Long journey from desert to Sunshine

November 7, 2004
Tebeje Belayneh Mokonen and his family outside the home they moved into last week, waiting to be transferred from the Armadale hostel.

Photo: Rebecca Hallas

After decades living in tents, an Ethiopian refugee family is now settled in Melbourne and discovering a whole new world. Paul Heinrichs reports.

Some of the poorest people in the world broke into smiles last week.

After 30 years living in tents in a Sudan desert, Melbourne's latest Ethiopian refugees had finally found a roof over their heads and a floor beneath their feet. Walls, too - what luxury!

It is just an old four-bedroom weatherboard in an undistinguished street in Sunshine North, but to them, it is the "castle" of folklore, full of mysterious but exciting new stuff.

In the kitchen, the finer points of an electric jug, a toaster, and a stove were explained. No one had seen these items before.

And a casually dressed teenage boy rummaging in a storeroom asked what an ironing board was. Alas, he will be collar proud soon enough.

Meet the beautiful, happy family headed by former Ethiopian freedom fighter Tebeje Belayneh Mokonen, 67, and his wife Azanu Alehegn Belete, 45.

There are nine children: sons Gizachew, 20, and Tedros, 18, daughters Negabanchi, 16, and Zenebech, 14, son Mulualem, 12, daughters Agerie, 10, and Awetash, 8, and sons Endargachew, 6 and Daguenet, 4.

Plus, there is their married oldest son, Yohannes Tebeje Belayneh, 23, and his wife Atala Dagnew Woldeselassie, 18, who are getting another house nearby.

Speaking in his native Amharic, Tebeje expressed his profound gratitude through an interpreter that Australia had put an end to his "30 years' crying and suffering time".

Their journey began on Monday when a bus took them from Abu Rakman camp in southern Sudan to the capital, Khartoum, from where they flew to Cairo, then to Singapore for an overnight stop, then to Melbourne.

Banking, taxation and Centrelink representatives were on hand to cut through red tape on arrival at an Armadale hostel on Wednesday.

Next morning, they took a minibus journey to the western suburbs, during which they could not fail to notice Melbourne's conspicuous wealth.

With everything they owned stashed in a couple of suitcases and cardboard boxes, they saw traffic jams of Oaks Day limousines, and people in their race day finery.

Ethiopian settlement staff working for the non-profit New Hope Foundation are working intensively with the family.

No one could accuse them of jumping the queue, and their turn came when they were among the latest group of 26 refugees accepted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for resettlement in Melbourne.

Australia is doing its bit to help the UNHCR clear the Abu Rakman camp, accepting 300 refugees from there this year, of whom Melbourne is getting 100.

Tebeje's family will join Melbourne's several thousand Ethiopians, in particular the community gathered around the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church in Maribyrnong.

Old friends from their camp greeted them at the Armadale hostel.

Some of the young men, expressing their friendship in the traditional physical way of holding hands or draping arms around each other's shoulder, were in for a shock when an Ethiopian settlement worker explained a cultural difference - they would be mistaken for gay men if they persisted in Australia. There was laughter as they jumped apart.

Raised in Gonder, a northern Ethiopian city, Tebeje arrived with little more than the ancient leather-bound book of psalms that has preserved his faith and spirit.

In 1974, he said, he had been caught up with the opposition to the military junta that overthrew Ethiopia's long-reigning monarch, Haile Selassie.

After he was captured and sentenced to a year's detention, he escaped from a truck transporting him to jail, and made his way across the border to the area where the camp sprang up.

As the cruel Mengistu Stalinist regime settled over Ethiopia, Tebeje realised he was there for the long haul, and married and raised his family in two four-metre square tents - a life, he said, that was full of problems.

He worked in the camp canteen, helped by his children. Only Tebeje's first two sons, Johannes and Gizachew, have had any education - a couple of years' basic reading and writing.

But they claim to have honed their soccer skills, and his daughter Zenebech is reputedly a fast barefoot runner over distances up to five kilometres. She wants to be a doctor.

The Sunday Age will follow the family's progress.