A LONG WAY FROM HOME

Sajeda, her husband, Nayim, and their six children are Rohingya refugees. They fled the violence of Myanmar and braved a terrifying ordeal at sea but, they tell Samantha Trenoweth, they are slowly finding a new sense of hope in Australia.

Sajeda sits in a suburban sunroom, painting intricate, beautiful, spiralling vines and flowers in henna all along her daughter’s arm. The design is not traditional. It is Sajeda’s own. This combination of ancient technique and spontaneous creativity allows her, for a moment, to forget the horrors that she and her family have witnessed as Rohingyan refugees who, five years ago, risked their lives to flee their homeland.

“We left because a village very close to us was set alight,” explains Sajeda, who is now 30, softly spoken and appears to walk with a little cloud of her countrymen and women’s suffering following behind her. Tears are never far away.

Sajeda, her husband, Nayim, and four of their six children were born in the land they call Burma, which was renamed Myanmar by its military rulers in 1989. Their parents and grandparents were also born in Burma but none of them are citizens of that country or of any other. Myanmar does not recognise members of the Rohingya Muslim minority as citizens and because the family arrived in Australia by boat, they cannot apply for citizenship here. Sajeda’s passport reads: Nationality Unspecified.

“They were attacking the Rohingya people village by village,” she explains. “That’s why we had to leave. Then the military came to people’s homes and arrested the boys – kidnapped them – and my husband said, ‘This is too dangerous. We can’t stay.’”

Today, Mondo, where they lived and where Nayim grew up, has been almost entirely burned to the ground. Many of their friends and relations have died or are missing. Sajeda had moved to Mondo to marry Nayim when she was just 13. It was an arranged marriage.

“I was angry, sad, confused and I missed my family terribly,” she explains. “But I understood that, in part, the marriage was for my own safety. Rohingya women and girls,

even then, were regularly raped and abducted. My parents were so concerned that they rarely let me leave the house, even for school.”

School was not often available to Rohingya children anyway and those who did attend mostly left without any evidence that they had been there. No graduation certificates or official results were provided for residents without citizenship. Nayim was forced to leave school in Year 10 with no papers but, Sajeda says, “he was intelligent, he worked hard and became a pharmacist’s assistant,” so he was a good match.

They had been married for

12 years and had four children when the violence reached their district. Even if they survived, Sajeda could see no future for her children in Myanmar. It was intolerable that her bright eldest daughter could not attend school and that, if her children were ill, they could not be treated in the local hospital.

The young family fled on foot under cover of night because government policies restrict Rohingyas’ freedom of movement. They took with them only what they could carry. Sajeda and Nayim walked with their two youngest (Mohammed, then six, and Muaz, nine months old) in their arms. The elder two, Asma, who was 10, and Nasim, eight, trudged along behind.

“We walked through the mountains, travelling at night,” Asma, who is 15 now, remembers, “and in the morning we would hide. We had to travel where there were not too many people because police were everywhere. We weren’t able to sleep because we had to be cautious of our surroundings. We had brought some dried food but that ran out quickly.”

“Then we came to a place where there was a boat,” Sajeda continues. “The boat was dark, enclosed, it had no windows. Once we were inside, we could see nothing. It carried us to the Thai border, where someone demanded money and put us on another boat that took us on to Malaysia. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know who to trust. Someone would say that they wanted to help us but it was all about the money. I just wanted to be safe and I wanted my children to be safe.”

The next boat that they transferred to was around 25 metres long, open to the elements and barely seaworthy. There were 105 people on board, including six children. Asma appears ashen as she recounts the journey.

“It was terrifying,” she says. “It was all water. I still have nightmares.

The waters were sucking the boat in, then it jumped up. I was scared. Every time the water splashed on us, I felt like the boat was going to sink.”

“I will never forget that time,” Sajeda adds. “My children will never forget that time. It was an open boat, so the sun, the rain, the waves all came in. We still have scars from the sunburn. The journey took three months in all and we were at sea for 11 days.”

The boat’s passengers had long ago exhausted their rations of food and water when a Singaporean ship found them drifting just north of Darwin. The ship transferred supplies and called the Australian authorities.

The asylum seekers waited six more hours before Australian rescue vessels arrived. Then they were transferred, three or four at a time, in small boats to a larger vessel. The last two left on board were Asma and her brother, Mohammed.

“There were sharks circling and the boat was collapsing around us,” Asma remembers, eyes wide. “We were afraid that they weren’t going to come back for us but I wasn’t crying because I was the oldest. I had to hold my younger brother, who was crying a lot, and I was just saying, ‘they’re going to come back, they’re going to come back’. Then the boat’s mast came crashing down and I started crying as well. Perhaps half an hour later, the Australians returned, we joined our family and were transferred to detention in Darwin.”

Sajeda and her family still live with physical and emotional damage sustained on their journey and with grief for friends and family who they know have died in the conflict or vanished in Myanmar.

“I am only 15,” says Asma. “What’s happening in Burma is something I should not be seeing ... On the news, I see my people being tortured, abused and women being raped; children being slaughtered and burned alive in front of their families. This is happening to people I know and love. My cousin, her husband and child, and their whole village were burned alive. I have lost all my childhood friends. They have been killed. My dad has been crying while he is praying and this breaks my heart.”

Sajeda and Asma have spoken at rallies and written to politicians. Sajeda volunteers with Rohingya community groups, and not long ago she flew to Bangladesh to search for friends and family in the refugee camps run by the UNHCR and others where almost one million Rohingyans have fled.

In Sydney, meanwhile, Sajeda and Nayim have created a comfortable home with a leafy yard where the laughter and chatter of six children competes with a chorus of cicadas.

With some help from a humanitarian group, Settlement Services International, Sajeda has opened a small business, Asma

Henna and Make-Up. She is now practising her art at weddings, festivals and markets. Sajeda has also found that she has a passion for learning. She has taken courses in business skills, hairdressing, make-up and English, and in this country, she smiles, “I receive certificates to prove it”. She cannot, forget the horror that continues to unfold back in her homeland but for the first time in a long while, at least personally, she can glimpse some hope.

“I see my people being tortured. This is happening to people I know and love.”