My Journey Toward Afghanistan from a Detention Center
You’ll never find out what people are truly
like just by reading about them on the news – you find out by going to them, and
simply being with them. In 2013, when I first began seeing the news and debate
about the heated issue of asylum seekers and refugees coming to Australia by
boat, I figured, I won’t know the full
story until I see these people in person. The answer to this dilemma was
simple, I will find them and say hello
for myself. So I Googled up ‘detention centers in Melbourne’ and found that
the only one I was allowed to visit was the MITA detention center, which housed
children, women and families in transit, waiting for their bridging visa or
asylum-seeker status to be approved. Even though you couldn’t just turn up and
try to visit people you didn’t know, by God’s grace, I managed to do just that.
I found a page on Facebook made of people
who were visiting detention centers and starting up various initiatives to
assist new arrivals. I posted my interest, asking for advice on how to go about
a visit. It ‘so happened’ that a friend of mine was on that page. As you can
see from my life, these instances of things ‘so happening’ tend to occur quite
often… Maybe it is in direct correlation to the prayers I ‘so happen’ to pray.
With this Facebook friend who happened to be on the page, truth was that I
didn’t even know her very well since we met only once at a camp for Sudanese
refugee youth. Still, she had kindly responded to my inquiry and said I could
come with her for my first visit. Since she already knew some people in the
detention center, I could pretend that I was also one of their visitor friends.
Once I made the first entry, I would be able to meet other refugees in the
visitor room and on future visits, list them as the friends I wanted to visit. So,
that’s exactly what happened!
I didn’t know what to expect on my first
visit. It was quite formal, and not at all unpleasant as some people might
think. I had to introduce myself to the detention center security at the front
desk, fill my details in a form and name the people I was there to visit. They
asked me to store my phone and bag in a locker so I took nothing in with me.
When I walked into the visitors’ lounge room, I found myself in a large room
with air-conditioning, ambient warm lights, sofas, some coffee tables, and a
tea counter for visitors to make a cup of tea or coffee. It was nicer than I expected.
That day seemed to be a busy evening filled
with visitors coming in and out over the two-hour visiting period. There were
children playing around, mothers talking in a stream of their own languages –
Dari, Urdu, Singhalese. There were also single men huddled together in a
corner, chattering quietly, largely keeping to themselves. My friend introduced
me to a few people she knew. But soon enough, I was making my own friends and
trying to hear their stories with the simplest English questions I could use.
Over about 3 months, I frequently took the
long one-and-a-half-hour train and bus ride to Broadmeadows – one of the most
multi-ethnic and culturally diverse suburbs in Melbourne – where the detention
center was. One of my first friends was a single Iranian young woman who was seeking
asylum in Melbourne, still in the process of interviews, and waiting for her
bridging visa to be issued. She was sitting quietly amongst a boisterous young
Afghan family – they had no father with them, just a mom and her 5 children. They
came by boat. I later also befriended a few Persian families and young Afghan asylum
seekers, some who were living in Iran, Pakistan or Indonesia before coming here.
A cool thing that happened on one of the
visits was an encounter I had with a detention center translator and officer,
an Afghan man who turned out to be a musician who wrote his own songs and
played the harmonium. We exchanged contacts since I told him I was a musician
too, and later in the year, I was invited to his large Afghan engagement party
where I met his family and his beautiful fiancée. They invited me to perform
and sing. I remember standing on the stage with the keyboard in front of me,
singing one of my songs – There’s A
Freedom – to a bewildered crowd of Afghans, men seated in the front of the
auditorium, and a sea of women wearing white headscarves in the other half of
the hall. I felt like I’d walked into a different world – a microcosm of
Afghanistan in Melbourne. Yes, these places exist. You simply have to find
these wonderful folks and be invited into their space – if they feel you are
their friend, and not just some do-gooder trying to ‘help’ them or make a story
out of them!
Around the same time that I visited the
detention center, through my own Google research, I found out about an English
camp specially for immigrant and refugee youth. I decided to volunteer for it
and that was where I met some exceptional Afghan young people who had already
been living in Melbourne for a few months or years. In that wonderful camp
context, we were able to connect more, unlike at the detention center, where communication
was limited to the visitors’ lounge room. (And truth was, most of the people
stuck in that transit center were hesitant to share the extent of their
journeys or life stories because it could negatively affect their application
for asylum or refugee status.)
One of the young women I met at the English
camp – Setara, meaning ‘star’ in Dari – has become one of my dearest Afghan
friends in Melbourne. I knew from the moment I said hi that we could be like
sisters. Even though she was only 17, I felt she had lived a whole lifetime and
had a story to tell. I didn’t hear about it all at once, it simply trickled out
through our conversations and our friendship over many months. Almost ten years
ago, things were really bad in her home country and her father had to escape
the Taliban. When he alone made it to Australia as an asylum seeker, it took
another 6 years until he was able to bring his wife and children over on
reunification grounds. Setara would tell me how difficult those 6 years were,
where her mother had to take care of all of them, plus some other cousins. They
all slept in their small house with mud floors, cramped into rows altogether. She
barely got a chance to go to school then. But now she is safe, in Australia, and
she’s still trying to get a hold of the English language. When she first arrived,
she couldn’t speak or write a single alphabet! Now her big family – with two
other sisters and four brothers, two of whom were married with kids– are living
altogether in the same suburban house, and doing very well. In recent years,
after graduating from highschool, she chose to study her Bachelor of Early
Childhood Education. We’ve often met up at a café or her home to go through her
assignments and I’d help expand her thinking by initiating discussion about
educational ideas and concepts that were challenging in terms of her grasp of the
language. She improved over time. I helped her with editing as well, since I
was also in the line of education and completing my Master of Music Teaching at
Monash University.
