No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  ‘You’re supposed to ask them if they want to phone their family to let them know that they’ve arrived,’ she said, ‘and that was fine, but who picks up the cost of that? The first few times, I would say, yes, please phone your parents, but I need you to be brief. An international call costs a lot of money. They would pretend they couldn’t understand. They would talk and talk. I would have to say, “You need to hang up now.” Plus, you can’t really understand what they are saying. They might be saying anything! So after that happened once or twice, I changed tack. I would say, “We have the kind of telephone that doesn’t make international calls.” I would say, you need to email your family. And then, voilà, out would come the computer with the Skype and whatever else they all have. They were taking advantage, using my phone.

  ‘Speaking of the computer, you could not get them off it. Most of them came with their own computer, which is just as well because I once made the mistake of letting one of them use mine. He was so grateful. I thought he’d do a quick check of things but no, he was on it all day. I’d want to use the computer and he’d be glued to the screen, looking at this site and that site, all in his own language.’

  There were other things that troubled Marjorie.

  ‘The booklet that you get, it says to offer them a drink and a biscuit when they arrive. But what kind of biscuit? What kind of drink? I’d offer them tea. Indians love tea. That’s where it’s grown, isn’t it? They don’t want that. They want Coca-Cola. The Americanisation of the world, it’s complete.

  ‘Then you’re supposed to show them where the bathroom is. What they should have told us is that you also have to tell them how to use it! Some of them don’t close the door! They just do things differently.

  ‘They didn’t understand about not disturbing the peace. Again, I suppose, because of where they are from. They’re used to having no peace and quiet, everybody living all one on top of the other, making a lot of noise. I would explain to them: I need to sleep. I have various ailments. I can’t be suddenly woken in the night by the sound of chattering from your room. Because they’d be on Skype! Or else, one week into their stay here, they’d have gotten a mobile phone from somewhere – pre-paid – and they’d chat, chat, chat all night.

  ‘The supervisor said, “It’s normal, they want to talk to their friends. Young people are different. They sleep all day, and stay up all night!” It took too much out of me.

  ‘Then there was the problem of waste. They did not seem to understand how we must not waste things. One student in particular, he would leave the tap running. The supervisors had already told me, “Don’t lecture them so much,” so I gave him a copy of the Al Gore film on DVD. I said to him, listen to this man. Imagine how different a place the world would be if he’d won the election and not that idiot, George Bush.

  ‘I explained to him: we don’t want Australia to end up like India, all slums and no clean drinking water, but that is what will happen if you let the tap run. It’s a waste of resources. And he complained about that! The supervisor had to come again. She said it’s racist to say that. Racist! Me! I’m the least racist person in the world. I mean, deciding to stop with the students and take on the refugees, isn’t that proof of me not being racist? Because the way those refugees are demonised . . . the way people carry on, you’d think they were all terrorists or something.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Twenty-four hours after he landed at Sydney’s Mascot airport, Ali Khan was introduced to Marjorie. He’d been taken from the arrivals hall, given a bed for the night at a Salvation Army hostel in the CBD, and the meeting between the two of them was arranged for the next day.

  According to Marjorie, she began to suspect almost immediately that the placement would not work.

  ‘The first thing was, he looked nothing like I expected,’ she told me.

  ‘I had been told that he was African, Father Paul, and that he’d come from a camp in Tanzania. I expected somebody . . . taller. Black, obviously. I’d been looking at photographs of Masai tribes and the like. People from that part of the world. I’d been telling people, I will be like that lady who went to live with the Masai except the other way around. The Masai is coming to live with me! I was really looking forward to it. I was saying, at least I won’t have to get the step-stool to get things down from the top cupboards.

  ‘Then when I got there they introduced me to this . . . boy. He was not black. He was not tall. He had cuts all over his face. He had a kind of sink-hole, a large crater, in his head. And he didn’t say a word to me. He sat looking down at his shoes. I don’t know who gave him those shoes but they were bright white sneakers and it was like he could not stop looking at them.

