Lessons in Letting Go (21 page)

‘He says that the UN will not help him find a safe place to live. He has been here in Jordan for many years and no one will find him a home. He doesn’t understand that the rest of the world will not take everyone. He thinks it is our fault.’

‘Does the UN have any figures on how many refugees there are at the moment?’

‘There are 11.4 million people registered as refugees.’

It was a staggering figure.

As the protestor with his homemade cardboard sign receded into the distance, the reality of his situation hit me properly: he was on his own in a foreign country with nothing. He was competing with millions and millions of faceless people, all trying to find somewhere safe to live, all in limbo, all slowly watching everything they had ever worked for disappear. And here was I, living in one of the richest countries on earth, with a roof over my head and a good job, gnashing my teeth because I didn’t want to throw out an old pair of leg warmers.

‘We are travelling to a school bus meeting point run by Save the Children. There are some volunteers there you can speak to.’ Dana was dialling a number on her phone and then she was talking to someone to tell them we were on our way.

‘The Jordanian government agreed a few years ago to allow the children of refugees to attend school. Refugee children can go to school in Australia?’

Again, I looked at my hands. ‘Some of them. Sort of.’

I didn’t want to tell her that we held many of our asylum seekers and their kids in jails on an island two and a half thousand kilometres off the coast of Western Australia. It would be like telling her we treated them like vermin.

‘Oh. Well, here they can go to school. But Jordan is not a rich country, so organisations like Save the Children cover the cost.’ We slowed to a stop and Dana turned to me and smiled.

‘Here we are.’

We stepped out of the car. In front of us was a large two-storey building with a verandah running around it. Children wearing backpacks were running around and being herded onto the bus as their parents waved goodbye.

Dana spoke to a woman who nodded and then walked off.

‘We will wait here,’ Dana said. ‘This woman is going to get some of the parents for you. There is a group that come here every day and hand out information about us to the other parents.’

‘Like volunteers?’

‘Yes. Because there are no organised refugee camps in Jordan, the Iraqis who have come across the border have dispersed into the wider population. They rent apartments in the cheaper suburbs. Many of them do not know that the UNHCR offers assistance with health, legal affairs, counselling and so on. Some parents come here each day to pass on that information.’

Dana and I joined two women and two men sitting in the shade on the edge of a concrete barrier protecting a little garden. I smiled awkwardly. They looked at me expectantly. So did Dana. Goodness knew what these people had seen in Iraq, goodness knew how much they had lost. I was feeling very Western and very privileged. I was waiting for someone to demand, ‘What the hell are you looking at, little white girl?’

A man to my right smiled at me. He was middle-aged and wearing a crisp, checked shirt and crease-free trousers. Even though his clothes were worn, they were immaculate.

‘Dana, can you ask this gentleman how long he has been in Jordan?’

I didn’t ask for his name; Dana had already explained that some of these people were still in danger and in hiding.

Dana asked my question in Arabic. He told her six years.

‘Umm . . . can you ask him how he came to be here?’

He answered me himself. He had been an officer in the Iraqi army during the war with Iran and, at that time, he was seen as a hero.

‘But when the war came from America, many people decided Iran was now our ally. Anyone who fought Iran was now an enemy. Militias hunted us because they thought we should pay for what we had done.’

I was confused. The war with Iran had ended twenty years ago—dredging it up now made no sense. Maybe this was more to do with the Sunni and Shi’ite tensions we kept hearing about in Australia.

‘Is this because of religion? There have always been problems with Sunnis and Shi’ites, haven’t there?’

Before the officer could answer, a young man with close-cropped hair, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, said, ‘No, that is not the problem. I did not know I was a Sunni until all of this war with America happened. For most of us, this thing was not a problem. I went to the same mosque as the Shi’ites.’

In Australia, we were led to believe that fighting between the Sunni and the Shia populations had always existed and was widespread. These people were telling me that the Western invasion of their country had caused it. I looked back at the army officer.

‘So this problem of religion is new? How?’

‘My country has fallen apart. People need someone to blame.’

