A Long Way From Home

Sajeda, her husband, Nayim, and their six children are Rohingya refugees. They fled the violence of Myanmar and braved a terrifying ordeal at sea but, they tell Samantha Trenoweth, they are slowly finding a new sense of hope in Australia.

- Samantha Trenoweth

Sajeda sits in a suburban sunroom, painting intricate, beautiful, spiralling vines and flowers in henna all along her daughter’s arm.

The design is not traditional. It is Sajeda’s own. This combination of ancient technique and spontaneous creativity allows her, for a moment, to forget the horrors that she and her family have witnessed as Rohingyan refugees who, five years ago, risked their lives to flee their homeland.

“We left because a village very close to us was set alight,” explains Sajeda, who is now 30, softly spoken and appears to walk with a little cloud of her countrymen and women’s suffering following behind her. Tears are never far away.

Sajeda, her husband, Nayim, and four of their six children were born in the land they call Burma, which was renamed Myanmar by its military rulers in 1989. Their parents and grandparents were also born in Burma but none of them are citizens of that country or of any other. Myanmar does not recognise members of the Rohingya Muslim minority as citizens and because the family arrived in Australia by boat, they cannot apply for citizenship here. Sajeda’s passport reads: Nationality Unspecified.

“They were attacking the Rohingya people village by village,” she explains.

“That’s why we had to leave. Then the military came to people’s homes and arrested the boys – kidnapped them – and my husband said, ‘This is too dangerous. We can’t stay.’”

Today, Mondo, where they lived and where Nayim grew up, has been almost entirely burned to the ground. Many of their friends and relations have died or are missing. Sajeda had moved to Mondo to marry Nayim when she was just 13. It was an arranged marriage.