Doing What We Can

Supporting Refugees

We have been confronted by economic migrants trying to get into Australia and New Zealand to escape poverty and to find a decent life for themselves.  The position of the Australian government (under Tony Abbott) and the New Zealand government is that both countries are not prepared to accept economic migrants.  They are rejected at the borders.

This, however, is not to say that the socio-economic aspirations of economic migrants are immoral or unethical in and of themselves.  Every human being has a freedom right to seek to increase the welfare and well-being of family and loved ones. 

Both countries run refugee programmes which grant entrance mainly to to those who have suffered at the hands of tyrants and the lawless.  Sometimes in the controversy over restricting economic migration, we loose sight of the more extreme cases of suffering which the existing refugee programmes seek to alleviate.

The Stuff carried an illustrative account of a refugee family in the process of setting in New Zealand.

Family reunited after decades apart

Karina Abadia
Stuff

Johnson Apet and his mother Malang Mabior at Selwyn College Refugee Education for Adults and Families (REAF).

A mother and son who were separated during civil war have been reunited after 24 years.  Johnson Apet was only four when his family fled their village in South Sudan in 1990. Soldiers came from the north and attacked the village in the middle of the night, he said.  "We ran when they started shooting people. From there mum ran away with my brother and sister and I ran with my grandmother."

His mother Malang Mabior, 49, travelled to Uganda and got a job cooking meals for sick children at a medical clinic to make ends meet. While they were travelling her husband and daughter became ill and died. There was no medicine available or hospital to take them to, she said.  In 1994 she moved to Kenya where she also worked as a chef.

Apet's journey was quite different. He moved around South Sudanese towns with his grandmother and uncle before spending almost a month walking to Ethiopia.In 1995 they were joined by his grandfather and a year later they moved to the South Sudanese border town of Pachola in South Sudan. In 2001 he returned to Ethiopia to study.

Apet never gave up hope that he'd find his family and spent years searching through the UNHCR registry of refugees. Finally in 2002, he had a break. "I heard my mother was in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya so I went there and asked people. They told me she was living in a place called Group 8."  A man took him to her house and he knocked on the door. "She came outside and I said ‘are you Malang Mabior?' She said ‘yeah'. She asked me who I was. I said I'm your son. She cried. I told her ‘don't cry' but I also cried."

It was a shock for Mabior to see her long lost son.  "I thought he'd died. I said ‘thank you God'." He was also reunited with his brother Solomon that day and met his three youngest siblings for the first time. But that wasn't the end of the story. Apet had found his mother the day before she and her children were travelling to New Zealand as quota refugees.

It took another 12 years for Mabior to arrange for her son to come to New Zealand through the Family Reunification Programme.  He arrived on September 13. His first impressions of Auckland are that it's cold but nice and clean. Apet is studying English on Selwyn College's adult refugee programme (REAF) and living with his family in Mt Wellington.

He had to leave his wife and two children in Kenya so the next step is to bring them to New Zealand. Once he has saved the money he also plans to go to university and study engineering.  Mabior is happy here and is thankful for the support she received from REAF staff in bringing her son to New Zealand.

This story underscores another aspect of accepting and settling refugees.  When they arrive in this country, the work begins.  Thousands of unpaid volunteers work in this sector, befriending, mentoring, encouraging, and assisting  people through the culture shock and successful assimilation.  It is a very important labour of love.