Amplifying refugee voices

Born stateless, Jeanine Hourani is inspiring others through the power of storytelling.

BY JOCELYN PRIDE

Jeanine Hourani (TC 2013) believes in luck, even though luck hasn’t always been on her side. ‘I often joke that there are lots of other things I would’ve loved to inherit other than statelessness, but it’s the luck of the draw and you just have to make the best of whatever you get,’ she says with a light-up-any-room smile. ‘You don’t decide the country you’re born into.’

It’s this glass half-full outlook that’s at the core of the can-do attitude Jeanine exudes in her work with refugees.

Born in 1994, in Bahrain, Jeanine became the third generation of her family to endure statelessness. ‘My grandfather was displaced from Palestine and walked to Syria where he lived in a refugee camp. My dad was born in the camp,’ she says.

Although Jeanine’s mother is Lebanese, at the time it wasn’t possible for a Lebanese passport to follow through the maternal line, so her family migrated to Australia in 1997 under the skilled worker points scheme.

Jeanine was naturalised in 2000, and after completing a few years in primary school, she and her family went back to Bahrain, then to the UAE where she finished secondary school. ‘It was at this point my parents wanted me to return to Australia to attend a college. I didn’t even know what a college was,’ Jeanine admits.

However, something in the back of her mind triggered a memory. ‘The previous year, one of my Melbourne friends posted on social media that they were going to Trinity College. So, in a way, it was just luck I ended up somewhere that was a perfect fit for me.’

From the get-go, Jeanine embraced the community feel of Trinity. ‘In my first year, I started volunteer tutoring and by third year I was elected community representative on the TCAC.’

While studying for an honours degree in biomedicine, Jeanine immersed herself in community projects at Trinity; the more she became involved, the more it reaffirmed her career trajectory into the non-profit sector.

It was then that a moment shared with a college friend narrowed Jeanine’s focus even further – it was the moment when she disclosed her background for the first time.

‘One day, I was walking around Princes Park with a Trinity friend and I told her how I came to Australia and became an Australian. She stopped in her tracks. I could see the impact the story had on her – I was humanising a refugee experience.’

This moment formed the premise for Jeanine to approach the grassroots, non-profit organisation Road to Refuge in 2016 with an idea for a project. ‘I wanted other young refugees to have the opportunity to tell their story on their own terms and in their own words.’

Fittingly, her project was titled ‘In My Own Words’ and is now the flagship program of Road to Refuge where, through a series of workshops, participants develop the skills to be able to express their story. ‘We’ve had participants feature in movies and others have had their stories and poetry published. If we keep doing this in media outlets, art galleries and film festivals, they end up having a collective impact.’

Since developing In My Own Words, Jeanine has gone on to become the director of Road to Refuge. Although she feels there’s a long way to go in changing public perceptions and challenging preconceived notions and negative rhetoric, Jeanine believes the program is gaining traction through understanding and diversity of experiences.

‘If everyone hears a story like mine, it decreases the stigma around refugees and people seeking asylum. I wish I’d seen refugee stories on film screens or in books when I was growing up. It takes a story to displace a story.’

In 2020, Jeanine helped Road to Refuge launch a new project, ‘Shifting the Story’, to encourage refugees to tell stories of how they’ve been impacted by the pandemic.