Refugee author shares his unique story at Pier 21
Jaivet Ealom will tell of his six-month journey to Canada
It’s a refugee story like no other.
Inspired by the TV show Prison Break, Jaivet Ealom meticulously planned his escape from an offshore holding site in Australia and spent six months crossing seven countries and three continents without a passport before finding refuge in Canada.
Though it may sound like fiction, Ealom’s memoir is called Escape From Manus Prison: One Man's Daring Quest for Freedom. His new home is in Toronto but he is in Halifax this week to read from his book and talk about his work at Needslist, a company that promotes the use of technology to help displaced people bypass institutional barriers.
He’ll be joined by Julie Chamagne, director of the Halifax Refugee Clinic, for a discussion at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 on Thursday night.
In a Ted Talk posted to Youtube in August, Ealom said that in 2013 he was pulled from a fishing boat by Australian officials and eventually taken to the infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre. As a Rohingya, he was fleeing atrocities in Myanmar.
It was a prison made of huts and shipping containers. He said it felt like a human zoo or a psychological experiment to test how much a person could take.
“Only months ago, I was a pharmacy student. How the hell did I end up in a remote, tropical prison?” he said during his Ted Talk.
Remembering the show Prison Break, he started studying every detail of every operation at the detention centre and connected with people who could help. After seven months of planning, in 2017 he got out. Manus was deemed illegal and was shut not long after Ealom’s escape. Ealom said it was the people who helped him along the way — some at great risk to themselves — who made all the difference, and that’s why he’s in Canada. He arrived in Toronto on Christmas Eve 2018.
While studying at the University of Toronto, Ealom is a member of the Refugee Advisory Network of Canada and is on the leadership team of the Canadian Rohingya Development Initiative.
The free event is being held at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 on Thursday at 7 p.m. and will also be live-streamed to Youtube.