Our refugee family was nearly kidnapped in front of me when they first arrived in Australia: Part 1 of 2
Alternate titles:
The black cat that cursed a refugee family’s first day in Australia
The bad hair day that nearly got a refugee family kidnapped
Don’t Look Like A Crackhead and other surprisingly important lessons in refugee sponsorship
A guide on how to avoid accidentally abandoning a refugee family in the wrong city five seconds after they land in their new home country with no English and a toddler with a penchant for running away
Oops, we lost one: what not to do when you have primary responsibility for newly arrived refugees [technically I lost two, but at different times]
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I run the Castle of Kindness Refugee Sponsorship Group. We are ordinary people who welcome a refugee family once a year and look after them, including setting up a fully-furnished house for them, teaching them English (sometimes from scratch), and spending fun and silly time with them.
We are trained and guided by Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia, a group that formed in 2018 with the goal of reforming Australia’s extremely awkward and expensive refugee sponsorship system…. and they’re succeeding! They are working with the Federal Government on CRISP: Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot right now, and have helped welcome about a dozen families so far.
We (the Castle of Kindness) have mentored three refugee families so far (families that were under the care of the Red Cross but benefited from having another refugee organisation on the side), but today I was at Sydney airport to welcome an Afghan family of six entering Australia for the first time. This time, the Castle of Kindness had the first and biggest responsibility for the family.
That vital first meeting…. did not go smoothly.
Here’s a few posts I made about the days leading up to their arrival, and what happened next.
We had fifteen days to make final preparations: they would arrive in Canberra at 10pm on Thursday 22nd June, coming via Melbourne. We made plans for Carol to meet them in Melbourne, utilising the airport chaplain and a local translator to help them through immigration.
21 June.
(You can see and buy prints by Qusay in the “Marhaba Arts” Etsy shop I run for him. Or just email CastleOfKindness@gmail.com and it will come to me.)
That’s my daughter in the kitchen. And yes, it’s a 1970s ex-government house that has never been updated. There’s a very particular look and feel to ex-guvvy homes that Canberrans know well. It is short term accommodation only, at a brilliant location (walking distance from a shopping centre AND from my house), and extremely cheap by Canberra’s standards. Because it’s only short-term, it gives the family the ability to choose where they want to live (very important for their autonomy).
It wasn’t even cleaned properly for us, but the remaining functional group members and a couple of other brilliant community members spent many hours cleaning it and sorting ALL the furniture, bedding, linen, and food we’ve been organising since we were matched with the family in February this year.
I mentioned that a group member was in hospital? Yeah, that was me. Which also meant a group member (Chris, my husband) had to be a single parent for several days while also running errands and caring for his dear wife in her time of need.
Except of course that he always has to care for me to some extent because I’m disabled by (among other things) fibromyalgia. It’s a chronic, incurable pain condition. It hurts for me to stand or walk and I sleep about ten hours on an average day. Coordinator is a great role for me because I’m a patronising control freak (or as I like to say, “benevolent dictator”—and I work hard to stay benevolent) and I can do almost all of it from my bed.
So why was I in hospital? Because when I’m not running a refugee sponsorship group and occasionally throwing chicken nuggets at my two special-needs kids, I foster feral kittens. It’s very new, so I foolishly handled an adult feral cat without donning a full set of armour first. As a result I ended up in hospital with an infection that required IV antibiotics and surgery. My finger is technically still infected and I have to go back to hospital tomorrow (Friday) to see if I need a second surgery. I was discharged last Saturday and told to rest and heal, or face the consequences. And, although I love the drugs they give a girl for most surgeries (which also fix all my fibromyalgia pain for about half an hour after I wake up), this type of hand surgery uses a local anesthetic injected directly into my nerves. It hurt like giving birth (not an exaggeration) and I don’t EVER want to go through that pain again.
Lesson 1 for CRISP groups: If at all possible, make sure every group member has a reasonable amount of free time during the most intense early weeks of the sponsorship journey. And are in the right city. And don’t start any other charities or dangerous jobs immediately before the likely arrival date, like some kind of extremely silly person.
Due to technological and language difficulties at the Iran end, the Afghan family only found out they were coming to Australia fifteen days before they arrived. They speak no English whatsoever. I speak no Farsi, and nor does anyone else in the Castle of Kindness group. The family has been living in Iran as refugees for thirty years and all four children were born there. The oldest is twenty and the youngest is a toddler.