In 2016, when Setara was going to visit her
homeland, she asked if I wanted to join her family. I got really excited about
the prospect. Unfortunately, I couldn’t, due to university. I remember checking
the flights and really considering it. But it wasn’t yet time. Nevertheless, I
felt certain in my heart that very soon, Afghanistan would be in my sights.
As I now trace the winding road of my
unexpected journey towards Afghanistan and its beautiful people – the way it started
with a small desire to ‘find out more’ by hearing their stories and sitting
with them over tea in a detention center; how it became a reality through my
willingness to travel the long distance to the opposite side of the city to
enter an unknown space and a more dangerous neighborhood; how those first steps
progressed into friendships with families who received their bridging visas and
started to make a new life in Australian suburbs; how it led me to make the
prayer that one day I would go to Afghanistan and see with my own eyes the land
that these friends of mine have harrowingly escaped – my heart fills with
thankfulness that truly, people are really not that unreachable or unknowable
if we stop seeing them that way. The first step begins with you crossing the chasm
– walking over that initial barrier of uncertainty, of cultural difference, of perceived
danger.
Upon reflection, I see that I began my
journey towards Afghanistan not this year, but many years back when I was 17
and began reading Afghan biographies, then a few years ago at 20 when I ventured
to the detention center on my own, and earlier this year at 24 when I chose to
bring myself and my music to the very land itself. Now here I am. It didn’t
just magically happen. Instead, as one would expect, it miraculously unfolded
over a period of winding years, preparing me to know and love a people who hold
a vastly different orientation of cultural traditions and societal rules. The
journey is always long, but you never quite feel it because you’re meeting
people and going through challenges along the way that take up space in your
heart.
Concerning the whole refugee crisis (and
debate), I want to voice a small thing. I feel like people make a huge deal
about them – specially emphasizing and calling them refugees, giving them that
pitiable label as if that’s all they’d ever done with their lives. But really,
I feel like we should just go about the humble business of reaching out and
helping them, recognizing their histories and their skills and talents. We
should also get on with this work without spending too much time blaming
everything on our flawed governments. I believe we need a balanced view of
things, and one that includes action on our part, however small or simple. The
wonderful people I met at the detention center were often frustrated that their
visa process were taking so long, and it’s true, some people fall through the
cracks. They have been languishing for far too long without progress – but at
the same time, there were many
families and individual asylum seekers who received the immense and timely assistance
they deserved as well, and they settled into a new life with a lot of social
help – both officially and also informally through various charity groups and
kind Australians. Some people focus on demonizing the detention center and the
policies that keep people stuck in it, and that may be an important area of focus
for them, but for me, I’d like to see both sides of the coin. I’ve met ‘refugees’
who had the money to pay their way and get smuggled by boat to Australia. As
harrowing as the journey was, they did have the money and the means to escape
their countries in that way. There were and remain many others who have no
money and no means; those who are still languishing somewhere in an IDP camp or
a UNHCR camp in Indonesia or Turkey or elsewhere. How do we help them? I realize that I’m just speaking
in generalities, even now – and that this is such a complex situation. But then,
it is all the more important that we investigate thoroughly and listen to people
on all sides to acquire a balanced view.
Even as we acknowledge that our governments
are flawed in their policies, we must also see that there are some who are
trying to do something. That something may not always be the best course of
action or solution, but does anyone have the better way out of this mess? My
take is, rather than blame another group – let’s find out, together. It’s
difficult – to balance the developing combination of research, policy and
on-the-ground action, and to foster dialogue between different groups and
governments. Maybe that is where we are failing perennially. But I believe that
in the ‘finding out’, we enter into this mess with an attitude of humility –
and it goes without saying that the process must involve the very people we are
trying to help. Often it seems like people in high places are making all these big
decisions in their costly conferences and meetings and debates about the people
who need our help, but sadly, the very people in low places are left out of the
conversation. That is the missing link in all our wonderful and important ‘initiatives’
and projects these days. That’s why I love the example of Jesus – he always
walked among the people, talked with them, ate with them, touched the
untouchables.
Ultimately, I think my ‘active’ philosophy
is to simply get into the thick of it – the dirt, the grime, the pain, the
poverty – and in that place of unknowable uncertainties, find that all other
lies, accusations, discomforts, pains, histories, differences, eventually fade
(or come into proper focus) in the face of the truth carried by the real person
or people.
[Cover Art: Koerdisch Nieuws, Netherlands Refugee Art]
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