Last Thursday - Sudan Information Evening

The Sudan Information Evening held last Thursday night was a great success. Amanda and the rest of the International Service committee should be congratulated. We had many guests including Rotarians and friends of Rotaractors.

In spite of some last minute changes to guest speakers due to illness, the committee arranged for three amazing speakers. The first was Adele Rice from Milpera State High School in Chelmer. Milpera is a unique high school in the Education Queensland system for recently arrived teenagers who have little to no English, refugees and immigrants. It prepares its students for schooling in a main-stream high school and also helps with settlement.

Adele spoke about her work with African refugees, particularly Sudanese students who have often spent many years in refugee camps in the countries bordering Sudan. She touched on a few major issues that hinder these teenagers (some of whom aren't much younger than us) as they try to make a new life in Australia. The two big issues that stood out for me were that so many students are dealing with grief... many of them are parentless or only have one parent and almost all of them have family or close friends left back in the refugee camps. The other was illiteracy. Many of them have snippets of several languages but are not literate in any of these. This also affects their parents. The school works especially hard to help the students in these two areas. They have art and music therapy programs and they do a lot of work on pre-literacy and pre-numeracy, which relies heavily on a volunteer base.

Our other guest spearker was Lisa Siganto from Airfares for African Refugees. While refugees on one category of visa are flown to Australia free of charge by the government and receive extensive help in settlement, including an individual case worker, refugees on another visa category have to pay for their own airfare and have almost no help with settlement when they arrive in Australia.

A couple of years ago a neighbourhood group of women came up with the idea of a revolving loan scheme. When a refugee in Australia sponsors another family to come here they can ask AFAR for a loan equal to the cost of the airfare. The sponsor acts as guarantor for the loan since they are already employed or have government allowances. When the new refugees arrive in Australia, they pay the loan back interest-free over a period of 2-3 years out of their wage or allowances. When the loan is paid back in full the money is available for a new family. The group raised over $80 000 for the loan scheme and St Vincent de Paul auspice them and they have started extending their help to resettlement services, not just airfares.

Lisa was kind enough to bring her good friend Zobaida and her family to the evening. Zobaida is a 25-year-old Sudanese woman with four beautiful young children between the ages of one and nine. She immigrated to Australia with her husband and children three years ago.

Since immigrating to Australia Zobaida and her family have sponsored another family through AFAR to come to Australia.

The thing that struck me the most was that they too are facing problems caused by a lack of affordable housing. The family might have to move to Caboolture as that's where the most affordable housing is. Apparently Caboolture have quite a progressive program when it comes to refugees but there's still the problems of leaving all the friends that you've made, the primary school with its special ESL program and so on. The saddest thing though was that Zabada said sometimes they would go to look at a house within their price range and they would be told that it was no longer on the market, that a tenant had been found. But then the house would still be listed afterwards.

All in all it was a wonderful night and it really opened my eyes and it'll be great to see where the club decides to go from here.

(If anyone else in the club wants to write about their thoughts on the night please feel free to update the blog yourself. If you're not sure how than email me your post at s4055109@student.uq.edu.au and I'll put it up for you or you can always add a comment to this post.)

Darfur Information Evening Thurs 20 March

ROTARACT

ACT NOW

The Rotaract Club of South-West Brisbane would like to invite Rotarians, Rotaractors, Interactors and the community to learn more about the conflict in Sudan. Since 2003, 400,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced.

We need to ACT NOW.

Our guest speaker will be Jenny Ryan from Airfares for African Refugees and the Mater Mothers’ Hospital. Sudanese refugees from the local Brisbane community will also be there to share their experiences.

Date: Thursday 20 March 2008
Time: 6:30 for 7:00pm
Location: Auditorium, St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School,
Cnr Ruthven St & Aidan’s Way, Corinda
RSVP: rotaractswb@hotmail.com

If you would like a copy of the flyer in PDF format please email rotaractswb@hotmail.com

We're in print!

Rotary Down Under featured us in their March 08 issue. I would scan a copy of the article but I think I left the magazine behind at our last meeting....oops!

But RDU does publish their magazine online so if you follow this link and click on page 30 from the menu you'll be able to read the article. There's also a neat article on page 29 about the Rotaract Club of Whitehorse who 'backyard blizted' a foster home in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. If you check out past editions they have a Rotaract section and there's heaps more projects in there as well.

-- Cat

Update

Steph and Suzanna visited the RSPCA today and presented a cheque from our club for $600. The money will go towards the wildlife centre where they have rehabilitation programs for skinks, possums, birds, bats, snakes and even a blue tongue lizard. The RSPCA officers were telling Steph and Suzanna that our donation is equivalent to three times the annual food budget for the centre or the cost of a heating pod-thing (can't remember what they said it was called!) so it will definitely go to good use.

We had a very informal meeting tonight, held outside in the undercover area next to our meeting room. Tim very thoughtfully provided us with some red and blue paint and we got cracking on creating some club banners... one of which is very professional looking and others slightly less so.

Laura passed around a roster as we have secured a spot to visit several Rotary clubs and talk about Rotaract, our club and our projects. There are still quite a few blanks spots so if you weren't at the meeting please, please, please email Laura and see what spots need visitors. Centenary and Ipswich both have meetings on Wednesday mornings that meet at 6:45 for 7:00 I believe so that may fit better if you have work and other evening committments.

Everyone who went along to anti-graffiti last weekend reported back that it went really well (see your Bulletin for photos) - the next one will be held on the last Sunday of March, the 30th. Instead of splitting into a painting team and a bbq team we will see how it goes having everyone painting then everyone helping set up the barbie. Hopefully we can make the bbq/picnic a meet and greet and information session for any people potentially interested in becoming a member.

Our next meeting on the 20th March is Bring A Friend night and we will hopefully have some guest speakers talking to us about the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Everyone and anyone is welcome so get all your mates and family and bring them along.