It’s not often you cry in the opening minutes of a meeting. But then it’s not often you get to hear stories that pierce your heart has you sit poised to work out strategy.
Yesterday I sat in the lounge room of one of the amazing women who convene the Sydney Mums 4 Refugees Working Group. It was the first meeting of this group I’d been able to attend and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew the women would be “my kind of people”, I knew they’d want the same outcomes as me and I knew they all cared.
What I didn’t know was how much I really didn’t know.
I’m aware of the plight of asylum seekers on a very superficial level. Even though I care deeply and I try and be as actively involved as I can, it’s all very much on the surface.
As much as I rail against the government’s dehumanising people who arrive by boat, it’s hard not to think of them as a generic group of people. Mothers and fathers, babies, professionals and workers, school kids, teens and young adolescents all with rights, hearts and brains, but still mostly referred to as a specific group of people.
Due to the government’s strict restrictions on reporting and because of the fact that so many of these asylum seekers are involved in legal processes that mean we cannot share their stories, we aren’t really given the background to a person’s life. It’s easy to forget that they are individuals.
When right-wing conservatives attack quoting ridiculous things like “they should not have come through a people smuggling operation” or when they cry that these people just want to live off our welfare system and they ignore the fact that it costs more for our government to detain people than it would cost to process them and allow them to aid our economy in jobs they are qualified or experienced in, it’s hard to be able to quote the stories of individuals and personify the actual struggles.
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Yesterday as the meeting started candles were lit in honour of Omid and before we began a minute’s silence to show our respect for a young life lost to soon, we were asked to think of the young 23 year old man.
We were asked to remember a man so exhausted and spent, a man who had already had his refugee status confirmed but was still forced to languish on Nauru. A man who after suffering burns to 80% of his body was not given any pain relief. Who had to wait 22 hours before getting proper medical treatment.
We thought of his wife, a young 21-year-old woman who sat next to him as he screamed in pain, a woman whose only “crime” was fleeing an unsafe country. A woman who has lost her husband, who has lost her hope and for some bizarrely cruel reason has had her mobile phone removed from her and is unable to communicate with anyone else as she sits and mourns her young husband flanked by two security guards.
One of the women read us a text from someone who knew Omid. “Please tell everyone that he was just so tired” it read.
So immensely tired and frustrated after being jailed for seeking a life. A genuine refugee with a life cut short just as it should have been beginning.
How could you not cry? How can you not care when you hear the story of a human life ending in such pain? How can we turn away when every person has a story to tell? This is not “misty eyed”, this is humanity.
Every single person on Manus Island, on Nauru and in detention in Australia has a story to tell. Every single one of these people are human beings with hearts, hopes and lives that could be full of promise. Bring them here and let us listen to their stories.