Munib is not alone in this anguish. During his time of struggle, he shared the roads with over a hundred thousand other homeless people on the Australian land.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are 116,427 homeless people in the country, an increase of 13,988 since 2011. Of the current figure, 15 per cent are those who were born overseas and arrived in Australia in the last five years. Of these, 5% are from the Pakistani origin, 6% from Afghanistan, 12% from India, 10% from China, and 4% from Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan and Malaysia.
Zeeshan Humayun, president of the Pakistani Students Association of Australia (PSAA), says most of these people are likely international students.
Talking to SBS Urdu’s radio programme, Humayun said cases such as Munib’s were not new to him. He said most new international students and other migrants are new to Australian rules and lack references for accommodation and employment.
5% of the homeless migrants in Australia are from the Pakistani origin, 6% from Afghanistan and 10% from India: report
“Sometimes they spend weeks in a mosque or even a car until someone from our Pakistani community gets in touch with them and offers to help,” he said.
Humayun, who is running the Association since 2009, said there was a strong sense of support and empathy among the Pakistani community and urged people, facing accommodation and other challenges, to get through to the Association through their Facebook page.
Severely crowded dwelling
A 2018 report by the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Social Impact suggests that one in seven Australian university students say they cannot afford food and other basic necessities, and a huge number is forced to live in ‘severely’ crowded dwelling.
“Sometimes they spend weeks in a mosque or even a car until someone from our Pakistani community gets in touch with them and offers to help.” PSAA president Zeeshan Humayun
Munib says an international student, who he had met at a bus stop, offered him a shared room, but he had to refuse because there were too many people in there already.
“He asked me if I was OK to share a room with other students and I agreed initially. But when I went to see it, there were six boys in there with one common washroom. It was impossible to live like that even for $50 a week.”
For one economist such severely crowded dwellings are directly linked to the lack of enough social housing.
Ellen Witte, an economist with S-G-S Economics and Planning says despite an increase in the number of homeless people in Australia, investment in social housing has been scaled back in the recent years. She stresses the need for the government to invest in social housing.
Talking to SBS Radio’s Dutch program, Witte said, “People who are homeless are at a greater risk of being a victim of violence and of being a perpetrator of a crime or being admitted to emergency departments of hospitals and that, of course, had a lot of costs to government attached to it.”
Living on the roads
After multiple unsuccessful attempts at getting his documents accepted by a real estate agency due to no financial and accommodation history, Munib decided to live in his small van, which his hosts had helped him buy in an auction for $700. He would use his university toilets and shower rooms and bought himself a portable gas stove, a mattress, a torch and solar battery to keep his phone charged – all fitted into the back of his van.
Munib's family back home has no idea that he had to live in a van for three months, cook on the roadside and use public toilets.
Munib says he also tried getting into the university accommodation, though it was very expensive ($280 a week for a shared washroom), but hard luck hit him hard and he was told that he was “late”.
Three months later, after finally making friends, Munib moved into a friend’s place. Today, after having graduated, he now lives in a two-bedroom unit with a friend in Sydney’s south. He passed on the van to another student for $250.
“Though it was very very tough, that experience taught me the lessons that I would've never learned otherwise,” says a happy, content Munib, who is now all set to invest in his first real home back in Pakistan with his father - his family still totally unaware of his initial ordeal.
