Touch the Sun
Page 20
A charity picked up on his idea and trained people to make and install them, and now Moser’s bottle-lights light up more than 350,000 homes without electricty in over fifteen countries around the world!
It’s not only Moser who is finding ways to bring great simple ideas to people who need them most. Ann Makosinski, a fifteen-year-old Canadian schoolgirl, invented the first ever torch that doesn’t need batteries or solar panels and instead runs on just the heat of your body. When the torch touches your skin, it lights up.
There are lots more simple and amazing inventions out there, which you can research yourself. Maybe someday you will invent one too!
People all over the world need shelter, sanitation, clean water, education, and many more necessities that are basic human rights. Most inventors spend their time making things like the latest-model phones or heated leather car seats, because expensive, fancy inventions make people rich. But simple, effective inventions can save lives.
Alfredo Moser never became rich from the bottle-light, but he has a huge sense of pride about it. ‘I’d never have imagined [it would help so many],’ he said in an interview. ‘It gives you goose-bumps to think about††’.
Return to scene 17 to continue with the story.
†† Alfredo Moser in ‘Bottle Light Inventor Proud to Be Poor’, by Gibby Zobel, BBC World Service, Uberaba, Brazil, BBC News Magazine, 13 August 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23536914
FACT FILE:
PEOPLE SMUGGLERS
A ‘people smuggler’ is someone who helps other people to cross a border in secret without the required documents. People smugglers may or may not be paid for the work they do.
People smugglers might be trying to help you, or they might be criminals who just want to make money from desperate people seeking safety. They might be reliable and get you safely across the border, or they might take your money and run, leaving you to your fate. They might even sell you as a slave, or hold you hostage until your relatives give them more money. Because of these risks, it is very, very scary to put your life in a people smuggler’s hands.
Desperate people use people smugglers. Often a whole family will sell everything they own just to get one member to safety. They risk a dangerous journey because their home is even more dangerous, and a safe option to escape is not available to them.‡‡
Millions of people around the world have either been sent to their deaths or had their lives saved by a people smuggler. If your grandparents escaped Europe during World War II, or if your parents came to Australia at the end of the Vietnam War, maybe you are only reading these words right now thanks to them trusting their lives to a people smuggler.
If we could do these three things, then refugees would not need to use people smugglers so much:
1. Make refugees’ home countries peaceful.
2. Give the neighbouring countries extra support so refugees can build new lives there.
3. Make visas and transport to Western countries much more readily available.
It will take a lot of time, goodwill and dedication to achieve those three things, but it can be done.
Return to scene 27 to make your choice.
‡‡ Those who can’t afford a people smuggler may end up killed, or living as ‘internally displaced people’, which means they live like refugees within their own country.
FACT FILE:
LIFE IN LIMBO
All over the world, asylum seekers and refugees live in countries like Malaysia, Kenya, Turkey, Indonesia, and many others. These countries give limited protection and opportunities for refugees, and visas to resettle in Western countries are so rare that most refugees will never get one. Unable to go home, unable to reach a country that will give them full citizenship, these refugees may spend the rest of their lives ‘in limbo’.
Imagine living in a country where it was illegal for you to work, where you couldn’t ever go to school, where you might be sent to jail at any time for just being in the country, and where you couldn’t go to a hospital if you got sick. How would you survive? How would you make a future for your children in such a place? This is the reality of life for thousands of refugees and asylum seekers around the world.
Even some asylum seekers who live in Australia feel as though they are in ‘limbo’ here while they wait for the government to hear their case and grant them a permanent visa.
It may seem strange, but many host countries actually don’t want to offer laws and services that would make life easier for refugees, because they don’t want to encourage too many refugees to come there.
Many countries would prefer to make it safe for refugees to return to their own countries instead – but to do this, we would have to make a huge global effort to eradicate all famine and war. Can it be done?
In the future, because of climate change, it’s possible that we will also have ‘climate refugees’ who can never return home because their homes are underwater, or stricken by never-ending drought. No country currently has any laws to deal with ‘climate refugees’, because it hasn’t happened yet.
How can we do our share to help and to be a world leader in the future?
Return to scene 34 to make your choice.
FACT FILE:
AUSTRALIA’S IMMIGRATION POLICY
Every country has the right to make its own laws about who to let into their country, how many people can come, and who can go on to be offered citizenship of that country. These are called a country’s immigration laws.