I was able to talk to the oldest on WhatsApp. He was obviously very tech savvy and without prompting was replying to me in English (so now I write to him in English, he translates it into Farsi using Google Translate, writes his response, and translates his response into English… and then pastes the translation into WhatsApp for me). Cool. I sent him photos of the house to give them all an idea of what to expect (without saying something vaguely threatening like, “The house we got you is suuper gross and ugly with an energy rating of minus five stars”). They’re used to four seasons including winter mornings similar to Canberra, so that was reassuring.
I sent pictures of my cats (and kids, and the rest of the Castle of Kindness) and asked a few questions, while trying not to bombard him with pre-arrival interrogation or ask semi-racist questions like if they were living in a tent with a communal pit toilet or something like that (which might mean we needed to teach them “living in a house” type skills like flushing a toilet after use).
It often took eight hours or so for messages to reach him but we did okay.
He is a cat person, so already showing signs of being an intelligent and discerning individual.
Translation apps are incredible, but they’re not perfect.
We got a fridge (free, and the right size) and some help, mainly from a group member’s grandsons who were visiting her that weekend (for only the weekend, so their time was doubly precious). And my uncle, who is over seventy but considerably fitter than most people I know. Chris is literally the only male in our group so of course he was on “Driving the truck to Cooma and fetching large furniture from an upstairs room” duty. Among many other jobs.
Lesson 2 for CRISP groups: Try real hard to have several able-bodied people in your group (or associated with it), and a range of genders (for different areas of expertise and for cultural sensitivity so all arriving genders have someone they feel comfortable talking to).
Wednesday 21 June: the day before arrival day:
My godparents live in Sydney and are two of the nicest people on Planet Earth. Their house is host to a constant stream of visitors including their adult kids, their godkids, and randoms from all walks of life. I called them up around 11am and said, “Can my family and possibly one or two other Castle of Kindness people and/or friendly translators stay with you tonight and possibly tomorrow night as well, and tomorrow night can we also bring another six people who don’t speak any English and will be extremely tired? I have some air beds. We’ll also need to pick them up at the airport at 6am and do you know anyone with Farsi and/or a minivan?”
They laughed with the kind of manic glee that I very much appreciate, and said, “We’d love to have you and anyone else; we’ll be out tomorrow night but you can help yourself to anything in the house; we don’t know any minivan owners but might have a distant connection to a Farsi speaker; and do you need us to come to the airport with you to help pick them up?”
Then they immediately went out and bought Weetbix for Chris to eat, and Turkish flatbread and hommus for the Afghan family.
I am so incredibly lucky to know these people. And so is the world. You’ll never guess why they’re busy Thursday night. . . they’re in the process of forming another CRISP refugee sponsorship group with a bunch of other people. (There are about eighty groups around Australia, and more all the time. You need at least five adults and a little bit of training and paperwork that CRSA helps you to do.)
When we found out that a flight to Canberra had been booked, we altered the plan again. Chris and I and the kids would stay with my godparents and Chris would drop me at the airport on his way home. I’d meet the family at the airport and fly with them back to Canberra. The godparents would never see them… or us, because we’d arrive at 10:30pm and leave at 5:00am. I was very annoyed to not get to bask in the warmth of their love for me but I’d just have to soak it up through the walls this time.
Did I mention they’re recovering from covid and very tired?
They were glad they didn’t have to join the airport run.
But.
They both got up at 4am so they could talk to me. I’m getting misty-eyed just thinking about it.
Everything went more or less smoothly from 4am-6am of arrival day (Thursday 22 June—the winter solstice in this hemisphere) except I was sweaty from frantic packing on Wednesday and didn’t have time to shower. I changed my clothes and hoped the refugees didn’t notice.
It turned out that my sweatiness nearly got the family kidnapped.
Lesson 3 for CRISP groups: Try not to look like a crackhead when meeting the family.
But for the most genuinely terrifying part of this incredible story, you’ll have to wait for Part 2. (You won’t have to wait long; I clearly need to debrief before my body will let me sleep.)
Part 2 is here.
Felicity Banks 
Our refugee family was nearly kidnapped in front of me when they first arrived in Australia: Part 2 of 2 | Felicity Banks said,
June 23, 2023 at 10:18 am
[…] Link to Part 1. […]