  ‘I put my hand out. I said, “Hello there, young man.” He didn’t answer. I thought, what is going on? From what they’d told us, the refugees were supposed to be delighted to meet us. They’d won the lottery coming to Australia. Here I was, welcoming him to Australia. Giving him safe passage. Opening my home to him. But he didn’t say boo.’

  As part of her training for the home stay, Marjorie had attended several information evenings. She’d been shown slides of what life was like in the African refugee camps: the dirt floors, the UN four-wheel drives, women carrying water pails, men herding goats with sticks.

  ‘All the people in the videos were black,’ she told me. ‘Ali Khan was not black.’

  ‘They didn’t tell you he was albino?’

  ‘They didn’t tell me anything. You don’t get asked. You don’t get told. I got a name. That was it, a name. I didn’t even get any warning, just a phone call saying one refugee had arrived and whatever place had been organised for him in his own community hadn’t worked out. I thought that sounded suspicious. Why wouldn’t it work out? Why had his own people rejected him? They – DIMIA – told me that he was only sixteen and he wasn’t kin. That I understood. The kinship relationships are important. We had learned all about that. They told me, yours is a single boy, aged about sixteen. They said he was on his own and I thought, right, well, if I’m being called upon to help, I will help!’

  DIMIA explained that Marjorie would have to give Ali Khan his own room with all the basics: a bed, fresh linen, and space to store his personal items. She would also need to provide three meals a day, and assistance with various tasks as Ali Khan adapted to the Australian way of life. Marjorie was warned that he wouldn’t speak any English. Privately, the staff from DIMIA believed that Ali Khan was probably illiterate even in his own language.

  I guess it’s a credit to Marjorie that she wasn’t daunted. She is a big lady and she doesn’t find it easy to get around on her own feet, and taking on a boy of sixteen who speaks no English is no easy task. She told me that she made some posters to put up around the house, saying things like, ‘My GOAL is to ASSIST your placement to become FAMILIAR with the local area and CUSTOMS in a RELAXED and FRIENDLY household setting.’

  She wrote, ‘YOU are encouraged to SHARE information about YOUR home country and culture with ME.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure the people from DIMIA – that’s the Department of Immigration – thought I was mad,’ she chortled. ‘They came with Ali Khan to the house, and they said, he isn’t going to be able to read that. It’s the kind of negativity you’d expect from Howard government people. How else was he going to learn if we didn’t help him? I said, “But isn’t that why I’m here? To help with those things?”’

  On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that part of the reason that Marjorie was upset to see that Ali Khan wasn’t black was because he wouldn’t stand out on her landscape. She had signed up to the program hoping to take in refugees from the wars in Afganistan and Iraq, people in headscarves basically, that she could parade around, showing how tolerant she was, even if the Howard government wasn’t. Then she was told that her first refugee would in fact be Tanzanian. She’d absorbed that but, she told me, she contacted all her neighbours to let them know that ‘a tall black man will soon be arriving’.

 
‘I’d been very interested to see their reaction!’ she told me, leaning forward in her garden chair. ‘I thought, let’s see what they think about that! Because some of my neighbours are Liberal voters. They don’t want anyone coming to this country. I knew what they’d be thinking the first time they laid eyes on my refugee. I would have to explain who he was or they’d be thinking: who is that person in our neighbourhood? Is he going to cook the cat?’

  I had to ask her. I said, ‘Did you actually get that reaction?’

  ‘Oh, they don’t show their true colours,’ she said shaking her head. ‘It was the same with my family when I told them. My brother, he’s a tradesman, not at all sophisticated. Happy with his big-screen TV and his air-conditioning in every room. Doesn’t believe in global warming! Says it’s all a conspiracy. I told him, “I’ll be taking in some refugees! I’m disgusted with our government’s policy on these things.”

