients and works with them to facilitates their recovery and rehabilitation. ASeTTS’ consultant psychiatrist co-manages clients alongside our counsellors

Social and community therapeutic groups

Social and community-based groups are facilitated with the aim of breaking social isolation and increasing the participation of torture and trauma survivors in broader society. Examples include the Men’s Group and Women Together Group.

Community development and community capacity building

For over a decade we have delivered training to new arrivals, families and communities to support their cultural transition to a new country and environment. This includes the Children in Cultural Transition and Families in Cultural Transition programs.

A range of targeted services and programs are designed and delivered to meet specific identified needs of ASeTTS’ clients – these services work alongside therapeutic services. Services and programs change and evolve to meet the needs of different clients, and community or language groups.

Professional development and training

We deliver high-quality professional development and training workshops to health, education and human services professionals and others who work with people from refugee or asylum seeker backgrounds, or who are in a position to assist survivors and their families. Our training aims to improve the relevance and responsiveness of services provided to refugees and torture and trauma survivors.

Acknowledgements ASeTTS would like to thank all the wonderful people who shared their experiences for this very special book.

Editor & writer: Julie Hosking, Edit Suite WA Photographer: Craig Kinder, f22 photography Designer: Cally Browning, Bare Creative

121 Acknowledgements

Community development programs are delivered in partnership with participating new and emerging communities. Their aims are to reduce collective trauma, build social capital, social cohesion and connectedness.

Community development programs and initiatives are co-designed with community groups and leaders and include (but is not limited to) leadership development programs, providing practical assistance to community groups e.g. how to becoming incorporated bodies, community consultation and general support aimed at enablement.

Our child and youth team deliver a range of services to support children and young people from refugee-like backgrounds, including those who are impacted by the experience of torture and trauma (direct or indirect).

Services include (but are not limited to) clinical supports, case work, support within schools, group and school holiday activities, understanding relationships, programs to support interest and engagement in education, and sexual/reproductive health.

‘We hope this book honours our clients, their families and communities. We hope it inspires conversation and action.’

In 1992, a passionate and committed group of professionals and community members started the Association for Services to Torture and Trauma Survivors (ASeTTS), acknowledging the support that humanitarian and refugee migrants needed as they settled into Western Australia.

For the past 30 years, ASeTTS has been dedicated to helping those who have experienced torture or trauma in their country of origin, during their flight to Australia, or while in detention.

30 Years, 30 Stories cannot possibly capture the depth and breadth of their experiences. But we are grateful to those who opened their hearts to give some insight into their world.

This book celebrates their strength and resilience, as well as the role of our staff, volunteers and communities in helping to rebuild lives.

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Association for Services to Torture and Trauma Survivors (ASeTTS) 286 Beaufort Street Perth WA 6000 • (08) 9227 2700

asetts.org.au