Love, loss and heartbreak: Stories about refugees

Love, loss and heartbreak: Stories about refugees

With recent reports of thousands of Rohingya boat people from Myanmar and other asylum seekers stranded in rickety boats in waters close to Singapore, the refugee issue has hit closer to home.

The number of people living as refugees from war or persecution now stands at 51.2 million globally, the highest figure since World War II, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

As a small country with limited land, Singapore will not be accepting refugees or people seeking political asylum, the Ministry of Home Affairs said last month.

However, Singapore has its fair share of individuals who worked closely with refugees, or have been refugees themselves.

Finding love in war-torn Afghanistan

Trainee solicitor Natasha Latiff, 27, first became intrigued by Afghanistan after reading an article when she was 12.

It described the great lengths that girls went to to receive an education under the country's hardline Taleban regime, including hiding their textbooks in sewing machines and under Quran covers.

About the same time, in 2000, she came across a video which changed her life.

The footage showed a woman, dressed in a pale blue burqa, executed by a Taleban gunman in front of thousands of spectators in a stadium in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

After viewing the video, Ms Natasha, who is Muslim, became determined to find a way to help those oppressed by the regime.

The shocking video played a role in her later work with refugees, as well as bringing her and her husband, who is a former Afghan refugee, together.

When she was 15, she started sponsoring a girl, a former Afghan refugee who had returned to Kabul after years in exile in Pakistan. She paid US$30 a month for the child's living expenses and the arrangement lasted about five years.

Her determination and boldness can be seen in other ways. While she was in secondary school here, she was disappointed by the school's lack of interest in topics that she was passionate about, which in her words were "the United States' war on terror, Islamic law, the rule of law and women's rights".

So she decided to change schools, applying to 45 schools in England without telling her mother Madam Lailah Latiff, a single parent. She got two scholarship offers and eventually attended King's St Michael's College, a boarding school in Worcestershire, England, where she did her A levels.

At the age of 17, she flew from England to Kabul in secret to meet the child she was sponsoring. She had lied to her mother in Singapore that she was "working with Moroccan refugees in the Czech Republic".

The two weeks Ms Natasha spent in Kabul was the start of a relationship with war-battered Afghanistan which has lasted 10 years.

She says: "At first, you read so much about the place and now you're seeing it in 3-D. Your senses come alive. There's dust in the air, even the stench of the drains. It's the complete opposite of Singapore."

She adds that she sometimes dressed like a boy to be able to walk more freely in the city's markets, hiding her long hair in a traditional turban.

She returned to England where she read law at the University of Warwick. There, she started a society, which later became the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Strategic Advocacy of Human Rights.

For the next 10 years, she visited Afghanistan almost every year for up to three months each time. She moved to Kabul to work full-time as a human-rights adviser for three years, from 2011 to 2014, returning to Singapore last year to complete her bar.

With 2.7 million refugees, Afghanistan has the world's second largest refugee population under United Nations care, a figure which is topped only by war-torn Syria. There are also many internally displaced persons (IDPs), that is, individuals who leave their homes because of war, persecution, disaster or other reasons and find themselves in a different part of the same country.

Ms Natasha has worked on issues such as women's rights and legal matters with her NGO and other organisations in Afghanistan. For example, she and her team worked with community leaders to produce a manual to raise awareness of violence against women, and also worked with the local authorities to ensure they would not register marriages involving minors.

She taught English and distributed basic items such as food, clothes, schoolbags, pens, diapers and sanitary pads to IDPs, refugees and their children. Once, she and some others slaughtered a cow, distributing the rare fresh meat to delighted refugee families.

She says that in her humanitarian work, she lived with "a lot of guilt".

"When you go into a refugee camp six months later, you realise the child whom you played with has died because of the cold winter or because of preventable diseases," she says, adding that part of her always feels she could have done so much more.

"For example, I might want to sleep in during the weekend, but felt maybe I could have earned more money to help these refugee children."

Madam Lailah, 63, who maintains a library in a law firm, describes her second child as "quiet, responsible and caring". Her oldest daughter, 29, is a beauty consultant and her son, 25, is a university student. She says she has been "surprised many times by Natasha", but adds that in general, she wants her children to be independent.

Madam Lailah says it was not an easy decision to let her daughter study in England, but Ms Natasha told her it would help her a lot financially as the bulk of the fees were paid for.

Ms Natasha had one more surprise up her sleeve for her mother. At the age of 23, during a work project on public advocacy against the use of young boys as soldiers, she met a colleague called Schoeib Sabri, who was a former Afghan refugee.

