Sudanese Australian Catholic Community

Why did you leave teaching?

When lay people were able to be paid to teach in Catholic schools, I asked if I could move on because I always wanted to be with people on the edge. I really seriously believe that the religious life has to be the conscience of the church and moving towards people who are left out, on the edge.

 

I started doing youth work in the Bathurst Diocese. I did that for four years and as part of that had a social awareness program with key leaders in the diocese. I brought them down to Sydney to places like Night Patrol and Matthew Talbot. And then I got to see more and more that there was a big need for religious to be in places where other people couldn't be because of finances really.

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So I went overseas on a scholarship to look at outreach to people who are poor in 1982 and when I came back I moved to Sydney to do youth work in parishes. But I was particularly keen to be involved with people who are poor and I started working with refugees from Lebanon and Sri Lanka.

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Was that the 1970s, 1980s?

It was the 1980s. Those two wars were at their peak in the early 1980s. After a while, a few young people joined me and we started a charity called Josephite Community Aid (JCA) where young people volunteered for a year, like a gap year, to work among newly arrived refugees.

 

I was constantly moving to newly arrived refugees because they seemed the most in need. Wherever there was a war in the world, we knew we would have those people in Sydney in six months. So there were people from Poland during the Solidarity time, El Salvador, Chile during the time of Pinochet, and then Bosnia. Following Bosnia, there were the people from Sudan.

 

After about five years, I realised that the people from Sudan were going to be very different from the others because there were so many single women, heads of households with many children.

 

At first I thought they all belonged to the one woman but then I realised that sometimes they were caring for the children of relatives who had died or been kidnapped during the war.

 

Why were you drawn to working with refugees?

I think that initial contact was so powerful for me because I had come from the country where it was pretty much a monocultural society. It started with the Lebanese especially, a number of whom had little education. I was running a church youth program called Antioch. In that program, you'd ask parents to write letters to their children to read at the Sunday closing ceremony and I discovered that the parents couldn't write. I had had no experience with people from other countries at all and discovered once I started visiting the families how impoverished they were. They just had so many difficulties with finance, English and their children.

 

Were these Lebanese Christians?

Some were Christian, some were Muslim, I never asked what they were. But the ones I asked to write the letters were Christian because they had children in the youth group.

 

What were the main challenges that each refugee group faced? Have they been similar?

No, they haven't all been similar at all. The best way to show that is to contrast the Bosnians and the Sudanese.

 

The Bosnians who came were from two different groups. The ones from cities like Sarajevo were highly educated, sometimes highly literate in English but literate in at least one language and sometimes three or four. If they were married, they had a nuclear family, two children, Mum and Dad. They came out here with some resources but not a lot because they obviously had to flee. We would help them for a little while but within six months they would be on their feet, up and going. They often had difficulty getting enough furniture, basic things like that but as far as skills went, they had it.

 

Then there were the Bosnians from rural areas who were less educated. They had more difficulty resettling because they were unskilled but at that time it was easier to get unskilled work and so most of them were able to find jobs.

 

When the Sudanese came, there was a huge difference. Even the people from rural Bosnia had been to school, had some education. Most of the South Sudanese had never been to school. There had been war in their country since 1956 so whereas in Bosnia the war erupted and was over in five years, in Sudan it had been going on for decades.

 

Of course, it was different and that was part of the problem. The government sees all refugees as the same. When in fact, there is a vast difference, a huge difference.

 

When did Sudanese refugees start arriving?

In 1998.

 

The Second Civil War started in 1983 so how come it took so long for them to arrive?

When it started in the early 1980s, most of them went to Khartoum so they were internally displaced. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the Islamic government started coming down on them in Khartoum as well. Anna would have told you how they closed the Catholic schools. Then most of our families went to Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt. It took time for them to apply to UNHCR. And I think the early ones went to America and Canada.

 

When did you first become involved with the Sudanese community?

I had been working with the Bosnians and they were getting on their feet. I had heard on the television about the Sudanese so I thought I'd go and see if I could find them. I saw a young boy outside some flats in Auburn. It was Wik's adopted son Kir. He was in Year 5 and spoke English and I met his parents. Wik then introduced me to Anna and to all the rest of the community. That was in 2001.

 

What were you doing in the beginning?

In the beginning, what we were doing most of all through JCA was trying to get furniture, food and clothes to them because they were destitute. We started to organise a lot of volunteers to go to people's homes to help with English. That was through JCA. A lot of people would go and sort of adopt a family because we didn't have classes and they were too busy trying to get their housing organised and get their kids into schools.

 

We spent the early years helping them access the services and material goods they needed to settle in. Because they came so quickly that there wasn't an earlier Sudanese community here to help them. There were many family problems, many financial problems, every concept was new. We spent most of the time on hands-on resettlement.

 

In terms of Sudanese refugees what is unique about their experience?

The thing that was most difficult for them was there had been no infrastructure in their country: there was no gas, no electricity, no telephone, no railway, no bus, nothing. And there was no adult male presence in many homes.