In Australia, there’s a big debate about whether we should take more, or fewer, refugees than we do (between 13,000 and 20,000 per year from 2010 to 2017). Some say we can’t afford it and should take less; others say it’s our duty as a wealthy country to help more of those in need. Long-term studies show that refugees usually do lots of good in their new homes – bringing new culture and generating money of their own – but some Australians fear people different to them will ‘take over’.
Imagine you have control over immigration into Australia. There are 65.3 million people without a safe home who would like to live here – nearly three times as many people as Australia’s entire population. How many refugees will you let in – and how will you decide who gets to come first? This is a thorny problem that even the world’s greatest leaders can’t solve.
Some refugees are given a visa for Australia before they arrive. Other asylum seekers come without a visa, and although they have a legal right to seek safety, in 1992 Australia started holding asylum seekers in detention centres in Australia while their claims were processed. In 2001, Australia introduced a new law: to send asylum seekers to offshore detention.
Australia set up two offshore detention centres: one on Nauru (a tiny island in the Pacific), and another on Manus Island (in Papua New Guinea). The centres are intended to put people off attempting to reach Australia by boat – by showing them they will be sent to an offshore detention centre instead if they try.
Both major political parties have sent asylum seekers, including children, to offshore detention in the years since 2001. Sometimes teenage boys have been mistaken for adult men and detained with the adults for some time; this happens in one of the scenes in this book. Hundreds of asylum seekers have been held in offshore detention for years, with no hope of reaching a safe country, and still too afraid to go home. Waiting in limbo, under immense mental pressure, without decent medical care or education, has driven many asylum seekers to despair.
Meanwhile, at the time this book went to print (January 2018), the government has also cut hundreds of millions of dollars from Australia’s foreign-aid budget, and greatly reduced the numbers of humanitarian visas Australia offers to those waiting in refugee camps overseas and in ‘transit’ countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.
While some people are pleased that Australia’s policies are keeping asylum seekers out, others claim that we have turned our backs on those in need. But ‘tough’ immigration policies only exist because they seem popular with th
e voting Australian public.
Are these laws popular with you? If not, how are you going to let the government know about it? And what do you think should be the alternative to the ‘Pacific Solution’?
Return to scene 36 to continue with the story.
FACT FILE:
INTERVIEW WITH HANI ABDILE
Hani Abdile is a poet and an asylum seeker who travelled alone from Somalia to Australia when she was only seventeen years old. Many of the scenes in this book are based on Hani’s memories, and the poems on pages 122–123, 265–266, 285–286, 292–293 and 302 are written by her.
EMILY: Hani, the first question I want to ask you is: What does freedom mean to you?
HANI: Freedom means a lot to me. If freedom could be a person, I would like to be her slave.
EMILY: What do you think freedom means when you’re an asylum seeker?
HANI: I think freedom means everything for every individual. It doesn’t matter what kind of situation they are in. It’s just something that you really need in your life.
Sometimes in the Christmas Island detention centre, I used to feel like I didn’t have the freedom to think, you know? Even when you go outside [in the yards or on excursion] there, you’re kind of free because you can walk around, but you’re actually only free physically, not mentally, because you have so much stress about your future.
EMILY: That’s an interesting distinction – to be free, you need to have both physical and mental freedom. Do you think it’s possible that if somebody takes away your freedom physically you can still have your mental freedom?
HANI: Yeah, I think if you fight for it. Sometimes it’s better to be physically imprisoned rather than mentally imprisoned. Because when you have a physical lack of freedom, you know that, ‘Oh, I can’t walk here, I can’t get out of here.’ That you know. But when you are mentally locked up but you are physically free, that is the worst, because you don’t know what your future holds, or when you will be mentally free. Freedom doesn’t mean just walking free, it also means being free mentally, emotionally, and, you know – everything.
EMILY: Can you tell me how far you would go for freedom, or maybe tell me some of the things that you’ve already done that demonstrate how far you would go for freedom?
HANI: For freedom, I would touch the sun. I would touch the sun even though it’s too hot. Yeah, because for me, freedom means a lot. As I told you, if freedom was a person, I could be her slave for the rest of my life. Because without freedom, life is just . . .you know, life is impossible. You can keep living life without freedom, but it wouldn’t be as sweet as it is with freedom.
EMILY: So, in the book, the characters have to make a lot of choices that influence their freedom. Can you give me an example of some of the choices that you’ve made?
