Adam Awad: Refugees want to participate fully in NZ life

Opinion

New Zealand accepts about 1000 refugees a year. These people come from increasingly diverse ethnicities. Many struggle to establish new lives in New Zealand. Their keenness to contribute to New Zealand life is hampered by unemployment and lack of acceptance.

When I arrived in New Zealand eight years ago, I had been a refugee for 17 years. I thought on arriving here that here was the end to my life as a refugee.

And it is. Because now I have a country I can call home. That is hugely important to me.

But there are ways in which I still feel like a refugee. Many new issues arise as we former refugees re-establish our lives here.

First, we refugees arrive in New Zealand as individuals. It is extraordinarily hard to settle when one's loved ones are left behind in dangerous or unknown conditions.

We nearly all come from collectivist cultures. When you come from a collectivist culture, your identity comes from your place in the community. It is like we are one body, and can only function effectively when all our parts and all our processes work properly.

In individualist cultures, the emphasis is on each person being independent - functioning fully on their own.

For most of us, we are more concerned at first with the survival of those we have left behind. Even people on benefits will send as much money as they can back to those they have left behind.

As well as that, people lucky enough to be in New Zealand (only 1 per cent of the world's refugees are given homes in other countries) are desperate to have their husbands or wives, children and parents join them. This is a very expensive and difficult process.

Many of us have to learn English when we arrive. This is a major hurdle in our integration here - English is one of the most difficult languages to learn. To survive while we are learning English, we rely on volunteers to help us catch a bus or buy food at the supermarket.

And we rely on building our own communities so we can speak to others who share our languages and cultural practices. This is an essential part of being able to feel at home here.

There are huge difficulties for us in building communities out of often very disparate people with very few resources. Imagine if you are forced to flee - alone - to an area of bush in Otago - and you find yourself among a group of people, none of whom you know, and who come from a wide range of backgrounds.

How do you go about deciding who the leaders are? Whose religion will dominate? How do you decide on the rules to share land and food by?

We refugee communities face all these issues. We have to minimise them by building trust and relationships among and between the refugee communities. Some of our communities are very small - there are only two Colombian refugees in New Zealand. And there are very few Rwandans.

So we work hard to build relationships among refugees from different ethnicities, struggling to communicate with each other in a language that is foreign to all of us. Then there are the different religions, cultural beliefs and practices to contend with. And all of us are trying to learn how New Zealand systems work.

The biggest struggle is to sit in a room with people whose families have been fighting your family. For example, imagine if you are Rwandan and a Hutu and the only other Rwandan family locally is a Tutsi family.

Somehow these people have to work through their experiences of the 1994 genocide that ruined their lives and their country so that they can work together to survive here. There is so little trust - so much forgiveness is needed to build bridges.

But we are doing it. Our communities are building. And our networks are building. We now have regional networks and we have a national collective voice that is called the New Zealand National Refugee Network.

When we refugees began to talk together, we left many meetings without any agreement, except to come back again. And when we did this, we continued our disagreements. It took years of challenging ourselves, and testing our strength, and learning about each other very deeply. Now we can work together on our common issues.

Our communities are still fragile. But our collective voice is getting stronger.

Now we find our biggest problem is people who have helped us wanting to control us. As we get stronger we discover, as have women, Maori, Pacific and others before us, that our "helpers" don't want us to stand on our own feet. They want to keep helping us.

We know our needs. What we need is for our supporters to listen carefully to us so they can use their resources effectively to help us achieve our goal of full participation in New Zealand life.

Adam Awad, a former refugee from Somalia, is president of the Wellington Somali Association, chairman of ChangeMakers Refugee Forum and secretary of the New Zealand National Refugee Network. This article is based on his keynote speech at the recent National Refugee Wellbeing Conference in Auckland.