 

They came from a country that was totally destroyed in terms of infrastructure and then arrived here and had to pay gas, electricity and telephone bills. They had to get their children educated and there was no education system in South Sudan. So not only did many of them come here with no English but it was as if they had been suddenly put on Mars. It was like they came from a parallel universe.

 

Even the refugees that came from Lebanon knew there was a school system, a banking system, railways and roads. Even El Salvador had basic structures still intact. But it was totally lost in South Sudan and it will be for many years. It is going to take a long time.

 

Do you think the Australian Government provides enough support for newly arrived refugees: four weeks of accommodation and 510 hours of English?

I think the difficulty is that they have implemented a one-size fits all program.

When the Polish people came during the Solidarity time, there was already a strong Polish community here. There was a Polish club and a Polish church because there was a big exodus from Poland after World War II. When the second wave of Poles came, there were a lot of established systems for them to plug into here.

 

The same thing happened with the people coming from Sri Lanka the second time. There was an influx from Sri Lanka in the 1970s and 1980s and then there was another one more recently. For the ones coming more recently, there are churches established, there are a lot of things already here. So those people have got systems that they can use.

 

When the Bosnians came, the provision the Australian Government made for the people who were educated was perfectly all right. There was one girl who wanted to be an astrophysicist and couldn't speak any English. But within two years, she had graduated from Sydney University and had gone on to do research. So for her there was no problem but for Bosnians with limited education, it wasn't enough.

 

And the same thing with the Sudanese. For the few who were educated then that probably was okay for them but others needed a whole lot of pre-education.

 

The government needs to distinguish between people that come who are not literate in any language and those who are. It needs to increase the number of hours of special teaching if they are bringing people into the country who are not literate in any language. They cannot give the same number of hours of English tuition to someone who is literate in another language, who may already have a degree and someone who has never held a pencil or been to school. It is completely ridiculous.

 

That's why we set up St Bakhita’s because they couldn't learn anything in the government courses. They would do their 510 hours of English and come here and couldn't sign their own name. It was just impossible for them.

 

When did you set up St Bakhita's and how did it come about?

Well, they were the drivers, the Sudanese: Anna and about seven or eight others. With my aunt, Sr Helen Sullivan and the JCA volunteers, we had been meeting them and carting furniture to them. They came to us as a group to ask about getting their children into Catholic schools. Their children were going to public schools because they couldn't afford to send them to Catholic schools.

 

They were also worried because some in the community were going to other churches because they had not been able to find a Catholic church. Back in Sudan, missionaries were only allowed to preach in certain areas so most people in Wau were Catholic but if they came from Rumbek, they were mostly Anglican. When they came here, they didn't realise the difference between the churches until Anna came and told them.

 

The other problem was that they had family overseas who were getting visas that were lapsing because they didn’t have the money to pay the airfares and other costs. The Australian Government says it brings in about 12,000 refugees a year under the Humanitarian Programme but it brings around 6,000 and the remainder are sponsored by those who are already here.

 

The government doesn’t pay for those who are sponsored and accepted as refugees. When you sponsor someone, you have to pay for their airfare and medical checks (which was about $600-700 per person back then). And when they arrive, you have to house them, clothe them, get them to Centrelink, get them a bank account, get their children into schools and get them into English classes. It was a big burden and they needed help.

 

I said, 'I will take you to the Bishop in charge of Catholic Ethnic Communities, David Cremin'. We went to see him and they told him their story and he said that he would take them to the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell. So we all went in to see the Cardinal at Polding Centre in the city. We had a big meeting beforehand and chose John as the spokesman. When we got there, John told the Cardinal that a lot of the South Sudanese were going to other churches and they couldn't afford to send their children to Catholic schools.

 

The Cardinal was excellent. He said he would speak to the Director of Education to get them into the schools at a reduced rate. They would pay whatever they could afford to pay.

 

They then asked him for a chaplain and he said that he couldn't give them a chaplain because there were no Sudanese priests in Australia and very few in Sudan. But he would give them a pastoral care worker and a meeting place. The place he gave them was a room in the church hall at St Dominic’s, Homebush West. We could use the hall as well as the room.

 

A loan fund was also set up with an appeal by Bishop David Cremin in The Catholic Weekly which got a huge response from a lot of ordinary Catholic people.

 

So the leaders of the newly arrived Sudanese community were proactive in getting support for their community?

People like Anna, Tresa, John and some others were really strong about wanting their own Catholic identity and a Catholic place. None of it came from me because I was going to move on to the next group of newly arrived refugees. The Sudanese were the ones who have actually driven all of this.

 

So what were the first programs you started here. What was the most pressing need?

The Sudanese asked for help with English. So we started with English classes because so many of the women had been through their 510 hours of English and couldn't read or write. We provided a playgroup because the women couldn't come to class to learn English if they couldn't bring their children. It was a typical Josephite response; what is the practical thing to do?

 

Four of us Josephites were involved: Sisters Helen Sullivan, Janine Keatinge, Mary Baker and myself. We did what we could to support the community at Greystanes and St Bakhita Centre. We didn’t have any money but the Sisters were generous. Many benefactors also gave us food, clothing, money and other goods; without them we could not have set up St Bakhita’s as an educational centre. We could not access government money because we were not a recognised institution.