The friendship gardener

When Mariam Issa and her family came to Australia as refugees, they felt like outsiders. But her mother’s love of food, plants and storytelling inspired her to invite community in, writes Genevieve Gannon.

Mariam Issa had two small children and was pregnant with her third when civil war forced her to flee her home in Somalia. She’d grown up listening to stories at her mother’s knee, while receiving her formal education under the shade of a mango tree, but her country had become too dangerous for her family. With her kids in tow, she exchanged tropical sub-Saharan heat for the scorching desert of Dubai, where her then husband was working.

But when he lost his job, leaving the family facing homelessness, Mariam took her children to Nairobi. “That’s how I became a refugee,” she says. Her husband didn’t have a Kenyan visa, and would have been jailed if he had followed, so for two and a half years Mariam waited with her children in limbo, hoping to be granted the chance for a new life in Australia. She would get up at 3am to join a queue of 200-odd people at the Australian Embassy. With little money and a family to feed, life was hard. She describes the period as “high-end survival”. A second chance was granted in the form of a reunion visa. Mariam and her husband had relatives who had settled in Melbourne, and so in 1998 they were able to come to the affluent suburb of Brighton. The bureaucratic side of the family’s resettlement was

“very well taken care of,” Mariam says, and it should have been a chance to take a breath. But the white mansions and beachside boulevards represented a different challenge from the ones that the family had already overcome. Traumatised, isolated, scared and alone, their first years in Australia were very difficult.

Mariam remembers her new home feeling “totally alien ... We were not only black, but we were also Muslim in Brighton. Then September 11 happened and I felt the fear. There was pushback.” In her traditional dress, Mariam felt vulnerable and highly conspicuous. Sometimes people would shout abuse: “You get that harsh, ‘Go back to your country,’” she says. But what was far worse was the pervasive sense that they weren’t wanted. “You could feel the hostility, There wasn’t that sense of welcome.”

Mariam gave birth to her fifth child, Sara, not long after they arrived, and lacking the support of her broader

“What I am today are seeds that were planted long ago.”

Mariam uses her cooking lessons to bridge the cultural gaps within her community in Melbourne.

community, lapsed into postnatal depression. Meanwhile her older children were being bullied, so Mariam shifted them to an Islamic school 20km away. “It was a private school, so we needed the money for that,” Mariam says. “We were on social welfare. My husband didn’t have a word of English. Most of the work to bridge the gap between the community and our family was on me.”

The world outside her door scared Mariam. The winters were especially hard. But she started making in-roads. She found work as a receptionist in a community centre and was fortified by the support she received. Small kindnesses helped her gain confidence. “I was given a room to pray in,” Mariam explains. The people who trained her were patient, thorough and kind. “That was the beginning of an understanding: I can fit in; I can try. I saw the welcome there.”

Finally, a heartbreaking episode with her youngest daughter shocked her into action. They had visited a local kindergarten, hoping that Sara might attend, but were made to feel very unwelcome. Afterwards, Sara asked her mother: “Don’t they want me because I’m black?”

“It was a defining moment for me,” says Mariam. “It was the loss of my child’s innocence – a four year old saying those words. How can a four year old feel this way?”

It was time to stop living in fear. “I didn’t have Western friends. I wasn’t part of this community,” Mariam says. “I spent a lot of time in that space of, ‘poor me.’ When I woke up from the victimhood, I became angry. It was so much better than being a victim. I could demand a better life.”

She volunteered to cook meals in community centres and nursing homes. She encouraged people to ask questions about Somalia. In 2007, she started a business called Cook with Mariam.

Soon she was going into private homes to cook African meals.

As Mariam met more local women, she came to realise that their lives weren’t as perfect as she’d imagined. “I started having coffees with Western women and I saw there were problems in their homes. I saw a lot of social disconnection and domestic violence. Amid the beauty and the glamour in Brighton, there was a less apparent truth here,” she says. And she came to see that perhaps there were ways in which she could help.

Food had already become a catalyst for discussion and bridging the cultural divide. Then, she took the idea a step further by turning her own backyard into a community garden, where people could gather, tend the fruit and vegetables, and share stories. “I got the idea when I was doing a permaculture course,” Mariam says. “I was sitting in an open space and everywhere there were amazing, beautiful vegetables and fruit trees growing. I felt the sense of connection to that. I saw something beyond myself.”

Memories of her mother also inspired Mariam. She had been a “powerful and beautiful storyteller”, and by building her own community garden, Mariam created a space in which she could continue that tradition, as well as creating a sense of understanding and belonging.

“My mother was a nomadic woman,” she says. “She spent a lot of time in the desert. We had food forests back home. We would go into the food forests for hours and hours. My starting a garden was not a coincidence. What I am today are seeds that were planted a long time ago.” Mariam’s garden is not just a passive space, but a grassroots organisation that offers events and programs to help women from all walks of life to connect. In the two decades since she arrived in Australia, feeling scared and alone, Mariam has used her hard-won lessons to beat an easier path for others. She has become a storyteller, leader, business owner and an advocate for others. And she feels she has struck a sense of balance within herself.

“We navigate through adversity but we most often don’t overcome it,” she says thoughtfully. “It’s a good thing to make adversity a part of yourself, to make use of what you learn from it. Darkness and light co-exist.” AWW Refugee Week is the annual international celebration of refugees, which started here in Australia. In 2020, Refugee Week is going digital for the first time. Visit refugeeweek.org.au from June 14-20 to access entertainment including cook-along recipe videos, podcasts and performances. You can also read more inspiring stories from people such as Mariam who have made Australia their home, and book speakers from refugee backgrounds to talk online to you, your school or workplace. Refugee Week is co-ordinated by the Refugee Council of Australia.