However the sad thing was that I saw people getting sick and dying and all I could do was just stand, watch, cry and start walking again. There was nothing, nothing anyone could do to help except to give sympathy. Throughout this unforgettable, torturing and miserable journey my family and I walked and slept for seventy-two memorable, harsh and emotional days. We finally reached Turkey, were rescued and were sent back to our little town called Dohuk.
In 1996 my family decided it was time to leave the country for a new and better life for me and my sister. A life that could build a career for us with peace and freedom. A country that is able to recognise the rights of a human being and is able to count the votes for legal and political rights. So we left our homeland and headed to that disastrous place Turkey again. We stayed in Turkey for about three years waiting for an exemption from the Australian embassy and thanks to heavenly God and Australia we did get a straight ‘YES’.
In 1998 in October we reached Australia. At that time I felt I was in this whole new world. A world full of happiness and excitement. It was like the beginning of a new life. Like the opening of a new chapter in a book. A life that can build my future with peace and not war.
The airport at Sydney is not really a pretty place. It’s very busy and surrounded by factories and warehouses, but to me it’s the most beautiful and wonderful place in the entire world because of what it represents—my freedom.
Somehow we managed to settle in, but trust me it wasn’t easy. Looking for a place with the difficulty of not knowing much English is the hardest thing to do. It was like running around in circles.
The worst thing I faced was that first day of school. The scariest day in my entire life. The thing that made me get scared was not knowing how to speak English. The fear of going to class was so strong that my ears and cheeks went red just like a tomato. But fact is, after learning how to speak English, I feel like a native Australian. I just love it!
Another difficulty I faced was finding friends and getting to know them. People in Australia are friendly but are very different to where I came from. It was very hard for me to try and open up to friends and get to know them. I felt this way because I was scared of what they might think of me. A freak! Just because I think different to what they think. My sister and I used to hang around together. I remember that one day we were sitting by ourselves eating lunch, and suddenly we saw this girl coming towards us who said, ‘Hey girls, would you like to hang around with me and my friends?’ I replied with a big smile on my face, ‘Yes, thank you. That’s very nice of you.’ Since then, even though I changed schools I am still friends with that girl and she is my best friend.
Reality in Australia, the attitude, the way of living and honesty is so different from where I came from. As they always say, Australia has freedom and that’s what makes Australia a whole lot different from Iraq. The word ‘Freedom’ does not exist there. I managed to fit in with friends and the lifestyle and I am continuing to manage my future, hopefully with a successful education so I would live the life that my parents brought me here to have. From the day I was born until the day I die.
Today my family and I are citizens; we are Australians. We go to school, my family pays tax, we are loyal to the country that gave us liberty and hope. I am very thankful for everything this country has done for me and my family. Coming to Australia is the best thing that ever happened to me in my entire life. Knowing this is the destiny and opportunity to fulfil my dreams, every day I wake up and look at beautiful sunshine. I think and wonder what is still ahead of me. I guess this is life, you never know what is ahead of you. Never.
Out of Italy
by Rosie Clare Giudici, aged 12
‘Excuse me,’ asked a man with a troubled frown, ‘do you know a boy here called Sergio?’ The young boy looked up into the man’s eyes and replied, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ For the first time in nine years Sergio looked into the eyes of his father.
In 1948 Sergio, who was ten years old, arrived in Melbourne with his mother. He had travelled for twenty-eight days on an Egyptian boat called the Al Sudan from Marseilles in France. They had fled Italy to be reunited with Sergio’s father, Bruno, who had fled the fascist regime nine years earlier.
Life in Italy during the early 1940s had been difficult. Italy’s leader, Mussolini, was forcing Italians to join up and fight with Hitler’s army. Bruno opposed this and feared being persecuted by Mussolini for not joining the army. As a result Bruno and his brother, Ugo, along with many other men from the surrounding villages fled Italy and travelled to countries such as France, America and Australia to seek refuge. On arriving in Australia Bruno was interned along with other people of Italian and German descent and worked for nine years on construction projects around Australia. After the war he found work in Tasmania on the hydro-electric projects.
Sergio grew up in a village called Sernio in the Northern Italian Alps, in the region of Valtellina. Here he herded the cows up into the Alps every summer to fatten them on the luscious grass. He helped milk them and make cheese. He learnt how to butcher meat and make sausages and how to grow grapes. He attended elementary school and skied to school in winter with his friends.
Sergio witnessed the outstanding courage of his mother, who after the war had tried on several occasions to get on a boat that would take them to Australia. They had to travel down through the mountains and all the way to Marseilles, the port in France. Every time they arrived, they were not allowed on. Then one day, whilst waiting in Marseilles, his mother heard on the radio that a ship was coming into berth. She raced off to the ticket office and bought two tickets before anyone else and this time she knew she had made it.
After arriving in Port Melbourne and being reunited with each other again, Bruno, Elsa and Sergio hopped on another boat and sailed off to Tasmania. Once there they were then transferred to a remote destination in the Central Highlands of Tasmania called Butler’s Gorge. They had a small house in the village and everyone was exceptionally friendly. There was not a very large variety of food but before long the immigrants began to arrange for the varieties that Italians know and love to be imported. The family was so happy to be reunited again. They lived in hope and faith in God.