  ‘He said, “How do you know you’re not going to get a bunch of terrorists planning the jihadi, Marj?” He was joking around about it! Wouldn’t take me seriously. I told him, “It’s not the jihadi, it’s jihad, and it doesn’t mean terrorism. It means living as a proper Muslim, and Islam is a religion of peace!” Do you know what he said, Father Paul? He said, “Better hide the tea towels, Marj, or they’ll be wearing them on their head.” Ignorant.’

  I can’t say for certain whether Marjorie thought that Ali Khan would be Muslim but my guess would be that she wanted Ali Khan to be Muslim, to better make her point.

  ‘I just feel that those people are so discriminated against, we are such a racist country,’ she told me. ‘I wanted to show my guests – my Muslim guests – that not everyone in this country is like those people out in Cronulla with the Southern Cross tattoos. Many of us are very sympathetic.’

  Shortly before Ali Khan arrived, Marjorie received a visit from the government agency handling the home stays.

  ‘The main thing they wanted to inspect was the rooms I intended to put my refugee in,’ she said. ‘I showed them the room, the same one I’d had the students in. I did feel like saying, “Why do you need to inspect? What do they expect, some kind of five-star service?” They told me some people had been planning to put their refugees in sheds out the back. They said it can’t be a room that’s under renovation or a room with no plaster on the walls. It has to comply with the council code.

  ‘I said, “What do you think, that I’d put them in a shed outside?” They said some people were doing that, and calling it an extra bedroom. It’s the money, you see. DIMIA were paying $300 a week and that’s a lot of money to some people. They told me, “We have to tell some people everything: if the room is musty, we expect you to air it. The bed should have fresh sheets. If you live somewhere cold, provide a heater. If it’s hot, provide a fan. The most basic things.” I think they were pleased to have me. I didn’t need to be told those things.’

  The guidelines for the first few meetings between home stay hosts and the new arrivals were pretty clear, too.

  ‘I’d been told, you can’t just leave him. Don’t say, “Just make yourself at home,” and go out for the day. He will be nervous. It’s his first time out of Africa, and he won’t know anything. Like with the students, they told me, offer him a biscuit, so when he arrived, I offered him a biscuit. He didn’t even reply. I held it out for him. He wouldn’t even say no thank you or shake his head. Everyone knows how to shake their head.

  ‘They had told me to explain all the basics to him. Show him his room and the bathroom. Ask him if he’d like to take a shower. I couldn’t get an answer to any of those questions. I couldn’t get a single word out of him. He ate nothing. He said nothing. I have no idea why; he just didn’t.’

  Officers from DIMIA stayed with Ali Khan at Marjorie’s home for about 15 minutes before leaving them to it. Marjorie made her first call to the DIMIA support line less than eight hours later.

  ‘I said, “He still hasn’t said a word!” ’ she said.

  ‘They suggested that perhaps there was confusion over what Ali Khan was supposed to call me. I said, “Don’t be silly; I have told him you may call me Mrs Devlin,” but he looked at me like I was an alien. He hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t eaten anything. He had barely moved. It was like having a statue in the house. It was worse than that because I was conscious of him! He took up no space but so much space. Some people are like that; you are so conscious of them! I was conscious of him, sitting and not moving. I felt like I had to entertain him, but how? It was torture, Father Paul.’

  By week’s end, Marjorie made another four calls to the DIMIA support line: Ali Khan produces no washing, just wears the same clothes over and over; he doesn’t appear to sleep in the bed, the covers are never rumpled; I can’t get him to eat but I know that he does eat because when I go out and come back there are crumbs in the kitchen; he still hasn’t said a word.

  ‘The support worker said, “He obviously doesn’t speak any English, Mrs Devlin. Have you tried communicating, like with charades? Like when you meet somebody who speaks a different language? Make it fun!” I thought, you’re crazy, of course I’ve tried that.

  ‘I had taken him into the bathroom. I had shown him the egg-timer that I have on the wall, and explained how he needed to stick to the two-minute limit for showers. I turned the shower on, closed the door and left him in there. The water kept running. I thought, thank God, he’s going to have a wash. Five minutes, ten minutes later, the water was still running. I knocked on the door. I called out, “Ali Khan, remember the water restrictions!” Twenty minutes later, the water was still running! I was frantic. I couldn’t get through to anyone on the DIMIA hotline. I thought, what could he be doing in there?!

