VoRTCS - Volunteer Refugee Tutoring & Community Support Program

Mustafa, 17 years, Iraq

My name is Mustafa and I want to tell you the story of how I have lived. I was born in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. In Baghdad my family were scared and saw the oppression, however, we were all happy because our family were together.

I don’t want to remember the actual day, as I wish it never happened, our family heard a knock at our door. My mother opened the door to find members of the Army. They pushed past my mother and without saying anything took away my eldest brother. I can remember the screaming and crying form my mother, brothers and sisters. We thanked Allah on that day because my father wasn’t in the house with us. It was mercy for us, as if he were there at the time, they would have caught him and taken him to be a soldier too.

When my father arrived back at the house and was told what had happened he said, “That’s enough, we can’t wait for more problems!”
Our family left our house, our company, our school and my uncles and aunts and travelled together to the north of Iraq. We stayed there for about one year without going outside of the small house that we were living in. We then moved to Syria because my father was worried about our safety. Syria was a little better than my country because there was peace, we were there for about two years.

In Syria I attended a special class to learn French but was unable to finish study because there was a need for myself and two older brothers to go to work to earn money to live. It was very hard to leave my study because I think that humans have no worth without an education.

I worked from 8.00 in the morning until late at night (sometimes midnight) for a cosmetics company. I had to stand up all day. Another job I had in Syria was working for a company selling shoes. I spent my days working very hard in the summer hear and carrying 25 kilograms of stock to another store one kilometre away.

After two years of living in Syria we were told by the UN that our family had been accepted to travel to Australia. We did not believe the good news. We were finally able to have peace and a new home. When we arrived in Australia we finally had our own home and the Australian people made us feel welcome, equal and took us in as their family.

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