HANI: The choices that I’ve made to be free… well, for me, I travelled miles and miles to get the freedom that I needed. But then living in the Christmas Island detention centre was not the perfect place, even though I had most of the things that I needed.
To get that freedom, I had to do lot of things that upset me. But I also found that the weapon that could bring me that freedom was my ability to write and to speak up.
EMILY: Were there many times on your journey when you felt like you didn’t have any choice in what happened next?
HANI: Yeah. So, when the guy nailed me under the boat deck as if I was a dead person, I knew that I didn’t have any choice. But it got me the freedom I wanted, and I think nothing ever comes easy in the world – you have to fight for it.
Every time I think about freedom, I will always remember Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty years behind bars and fought for the freedom of the rest of the South African people. He was just a person like me, you know? He had a brain, and he had everything that I have. He didn’t have anything extra, but with patience and willpower, it got him through all those hard times.
So, it didn’t matter to me how many walls were in front of me to reach my freedom – I knew that I would fight for it until my last breath.
Return to scene 17 to continue with the story.
STORIES ABOUT SOMALI REFUGEES, BY SOMALI REFUGEES
* * *
Video of Hani telling her story and reading poems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbRn26mikJg, Hani Abdile, ‘Living Library’, MerJa Media, Australia, 16 September 2015
Book of poetry (for adults):
I Will Rise, by Hani Abdile, Writing Through Fences, Australia, 2016.
Inspirational schools speaker link for Abdi Aden:
Booked Out, Australia, http://bookedout.com.au/find-a-speaker/author/abdi-aden/
Memoir (for adults):
Shining: The Story of a Lucky Man, by Abdi Aden with Robert Hillman, Harper Collins, Australia, 2015.
Memoir (for children):
Yes, I Can! Abdi’s Story, by Abdi Aden, self-published, Australia, 2018.
A poem:
Home, by Warsan Shire, United Kingdom, 2011.
In writing: http://austinrefugees.org/home-a-refugee-poem/
Audio read by Warsan Shire: http://seekershub.org/blog/2015/09/home-warsanshire/
TAKE ACTION
The orphanage ‘Bright Dream’ does not exist. However, many organisations around the world are doing amazing work to support human rights. You can find out more here:
http://www.roads-to-refuge.com.au
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/junior-urgent-action-network
http://www.unhcr.org/en-au/
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOVE ALL ELSE, I kiss the toes of the magnificent Hani Abdile: poet, survivor and superstar. I feel so lucky that our paths crossed. My world is richer from your laughter and stories, and you blew air into the lungs of this book. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Deep respect to Abdi Aden: a kind and generous person with true integrity, who was a great sounding-board and advisor. Nadia Niaz also gave rich and thoughtful advice from a Muslim perspective.
So many people have trusted me with their stories – too many to name here, but especially detainees at the Pontville Immigration Detention Centre, and students in the Young Adult Migrant Education program at TAFE. I hope that you find all the freedom and happiness you deserve, and more.
I’m lucky to count among my friends a crack team of refugee advocates, including Clarissa Adriel, Janet Galbraith, Justine Davis, Mark Isaacs, Frederika Steen, Pamela Curr and Kirsty Madden, who have all inspired and advised me on this project and many others. Thank you, too, to all the tireless people around the world who work for organisations such as Amnesty and the UNHCR to bring about a better, more just world.
The birth scene was given the seal of midwife’s approval by my wonderful friend Nina Cadman. Steve Mushin applied his neverending curiosity, enthusiasm and imaginative genius to this project – everyone needs at least one Steve in their life, and I’m very grateful I have mine.
Thank you to my editor, Elise Jones, who has showed superhuman levels of dedication in bringing the first two books of this series to print at the same time. You really have ‘touched the sun’! Erica Wagner, my publisher at Allen & Unwin, has been wise and wonderful as always. I really struck gold with the whole team at Allen & Unwin – being published by you is an honour.
My beautiful family, you are the honey in my tea. Actually, you’re also the tea, and the milk, and the cup itself. Pretty much everything. I love you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EMILY CONOLAN IS a writer and teacher, who is also known for her humanitarian work. For her role in establishing a volunteer support network for asylum seekers in Tasmania, she has been awarded Tasmanian of the Year, Hobart Citizen of the Year, and the Tasmanian Human Rights Award. The stories of courage and resilience she has heard in the course of her work with refugees, combined with tales from her own family history, inspired her to write the Freedom Finders series.
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