My marriage unraveled when I was seven months pregnant. I think I had a nervous breakdown at that time. It’s hard for someone to go through a betrayal, but for a pregnant woman, it’s devastating. That was the defining moment in my life which led me to who I am now,...
We came to Australia from Jordan when I was 9, and we ended up living in Castle Hill, a very Christian area. As a result, I went to a public school filled with Christian teachers, where I was one of the few Muslims in my school. So I was already different, but then...
I am Karen, one of the ethnic groups from Myanmar subjected to ethnic cleansing for many decades. When I was five months old, civil war struck our village and my family had to flee to a refugee camp on the border of Thailand, where I lived for 12 years. During summer,...
My tummy was never once full in our whole life until two years after we came to Australia. Our family was from the poorest place in Vietnam that you could find, and when I was growing up, most of our food consisted of stuff collected from the side of the road, if you...
In 1956, there was a big frost in Italy, and nearly all the olive trees on our farm died. At that time, my father had friends in Australia telling him that money grew on trees, so he came over to see if it was true. Well, he arrived on a Saturday and started working...
