Local hero celebrated
TOUCH OF TOOWOOMBA: PEACE Toowoomba, Picnic at Picnic Point, July 31
GENEVIEVE Allpass was nominated for the Australia Pacific LNG Community Hero Award for her work with PEACE Toowoomba, a charity dedicated to helping the city’s most disenfranchised communities.
The Community Hero Award acknowledges those everyday people doing extraordinary things in their communities. The Chronicle caught up with Mrs Allpass during a picnic she hosted with women from Toowoomba’s Yazidi refugee community.
Hana Arbo
Genevieve has been very good to us. We trust her a lot and she has helped us to become more confident in ourselves. We feel like she is our mother.
I am from Syria. I have been in Australia for two years. In our country it was very difficult, but here we feel safe, like it is our home.
My son is in Germany and he is very far away from me. I have not seen him for four years. He is 18.
We have applied to bring him to Australia and hopefully he will be here soon.
I was worried I would lose him in the war, so we sent him to Germany. I hoped he would be able to bring his family later, but we received visas for Australia.
Genevieve Allpass
It is quite surreal to be nominated and to get that recognition, but it is for all of us, because we all work so hard to build our community.
We are primarily working with the Yazidi refugees, but we also work with migrants, people experiencing homelessness, people with cancer and women experiencing domestic violence. We work with anyone who is at risk at our community.
We never turn anyone away, regardless of who they are or where they are from.
The Yazidis are a beautiful community, really peaceful, very happy and extremely keen to members of the wider community. They love Toowoomba.
These ladies taught me resilience and strength, these ladies show us – with strength of mind and body – you can get through extreme adversity.
Rojin Rash
I have been volunteering with PEACE for almost two years.
I meet Genevieve and I really liked her personality and her message of peace so I started work with her as a Kurmanji interpreter with the Yazidi community. I arrived in Toowoomba on August 11, 2017.
We are Syrians who went to Iraq during the civil war as refugees. There was an organisation that helped us apply for a visa for Australia.
We lived in the capital of Kurdistan, Erbil. We lived in the Muslim community and could not let people know we are Yazidis. It was unsafe.
There was a lot of kidnapping, persecution and genocide and we had to hide and present ourselves as Muslims.
You cannot understand how good it felt to come to Australia and be safe, especially for our kids. Here you feel like you are human, have the freedom to express your religion, culture and traditions.
We really want to thank the community and the Australian Government for accepting us. I had to leave school in Year 9, because of the war. Now I am studying at TAFE and I want to be a nurse.
We live here ‘cos we love it!