Last year I judged a Youth Literacy Competition for schooled aged refugee children in Dandenong, Melbourne, Victoria as a part of the STAR Club (Students Taking on Active Role) at the Southern Migrant and Refugee Centre. The STAR club provides support to students with literacy, numeracy and study skills, help build confidence, self-esteem and feelings of connection to school and the wider community and they provide a safe place to study. They can also assist families to gain greater knowledge of the education system and provide opportunities for families to explore practical strategies to support their children’s learning at home.
The City of Greater Dandenong has the largest numbers of people seeking asylum in the country. The area has a population of approximately 152,000 people, more than 60% of whom were born overseas, with 64.% of households speaking a language other than English.
The students are from Afghanistan, Iran, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Sudan.
I would like to share with you some stories that myself and author Fleur Ferris judged from these wonderful children, and who, despite the intention and behaviour of others, will prevail and become the voices of the next generation.
Today is a story about what it is like to be a refugee from a young girl called Nazdana. Thank you for reading. and if you would like to donate to the STAR Club and the Refugee Program in Dandenong, please click here.
1. Ask for help. Mental health, cleaning, shopping, physical health. There is someone to help.
2. Clean your space. Maybe it is just the coffee table but that is better than nothing. Start there.
3. Eat for nutrition today. Not calories. Ask your body what it is craving. Whatever it needs is what your body is lacking.
4. Have a shower or a bath.
5. Schedule in tasks for the week ahead. Put them on your phone as reminders also.
6. Play with an animal. If you don’t have one, go to the dog park and one will come up and say Hi to you.
7. Read a poem. This one works.
8. Make a playlist of upbeat tunes that make you sing and even better, dance.
9. Burn a candle. Scented or not. Either way, it’s the lighting of intention of your new self-care.
10. Get a massage if you can. Even a back and neck from the mall shop helps. Sometimes loneliness gnaws at our soul, and we are skin hungry for touch.
11. Potter with plants. Potted or in the ground. Either works. Prune, feed, water, tidy.
12. Go somewhere busy and sit with a coffee and watch life around you. Witness the Sonder. *“Sonder” is the profound, individual realisation that each person you meet is living their own life, that each person has their own world fitted with their own personal worries, pains, pleasures, ambitions, routines. It is not an official word but it is a lovely descriptor and can remind you that everyone is doing going through ‘stuff.’
13. Drink calming tea. I like black tea but some people recommend chamomile and peppermint tea.
14. Go to the water. Watch the waves, watch the boats, watch the sun glinting on the water, swim, drift, float. There are two types of mental attention in life. One is “directed”, which is when we are focussed on a task such as driving a car, or walking on a busy footpath. They other type is “involuntary” which is when we we are in an environment outside our ordinary habitat, with enough familiarity that it poses no threat but enough interest to keep the brain engaged”. It is this state of “drift” that water encourages. We’ve all felt it. Staring at the sea, like one of Melville’s hypnotised “water gazers”, everything seems static, yet gently changing. Instead of the stress of addressing electronic data or dealing with the millions of different images we see every day, we’re presented with a view where change is subtle and slow – a sailboat, a seagull, the incoming tide. “Drifting takes us into the default-mode network: the network that’s active unless we are paying attention to something. In other words, it’s basically ‘online’ until we call on other areas of attention. And the default-mode network devours huge amounts of glucose and a disproportionate amount of oxygen.”
15. Buy an indoor plant or two. They create wellbeing and they improve air quality.
16. Reread your favourite childhood book.
17. Cook something that takes time. Each step is a meditation. Each step is more flavour and wellness.
18. Make a meal plan for the week so you know you will be nourished.
19. Clean out your workbag or handbag.
20. Plan your day for tomorrow.
21. Tell someone how much you appreciate them and love them.
22. Write your priorities for the week and schedule them.
23. Reframe your mistakes and see what you learned from them.
24. Turn off your phone for the day and unplug from the network for as long as you need.
25. Put away those things that annoy you every time you walk past them. They are eye irritants.
26. Make a list of things you would like to do one day – travel to Iceland, learn French, see the Kremlin
27. Make a list of things to do now – put away washing, sweep the floor, open the mail.
28. Write a letter to yourself with everything you have learned so far in life, and what you would tell your younger self.
29. Clean up your inbox and run a computer clean on your machine.
30. Ask someone who makes you feel energised and inspired to lunch or dinner.
Be kind to yourself, use inner dialogue like you would talk to a cherished friend, and above all, laugh, often and always. Because the one thing I can tell you about life is, it goes on.