  ‘I had to call out over the back fence to my neighbour. The husband who lives there – he’s a businessman of some type, we hadn’t talked that often – said he’d come over and have a look. He banged on the bathroom door. Nothing. Finally I gave him permission to kick open the door. That’s how frantic I was. And do you know what we found when the door swung open, Father Paul? Ali Khan wasn’t even in the shower. He hadn’t even taken his clothes off. He was sitting on the floor – squatting, like the Vietnamese do – and the water was just running straight down the plughole. My neighbour told him, “Mate, you’re supposed to get under it.” I said, “Do you think he doesn’t understand?” And then do you know what happened? DIMIA told me I couldn’t be reimbursed for having to get the door fixed because I’d asked the neighbour to open it!’

  By the end of the first fortnight, Marjorie had started writing a list of things that Ali Khan was doing wrong. She had a copy, she told me, thumbing through the folder I’d taken outside for her. For a moment, it appeared to be lost among a hundred other dog-eared pages of complaints about this, that and the other – old letters Marjorie had written to her local council about the fact that it didn’t have a native tree policy; letters she’d written to the government on a range of issues – but finally she found it.

  I took it from her and began to read. Complaint number one said:

  I had to leave the house one afternoon. I am under instructions to provide Ali Khan with food. I put two Tupperware containers, one in the fridge and one in the pantry, marked “Snacks – Please Just Take One!”

  When I came home, all of them were gone, plus snacks I hadn’t approved for Ali Khan to eat!

  Complaint number two said:

  Ali Khan does not offer to help with the washing up. He also keeps the light on all night and wastes electricity.

  ‘That one about the electricity, that’s important,’ she said, pointing at it with her finger. ‘They said to me, he probably fears spirits! But he wasn’t even trying to get to sleep. I would go in there at night sometimes to turn off the light and Ali Khan would be sitting on the floor, wide awake, and the bed had never been slept in.

  ‘The DIMIA caseworker said that perhaps he doesn’t understand about getting under the covers. Not everybody sleeps the way we do in Australi
a. Perhaps you need to explain to him, this is how we sleep. We get into a bed and we get under the covers. How could I explain anything to somebody who would not talk to me?’

  The supervisor asked Marjorie whether it was possible to get Ali Khan a night-light, so he wouldn’t have to keep the main light on all night. Marjorie refused. When I asked why, she couldn’t really explain it, but I think I can: Marjorie is not a bad person. She thinks she’s a good person, but she’s an anxious person. She wanted to be warm and welcoming, but it was enormously stressful to her to actually have other people in her house, and to have to make adjustments in her own life to accommodate them.

  Maybe you’re thinking: but how could the dim glow, the comforting glow, of a night-light possibly bother Marjorie? It wouldn’t be the night-light. It would be having to get one. It would be knowing that it was on, wasting electricity – that alone created an immense amount of stress for her.

  ‘One of the reasons I didn’t get the night-light was I was starting to think Ali Khan was mentally ill,’ she told me.

  ‘The way he just avoided me, and did everything I told him not to do. I was starting to wonder how long I would have to tolerate it. On one hand, you want to do the right thing. On the other, how much is a person expected to put up with?’

  Marjorie would go to the farmer’s market and come home with a basket of carrots straight from the ground, some unwashed potatoes and an oval of bread in a brown paper bag, and there would be evidence that Ali Khan had left his room – there might be wee in the toilet, that he hadn’t flushed, probably not knowing what flushing was – but he never came out while she was there.

  Then, one afternoon about three weeks after Ali Khan arrived, Marjorie got on the phone and requested an emergency appointment with her caseworker – every home stay host also had a caseworker – who went out to the house to see what had happened. Marjorie explained the situation: she was the type who knew exactly where everything in the house was kept, and the corkscrew was missing.