SA: So my name is Shizleen. I am from the Maldives. I’m going to set my story ten years ago, coming here and I come from a city life and being quite culturally shocked to come to Bunbury at about 5 o’clock, going, where are the people? I remember saying to my mom, I’m pretty sure it’s deserted. I don’t know what to do.

Anyways made some beautiful friends. I came here to study here at ECU. I was the only international student. Just to give you an idea of how far and far between we are. I’m going to set my story in the local Red Dots shop. Why not? One of the girls that I met at uni decided to show me around. So we’re checking out the aisles. Not my thing.

So I’m just, like, cruising around trying to get out of there. And this little lady comes up to me. She comes up to, about this much, and I’m quite tall for an Asian, so I already have a complex here. So I am looking at her. I smile at her and she goes, Get back on your boat and go back to where you came from.

And I’m like, lady, it took me 9 hours to get here on a plane. I said this in my head because I wasn’t brave enough, but I’m like, Why would I get on boat? And I’m so as like any intelligent, normal human being would do. I put that in a box and stared away because I wasn’t ready to deal with that.

And also so people know, us, I like to call myself as a local person now – have slangs that nobody else understands. So boat people is not something anybody else uses. So I had no clue what she was talking about. We call them maritime refugees in outside Australian world. So I was like, Have you heard of planes? So anyways, that started my journey of encountering really situations that I thought was quite bizarre because I come from having worked in the UN for seven years prior to having come here.

So I had travelled a lot, been around, seen a lot. I taught before coming here. But I got all sorts of experience. I just want you guys to remember that there’s something positive coming out of it that’s happening at the same time. So don’t think it’s all negative, while I tell you this story, to the point that people would speak really slowly and very loudly to me and I’m like, you are not going to teach me English in 2 seconds, but that’s okay.

And I could not walk down the streets without people rolling down the windows, yelling out horrible things and obviously, as any normal person would do, I started taking it on board and really kind of going, Is this the place I want to be? We were a young family that had decided to come here. I already had a five-year-old son who was asking me questions as to why he did not fit in.

And I just really started getting into that headspace of like I was also the spokesperson for all the Muslims. I had to tell everyone that I wasn’t part of anything bad that was happening. I had to justify it constantly. And anyways, at the same time I was studying, we had a beautiful young girl, and I continued studying full-time.

My husband was a stay-at-home dad, so he was happy doing what he was doing. I was happy doing studying and not being a responsible parent, the fun one and the fourth year, so four years from there, fourth year, we had a beautiful boy and an accident happened. He had an acquired brain injury during birth and we were told he was not going to live.

So we were going through the trauma of that. And then after five days of being told that we were told, no, he’s going to survive. And I remember sitting at PCH the last year of my study, we had plans to go back home, going, looking at my husband, going, we can’t go home. We can’t take him there. There’s no facilities, there’s no health, and we can’t keep him healthy or give him the help he needs there.

And that started the journey of trying to keep him here, which we are now fighting and continue to fight. Six years on. But when you have a disability, you do not get the option to stay here. You are not seen as the same as the rest of us. So he was rejected with his visa. And that brings to my next bit of the story.

Where I was always thinking about how people were telling me how to talk out. People were really like at times ostracizing me for looking the way I look and choosing to look the way that I look, and to the point that I was told how to pronounce Maldives, that it’s pronounced the Maldives. And one day, I kid you not, I went, is it though? Like in my head and I’m like, silly girl, you are from there, you know how to pronounce this.

But I actually questioned it because that many people told me that I shouldn’t be pronouncing it that way. Um, so anyways, my son’s visa got rejected, and that started the public journey of trying to get him to stay here in Bunbury. And I remember showing up to a rally where we were going to do a march to show the support that [inaudible words] had in the community.

And I remember looking around, hundreds of hundreds of people. There were friends, most of them who had become family, looking at them going, oh, I am part of this community, like I was so focused on looking at all the little negative things that were happening in my life, including what we call life in itself, that I forgot that in the ten years, like ten years now, about six years at that time, we had actually become part of a community where we’re really ingrained and that people actually chose to give up what they were doing, chose to write the letters, chose to show up and march the public square to show that they wanted us here.

So I guess I wanted to talk about my journey of getting there and not actually seeing any of that happen while I was so focused on going, oh, he said that to me. Oh, he was a bit rude to me. So that’s our story of becoming part of the Bunbury community where I guess six years from then, now where I am a small business owner, part of a small business and, I’m a social worker, work in the disability sector and know most of the community, they know us, we know them.

Yeah, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Like I have two homes, a lot of people don’t, so I’m quite lucky to have that. I see Bunbury as much of a home for myself as I do when I think about of Maldives. So that’s what family means to us, and that’s my story. I guess if you have any questions.