Gradually the number of Italian and other European families increased in Butler’s Gorge. Sergio attended primary school there for two years. After only one year at primary school, Sergio won the school prize for English! When he reached high school he boarded at New Town High School and later became house master.
After graduating from high school Sergio enrolled at the University of Tasmania where he became one of the founding students of St John Fisher College, a catholic residential college.
While at a youth function at the Springs Hotel on Mt Wellington, Sergio met a woman called Rossalyn Hundt. Rossalyn had come down from Queensland on a working holiday. These two romantic people fell in love and decided to get married. That same year Sergio won the Rhodes scholarship, the first migrant person in Tasmania to do so. He studied a PhD in Engineering at Oxford University in England for three years, and for three years Rossalyn waited patiently for him to return. On 18th January 1964 they were married.
After returning from Oxford he was employed by the Hydro-Electric Commission, based in Hobart. One of his major achievements and first big projects was the design of the Gordon Dam, a concrete arch dam.
While working for the Hydro, he pioneered the design of concrete faced rock filled dams and his expertise in that area was in demand all over the world. Later in his career he became the founding manager of the consulting arm of the Hydro and in this role he travelled extensively on the business of major engineering projects, in countries such as China, Laos, Indonesia and the Philippines. Sergio was also involved in the Italian community, helping these people with immigration issues and local concerns.
He was a great friend of Archbishop Guilford Young and James McCauley, the famous Tasmanian poet and English professor with whom he organised many seminars and conferences. Sergi
o attended mass at St Mary’s Cathedral and was very involved in the parish. He was very devoted to his faith and the Church.
But to concentrate only on his professional career would be to only reveal half the man. Sergio loved hosting celebrations with family and friends and was never happier than when opening a bottle of wine to share with his four sons and three daughters.
In early 2000 he retired from the Hydro after thirty-seven years’ service but still maintained an active role in the engineering community. On 27th April 2002, whilst consulting in New Zealand he became suddenly ill and died. He was sixty-four years old.
This beautiful man was my grandad and I’ll always hold the fondest memories in my heart. The way he used to nibble his grandchildren’s ears; wrestle with the toddlers on the floor; blow raspberries in our ears; slump asleep in his armchair after Christmas feasts. I will especially remember wonderful food and the bottles of wine he would open, the way he used to sing louder than the opera on the record, and the way he just loved every minute he spent with his family.
He is sadly missed by his wife, mother, sister, seven children and their husbands and wives, and by his thirteen grandchildren.
Uhuru
by Simon Pitt, aged 16
As the battle started, mortars, grenades and machine-gun bullets tore into a line of 1200 government troops. Clouds of smoke and panicked birds billowed from the ground below. Standing under an African thorn tree, the rebel commander looked on, as the carnage unfolded on the Sudanese savannah. It is 1983, and the first day of death had begun, ending a nine-year ceasefire in Africa’s largest country, and longest war.
Meanwhile, in the remote town of Bor, buried deep in southern Sudan, Chol traced circles in the sand which dominates the landscape. A young man wielding a sub-machine gun walked past Chol’s hiding spot, beads of sweat glistening on his forehead under the legendary Saharan sun. Chol was well used to the formidable presence of militiamen around his hometown, but nonetheless, he felt a chill run down his spine as this enormous specimen of a man marched by. This man was not like the others, but a black militiaman in the pay of Sudan’s Arab regime, further symptomatic of the latest outbreak of hostilities between the Islamic north and Christian south.
Walking through the park, his brothers’ light-hearted chatter reverberated down the street. It was then that Chol heard the distant throbbing of aeroplane propellers. Only nine years old, Chol had not witnessed the turbulent end of Britain’s influence in his country, nor the harrowing beginnings of Sudan’s civil war, but even so, Chol knew that the ominous whirring he heard approaching meant no good.
It was on that day that the bombing began. Soviet-owned planes swept across the small city, leaving in their wake a path of devastation. Pilots would sweep so low that their unfaltering faces, hardened by government propaganda, were visible in the cockpit. Chol hurried home from the park, petrified by the images that now filled his head. All too aware of the dangers of staying, Chol’s father immediately instructed him and his three younger brothers, to run.
Chol fled on foot, and amidst the confusion, he was separated from his brothers, whom he would not see for many years to come. It soon became clear that escaping would be hard and although Chol began his flight from persecution with hundreds of others, he had to go on as if he were alone. Of those he began with, many did not make it. Realising they could expect no sympathy, they wearily pulled themselves from the track to die.
They did not travel on the road, because of the constant threat posed by the presence of militiamen, both those of the government and the many local warlords, and so instead they traced a treacherous path through the savannah. Food and water were short, and the fugitives strictly rationed what they could carry in makeshift containers on their heads. Chol had no shelter, no money, no clothes other than what he had on, and had to forage for the little food and water he got. The hundreds Chol went with did not offer him any help—each person struggled making their own way—but they did offer him someone to follow, and this gave him hope.