Six months later, she married him in Kabul, with each of their mothers connected to the ceremony via Skype video link. The couple have no children.

Mr Sabri, who is a German citizen, fled Kabul with his family during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which started at the end of 1979.

His father, a mechanical engineer, had heard of alleged killings by the communists and decided to flee with his wife and three children, paying people smugglers US$3,500 a person to help them escape. A fourth child was later born in Germany, where they arrived in 1981.

Mr Sabri, 42, recalls the gruelling escape journey.

The family was squashed in a pick-up truck transporting walnuts for seven hours.

At one point, they were threatened at gunpoint by Afghan mujahideen, who were guerilla fighters battling the Soviet army. They managed to convince the fighters they were not the enemies.

Eventually, they made it to Karachi in Pakistan and later flew to Germany, where they spent a few months at a refugee camp before receiving their citizenship and settling in the small town of Solingen.

Mr Sabri, who found himself "suddenly illiterate", started learning German by watching Sesame Street in the language and later took a bachelor's degree in biomedical technology and found work, including as an electrical technician.

Still, his homeland exerted a pull on him.

Around the time that Ms Natasha saw the Taleban execution video, Mr Sabri saw it too in Germany.

The burqa worn by the woman killed, a mother of seven, was similar to the blue garment which his mother wore when they escaped from Kabul.

He returned to Kabul at the age of about 30, establishing clinics all over Afghanistan and later working in a media company, where he met his wife.

He came to Singapore in January on a long-term visit pass and is looking for work.

Mr Sabri says he struggles to recapture the sense of belonging he had in the first eight years of his life in Afghanistan.

While a German citizen, he has faced jibes about not being a "real" German. In Kabul, he was told he was "Germanised" and not a true Afghan.

He says: "I will be, for the rest of my life, a refugee."

Fleeing Laos, family lost their fortune

When restaurateur Michael Ma left his homeland Laos, his father told him they were going on holiday in Pattaya, Thailand, a regular vacation spot for the family.

Little did the seven-year-old boy realise that they were leaving Vientiane for a refugee camp in northern Thailand - thus beginning a drastically different life which would eventually land them in Australia.

Mr Ma, 47, founder of the IndoChine group of hotels, eateries and clubs, is the fourth of five children in a well-to-do ethnic-Chinese family.

They were the largest pig-farm owners in Laos in the 1970s, and his father, Mr Somsak Ma, 85, was then a well-known entrepreneur whose business interests included brewing whiskey.

They had many maids and cars, as well as a house in the city and one in the countryside.

When the communists took over the country in 1975, his father started hearing about arrests and politically linked disappearances and was convinced he was being targeted.

At the first Thai refugee camp, life was much harder than the family had been used to. It was congested, filled with mosquitoes and had only basic toilet facilities.

After almost a month there, his father decided to move to Bangkok, where they rented a small flat by selling the jewellery, watches, diamonds and gold which his mother had carried with her.

More relatives joined them in Bangkok, but his father did not want to stay in Thailand for fear that the country would fall to communists as part of the "domino effect", a theory which held sway at the time.

"It was a terrible ordeal. We didn't know what was happening. My dad had lost all his land and fortune. We'd lost everything," he says.

His mother, Mrs Chou Ma, went to the various embassies every day to try and get documents which would allow them to be repatriated to countries such as the United States, France or Australia.

Luckily, one day, a top Australian embassy official recognised her. The year before, some officials had visited his dad's farms to take a look at its fertilising system.

The family soon got the papers they needed and flew to Sydney in Australia as refugees.

Australia presented a new set of challenges.

Putting up at West Ridge hostel, a refugee resettlement centre where refugee families lived in two-bedroom homes, Mr Ma remembers not being used to the "very strong cheese" and Australian food. They had no friends. Mr Ma spoke Laotian, Mandarin, Thai and Teochew, but he did not speak English at the time.

"We had become refugees and my father didn't know what to do with himself. He had been a big shot and, all of a sudden, he became a cleaner at a factory. He was about 50 years old and had five kids," says Mr Ma.

Flung into poverty, he was grateful for small mercies.

"In Laos, it was always hot. We were always wearing flip-flops and had no socks. In Australia, it was cold in winter. The Red Cross there gave me my first pair of socks," says Mr Ma, a Singapore permanent resident.

He has four children and his wife works in business development and marketing in IndoChine.

Today, he helps the Red Cross with fund raising. IndoChine donates more than $300,000 a year to charitable and environmental causes in Singapore each year.

