FIRST PERSON
Abiola Ajetomobi, 39
My family arrived from Nigeria to Melbourne as refugees in 2008. Five days after we arrived my daughter broke her foot at a Melbourne train station - we didn’t have Medicare or even know where the hospital was. It was really scary. We don’t even know whether to call an ambulance or what to do. The hospital wanted an address [but] we didn’t have anywhere to live. Reflecting now, we wonder how we got through it.
One day in church a lady came up to me and she just had compassion for my daughter. She came to me and said: “What happened? Where do you live?” We said: “We don’t have anywhere to live.” We told her we were in temporary accommodation and we were constantly moving. She said, “Come live with us.” I was so shocked. She collected our address and the time we needed to be out. She said she’ll come with her husband and pick us up. I got back to the apartment and told my husband about it and he couldn’t believe it. Her name was Dayle Hooker.
We were meant to leave the place at ten in the morning and Dayle got there at five to ten. It was the day before Christmas - it was the best Christmas we ever had. She took us to her house, we had Christmas with her family. We stayed there two months.
We call Dayle our Aussie mum. She showed us everything
We call Dayle our Aussie mum. She showed us everything – how to eat Aussie food. She was the one who would speak to us if we were worried or not sure of something. She’d tell us "don’t worry" and laugh with us. She took care of us.
One day she sat us down and asked: “What do you eat in your community?” and we said “yam”. One Saturday her husband and her left the house early. She came home that evening and said: “We’ve been going around Footscray and everywhere looking for yam and we found it.”
I don’t know if you’ve seen yam before. Yam is really big. I couldn’t see her carrying anything and Iooked at her. She opened her handbag. She got a cookie from the Asian shop that had yam flour in it. Even though it was the wrong thing, she went everywhere to look for it! That’s the kind of community generosity I will remember for the rest of my life. You can’t forget it.
Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by people’s generosity. I can’t wrap my head around it.
Abiola Ajetomobi, Innovation Director at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. Source: Supplied by Danyal Syed
Australia’s policies are very different to people on the ground. Sometimes you just want to shut your ears to the policy because the community generosity is just beyond words. Australians have a different way of creating change. They’d probably not like the Americans who protest in the streets, but they are determined to do something meaningful. We see that from the way they give their time, their money, from the way they support us - people give me hugs, saying we are doing a great job.
The Australia I know feels differently.
Every time I see an MP on TV saying Australians are saying this or that about refugees, I think, who are they? Where do they live? Is there another Australia than the one I know? The Australia I know feels differently. The Australians I know are passionate about human beings in general. Thousands of Australians are working overseas on a voluntary basis, helping the poor and refugees. That’s incredible. They are committing their lives to humanity. We’re saying we don’t care about humanity? That doesn’t sit well with me.
You can’t imagine your child spending even an hour on Nauru. When you start putting yourself in people’s shoes – your children, your family and what kind of future you want to create for them – you start to think differently. It’s about leadership. The decision our leaders make play out in our streets and communities and that’s what’s happening now. Polices are created so they can be changed. We need people to live by values and not by popularity and votes.
Let’s live by our values and create an Australia we can be proud of.
When I first started the job at ASRC, I met a man who arrived the same time as me and he had just been released from detention. I sat in the bathroom, weeping. I couldn’t believe someone could be in limbo that long. That’s what our government is doing to people and it’s so wrong. Why should he be kept in that situation for so long? He just got a visa. But they’ve wasted so much of their life. Their mental health is bad, they have issues. They can’t keep going anymore. Visa don’t mean anything if it’s too late. They are too damaged.
Whenever I do public speaking I never go in for debate. We’re talking about human beings here. This is real life. You can believe what you want but I will tell you what I know. You take it or you leave it, I don’t debate it. Let’s live by our values and create an Australia we can be proud of, one where generations after us will look at us and say they’ve done a good job.
Abiola Ajetomobi is the Director of the Innovation Hub at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. To support the ASRC's winter appeal and stand with people seeking asylum, .
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