I wasn’t sure which made me feel worse: the arbitrary nature of hatred, or the calm way in which this man told me about it. I asked him if it had been hard to leave everything behind.

He replied, ‘I stayed after the first attempt on my life, but the second time they came right into my house. I don’t know if it was difficult to leave. You don’t think when people are shooting at you in your own home, you just run.’

Now, everyone was keen to tell their stories. A middle-aged woman with short brown hair told me her brother hated her because she had married a Sunni. ‘Before 2003 we all lived together. None of the children knew who was a Sunni and who was a Shi’ite. It didn’t matter to us. Now my own brother tells me that I am a disgrace.’ She shrugged. I couldn’t imagine telling anyone what she had just told me without bursting into tears.

Another young woman in a red headscarf and jeans told me that she had lived in a Shi’ite part of Iraq all her life, even though she was Sunni. ‘It never used to be a problem. Everybody lived side by side until the war. But now everyone hates each other. The militias tried to shoot my husband because he would not join the army.’

The army officer nodded. ‘It was compulsory for everyone to serve for one to three years in the army, even the women. The government would punish you or kill you if you did not. Now, the militias want to kill me because I served, they want to kill her husband because he did not.’ He paused and smiled at me again. ‘You know, I have a brother who lives in Australia. He was given asylum six years ago.’

‘Are you hoping to go there too?’ I asked.

‘I have tried. Three times. Your country says I cannot come.’

No one was blaming me but I felt responsible all the same.

I wanted to ask the group what they missed the most. I didn’t expect any of them to say ‘my clothes’ or ‘my jewellery’ or ‘my car’. I thought they would miss sentimental things: photographs, family heirlooms, their children’s baby clothes.

‘Out of everything you left behind, what are the things you miss the most?’

It caught me by surprise when they all answered the same way. The middle-aged woman spoke first.

‘Stability.’

The army officer and young man nodded and agreed. ‘Stability.’

‘Stability,’ said the woman in the red headscarf. ‘Of course! I had a future. My children had a future. Now I have this.’ She held out her empty palms to the sky. ‘When they shot at my husband, our son was watching. He was three. They shot at my husband and then they set fire to the house. They knew we were still inside it. My son is five now. He still draws pictures of rifles and fire.’

I didn’t know what to say.

These people had fled with almost nothing. There was no time to plan an exit strategy, there was no time to pack up crates of belongings and ship them to a nonexistent forwarding address; they arrived in Jordan with less than I had packed for a week-long journey. They’d arrived with nothing other than scars and nightmares and damaged children. They were lucky just to be alive. It put all of my fretting about old postcards and shoes, books and dead flowers into perspective. I felt like I’d finally had some sense knocked into me.

After a restless night’s sleep I again met Dana at her office at 10 a.m. This time we drove to a poorer suburb heavily populated by refugees. The closer we got to our destination, the more densely packed in were the buildings and the people. We were on our way to visit a clinic run by Caritas that gave free health checks, referrals and counselling to refugees and impoverished locals. Our driver dropped us by the side of the road and we entered a nondescript multi-storey building wedged between shops and apartments. There were a few people milling out the front. It was so quiet inside that I thought we must have arrived before opening time. We turned into the waiting room and saw the place was full, with standing room only. Everyone was waiting silently. No one took any notice as we moved past them.

We walked up two narrow flights of stairs to meet with one of the doctors who helped run the clinic. Through an open door I saw a teenaged boy with a blank stare hooked up to an ECG machine. Something about him looked wrong, not medically, but psychologically; his eyes were dead. Passing another room with the door wide open, Dana told me that the woman I could see was talking to a gynaecologist. Then we entered a third room where the doctor was still consulting with his patient. We stood there watching them until the consultation finished and the patient got up and left the room. I wondered whether all of this was normal in a Jordanian health clinic or simply the plight of the disenfranchised; perhaps when you were forced to rely on charity you became accustomed to your whole life being laid bare.

We sat down and Dr Jameel, a cheery, enthusiastic man in his early forties, introduced himself. I asked him what were the most common illnesses he saw at the clinic. He ticked them off on his fingers.