It took three long months to reach the Ethiopian border. Hostile mercenaries were rampant. They would take whole crowds trying to cross the border and order them to hand over money and valuables of any kind or be killed.
In spite of the odds, young Chol finally arrived at Dimma one day late in 1983. Hemmed in by seemingly boundless expanses of desert on all sides, this was the day that Chol entered a refugee camp and became a refugee. Chol came to the camp alone, and at just nine years of age self-sufficiency was a characteristic deeply imbued in his character. He was briefly screened, before being pushed out into the unwelcoming world that was the Dimma refugee camp.
The conditions in the camp were nothing short of horrific. To begin with, the time Chol spent there, he spent alone. For the first few nights, he slept on a cramped and hardened piece of earth beneath the starry expanse of African sky which spread out above him. Chol soon set about constructing himself a small mud hut. It was hard work and he laboured alone for days under a violent sun to complete the hut that for the next ten years, he would make his home.
And for ten years, the yellow dunes would reign supreme, determined to fetter his attempts at moving forward. The yellow sand permeated everything, working its way through gaps in the walls and roof, each morning leaving a thin film of fine yellow grains around the place where his head had been. He would feel it against his face and in his hair and in the inside of his mouth too. The nights were cold.
There was no sense in talking to anyone about things. Everyone was in the same position. They all just wandered about like ghosts, the desert looming either side of them. There were crowds everywhere, but everyone was alone.
One day Chol discerned that everything was gradually changing for the better. This was the day it was announced that rudimentary schooling was to commence for the children in the camp. Long deprived of the simple joys of childhood, it was the first excitement Chol had felt in many months.
To begin with, they were divided into classes of fifty, took their lessons under what little shelter the thorn trees around the camp could offer and wrote with charcoal on cardboard packaging. Soon Chol was fortunate enough to be allocated a sponsor, and was then allowed to go to a school in town. Here he completed his education whilst living in the refugee camp. Chol wanted to pursue medicine, but could not afford the prohibitive costs of study, and so he went on to do a teaching diploma. It was at that time, in the horrendous conditions of Dimma refugee camp that Chol met Ariet.
Ariet’s first husband had been killed some years earlier, and she was living as a widow when she first arrived at the camp. Their courtship was brief: an Ethiopian refugee camp was no place for romance.
The camp’s conditions were still unimaginably horrific, but Chol had finally found strength through the happiness his wife’s companionship gave him. Chol’s newly-wed bride soon announced that she was expecting their first child, and several months after that, they brought a beautiful young girl, Hasana, into the world.
Chol’s lowly mud hut in Dimma refugee camp was hardly a proper place to bring up a child, and come 1994, war had broken out anew in Ethiopia in the wake of Eritrea’s recent secession. Security at Dimma crumbled in the following weeks, and Chol, along with Ariet, Hasana, and fifteen other friends from the camp decided to move on.
Thus began the soul-destroying journey which lay ahead of him. As with his escape from Sudan over ten years earlier, Chol, his wife and friends fled on foot. Again, they could not follow the roads for danger of persecution, and again they had no money, water or food. This time, however, Chol was charged with the added responsibility of protecting his wife and six-month-old daughter, and they were ill-prepared for the conditions ahead.
The water was bad; any that was found had to be drunk and that which was left over, they had to carry on their heads in whatever container they could fashion at the time. En route, many were plunged into a ruthless cycle of poor health and those who were relatively well had to care for thos
e who were not. Many amongst the group had badly blistered feet and everyone removed their clothing to use as bandages. In the cold and hungry nights, and the hot and hungry days, Hasana cried hopelessly for food as Chol carried her in a makeshift sling on his back. This continued for three and a half months as the small group walked towards their final destination, the Kenyan border.
When they finally reached the border, the Kakuma refugee camp, they were not alone. Indeed, there were 96,000 other refugees from the neighbouring countries of Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan—all thrust into turmoil by the political climate that pervades much of Africa to this day. Here, Chol was tearfully reunited with three of his brothers, Artem, Kabira and Abraham, whom he had neither seen nor been able to communicate with for many years. Moreover, it was the first time that Chol had ever met his thirteen year-old brother, Abraham. This was a moment of great joy and pride for Chol. All the same, not all was well at Kakuma.
Without sufficient food, water or shelter, tensions between the hundreds of ethnic groups ran high, and affrays were a regular occurrence in the camp. Likewise, situated close to the Kenyan border, the number of militiamen from neighbouring countries was of epidemic proportions. Hundreds of innocent refugees were killed—for their gold teeth, their Christianity, or for no reason at all.
At the camp, Chol and Ariet were processed by the UNHCR and so began their uphill battle to be accepted in a Western country as refugees seeking political and religious asylum. While it would seem that for many others of the 96,000 in his company, providence was not on their side, Chol was fortunate enough to be processed relatively quickly, waiting only three years for Australia’s eventual notification of acceptance. Within a few short weeks, the Australian government had arranged the necessary flights and Chol was embarking on the most important journey of his life.
Dark Dreams Page 11