The first time we tried to leave Iran was not a success. We paid people smugglers to take us to Turkey. They divided us into two groups and said they would be moving us three days apart. In the first group was my mum, 3 sisters, my uncle and a friend. In the second...
I was only 6 months old when my dad got killed in the war, so I don’t have any memories of him. Mum was always the only person providing for us. She worked in the daytime as a midwife, and at night in the emergency department helping people who had been hurt by the...
Although my father was from Congo, my mother was from a Tutsi group from Burundi, and due to ethnic conflict at the time, her people started being targeted. The first thing that happened was that my father lost his job as a government intelligence officer because he...
I identify as gender queer as well as queer. I was not a typical girl but not really a typical boy either. I was just this weirdo who wanted to sit alone on the playground and read science-fiction books, and the other kids at school didn’t know what to do with that....
I left Bhutan in 1991 due to the ethnic cleansing targeting Nepalese speaking people at that time as part of the government’s One People, One Nation, One Language campaign. Suddenly, marriages between our cultural group were discouraged and we were forced to marry...
My husband and I both came to Australia as teenagers and we joke about how the only time we feel like we belong somewhere is when we fly over an ocean, because although we belong in two worlds – Zimbabwe and Australia, we also feel we don’t belong to either. My...