In the Cabramatta suburb in south-western Sydney, where they settled as new citizens, his father decided to open a shop selling Asian foodstuffs.

All the children pulled their weight at the shop, which was open seven days a week.

"I never had any toys or new clothes. We never went shopping. We didn't go for holidays. We just learnt to work."

Eventually, his father opened a chain of supermarkets, restoring the fortunes he lost in Laos.

Racism was rampant and "Asian bashing" was common in Australia at the time, says Mr Ma.

Once, when he was 11 and walking home in his school uniform, he was stopped by a car. Four or five adults came out from the vehicle, holding a cricket bat and stumps. He fled.

He also knew people who were killed or brain-damaged from racially motivated attacks.

The streets were also rough. In the 1980s and 1990s, the 5T Vietnamese crime gang wreaked havoc in Cabramatta.

Mr Ma played basketball with some of the 5T leaders who were refugees, until his mother sent him to boarding school when he was about 15 to get him out of reach of the gang.

Musing that he might have become a spoilt brat if he had remained a rich man's son in Laos, Mr Ma, who came to Singapore in 1993 and started life here sleeping in the rented hall area of an HDB flat, says being a refugee has taught him "never to give up" and to have a cast-iron work ethic.

The refugee experience has also influenced his philanthropic interests, which extend to Australia and Thailand.

It taught him to "give when you are more fortunate than others, help out and get involved in the community".

"If you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you are lucky. The tables can turn any time," he adds.

Refugee girls behind fence shaped career choice

The Rohingya boat people crisis is a familiar one to humanitarian worker Geraldine Ang, 39, who has been helping refugees for about eight years.

She once interviewed a group of Rohingya people in 2006 in Indonesia. They were part of 70 men and boys crammed into a fishing boat which could fit only half that number.

Thin, sick and disoriented, they had fled Myanmar and had been on the high seas close to a month before they ran out of fuel.

"It's always the expression in the eyes of the refugees that I remember," she says. "That look of fear and confusion which seems to say, 'Can you please help us?'"

The Rohingya are one of the communities she has helped in the course of her work, which has taken her to places such as Africa, Indonesia and Timor Leste.

She started as an intern at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and gradually got a full-time job there, assisting in various refugee camps for four years.

Ms Ang took on other jobs before returning to the UNHCR, where she helps to raise funds for refugees. She has a 21/2-year-old son and an eight-month-old daughter.

Her desire to become a humanitarian worker started when her older brother took her when she was a pre-schooler to the Hawkins Road Camp in Sembawang.

Singapore's only refugee camp, it was set up in 1978 to deal with the influx of refugees after the Vietnam War.

Behind the fence in the former army barracks, she saw Vietnamese girls her age staring back. She never forgot them, even after the camp closed in 1996, when the last of the Vietnamese boat people there were repatriated.

She decided to take a master's degree in humanitarian assistance in Sweden and found work at the UNHCR.

In 2004, she spent a year working in a refugee camp in Tigray, a province in northern Ethiopia. The camp housed 10,000 people fleeing persecution and conflict in Eritrea, which was north of Tigray.

The region was poor and dusty. After she disembarked from the propeller plane, she found that a shipping container served as the airport terminal.

As much as she could, she followed the simple, impoverished lifestyle of the locals, drawing water from wells to take her showers.

For drinking, she had bottled water, which was a huge luxury.

Her diet comprised mainly injera - a traditional Ethiopian flatbread - with onions, lettuce, carrots, eggs and goat's meat.

Many of the Eritrean refugees there were law or medicine students stuck in a quagmire.

They could not find work in the new country because of their refugee status. Returning to their previous country was also out of the question.

She says it is a shame because these people "could add value to whatever community they went into".

Instead, they could spend years in exile, she adds, such as the Burmese refugees in camps on the Thai border, many of whom have been there for 30 years.

In her four years in the field, part of her job was to ascertain whether asylum seekers could be registered as bona fide refugees through an interview and screening process.

Being registered would pave the way for refugees to eventually return home, live legally in the local community or be repatriated to another country.

Over the years, she has seen her fair share of human suffering, especially that of separated families.

She remembers speaking to a woman in Jakarta who had fled Iraq with her nine daughters in 2003. They were part of an ethnic minority being persecuted back home.

"The woman thought her husband had escaped to Australia," Ms Ng says.

"The people smugglers, whom they had paid a lot of money to, dumped them in Indonesia and told them it was Australia."


This article was first published on June 7, 2015.
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