‘There is a lot of high blood pressure, diabetes and stress-related illnesses, but Iraqi refugees also have a higher incidence of cancer than the Jordanian population. Some say this was caused by depleted uranium used during the war with Iran but really no one knows for sure. All we know is that they have more cancer.’

He told me that the Jordanian government had recently declared that refugees and non-residents could access the national health care system at the same rates as non-insured locals. This meant that for those who could afford it, the health care they needed was always available, irrespective of whether they were a citizen or not. For the rest, Caritas worked hard to find them a place in one of the hospitals that had agreed to take on such cases at a reduced fee.

‘For every twenty-five people per week we refer to other hospitals, we can afford to pay for the treatment of the ten most urgent cases. The other fifteen have to pay themselves, or hope that a place becomes available in the future. We are increasing the number that we help every year but it is hard to help everyone.’ Dr Jameel smiled at us both and apologised for not being able to stay any longer. He had a lot of patients to see. He took us into a little room off to the side and introduced us to his secretary, who then escorted us back down to the street.

We got into the car and I looked back at the building. There were many more people out the front now, as well as all of those still waiting inside. I couldn’t imagine how the clinic would get through so many people in one day. So much about being a refugee rested on luck: luck in getting out of your home country alive, luck in finding somewhere new to shelter, luck in finding a way to earn money and the sheer dumb luck of remaining healthy.

It was lunchtime and Dana had meetings in the afternoon. My two days with her had passed so quickly and now the entire reason for my trip was over. It felt surreal. Tomorrow I would be flying home. I thanked her profusely for giving up so much of her time to help me and she offered to drop me in a part of town where I could find a taxi back to my hotel.

I didn’t pay any attention to the scenery out the window as we left the clinic; I was too absorbed by the image of that boy attached to the ECG machine. He had looked irreparably broken.

The car slowed down and stopped at a corner. I smiled at Dana, shook her hand and sincerely thanked her again. Then I stepped out of the vehicle and turned around to discover a world as far from the one I had just left as it was possible to imagine.

I was in Abdoun, the most affluent suburb of Amman, and all around me stood houses of astounding proportions. They were just as white and unadorned as all the others I had seen but they were immaculate and tri-levelled and there was grass (grass!) complementing the elaborately landscaped gardens I glimpsed behind their fences and railings and walls. There were workers tending to the flowers and fountains. There were stained-glass windows and mosaics. I walked downhill for twenty minutes, agog the whole way.

I was hungry and ahead I could see what looked like a little restaurant. I crossed the multi-lane road and walked into a café that may as well have been located in inner-city Melbourne. I had seen nothing like it the whole time I had been here. The glamorous locals seated at the tables in front of me had ordered baguettes, pasta, prawn salads and croissants from an entirely European menu. In less than half an hour the poverty, the uncertainty, the illness and fear of being a refugee were as distant as if I was back in Australia.

I sat down, ordered a cup of tea and a piece of quiche, and looked at the people around me. A television attached to the far wall was mutely showing an international soccer game and pop music wafted from hidden speakers. Everyone was smiling and chatting in air-conditioned comfort, everyone was relaxed and oblivious. The unfairness of the world was slapping me right in the face. How easy it was for us, the lucky ones, to talk about the new dress we had just bought, or how many pairs of shoes we owned, or to complain about how our garages were filled with junk. I stirred my tea and smiled bitterly. How easy it was for us to block out everything else and pretend these things really mattered.

Chapter Seventeen

When I returned to Australia, I attacked my stored-up house of horrors with new vigour. After meeting those refugees in Jordan, I just couldn’t look at my stuff in the same way. It was daft to be so obsessed with it all—in fact, it was more than daft, it was a waste of the precious, lucky life that I had been granted. I had a roof over my head, I had friends, I had family, I had everything I needed and I’d been carrying on like I had nothing. Now I had perspective. Now I could see how pointless and irrelevant most of the stuff I had been hoarding really was. And besides, it was winter now and after the heat of the Middle East, the freezing foggy mornings of Melbourne were making my toes shrivel. If I was going to be cooped up inside, then I may as well do something useful.