Extract from ABC News
From whole apartments to the tiniest piggy bank, community groups across Australia have been inundated with donations for Gazan families arriving on visitor visas after fleeing the war.
More than 800 people from the besieged territory have been granted temporary visas by the federal government.
All are starting from scratch, after boarding flights to Australia with nothing but what they could carry.
Within days of putting the call out for help, Susan Wahhab said she ran out of space in her home garage to store all the donations.
"It's so heartening actually to know that there are so many people out there who have responded to our donation drive," Ms Wahhab, president of the Palestinian Christians in Australia (PCIA) group, said.
There were so many donations she had to source a large warehouse.
On a steamy Saturday morning the warehouse is abuzz as volunteers begin sorting everything from mattresses to toothbrushes.
"For us, we can't be there [in Gaza] to help them but we can be here to help them, so we're just doing our bit," volunteer Sally Asfour said as she carried donations into the warehouse.
As the volunteers busily sort through thousands of items, a little girl dressed in a bright pink dress with a matching piggy bank walks up shyly to one of the organisers and hands over her hard-earned pocket money.
She doesn't say anything but she doesn't have to. The gesture says it all.
The volunteers begin to tear up and give the little girl a big hug.
Other local children have donated toys and games.
"We've seen [Gazan] kids' lives torn to pieces. So, for an [Australian] kid to come and say, 'I've saved enough money for the Gaza kids,' it breaks your heart," Ms Wahhab said.
"The kids are the barometer of our humanity."
Mosque turned into makeshift warehouse
In Melbourne's west, Adam Raad had to quit his day job to manage the volume of donations coming into Al Rahman mosque.
When the ABC visited, he was inside the mosque with his wife Sanaa and five children sorting through hundreds of boxes of donations and getting them ready to deliver to newly arrived Gazan families.
He said the team of volunteers had "not stopped working for the past two weeks just to keep up with demand".
A blue tarp divides the mosque section from the lines of boxes that have filled the makeshift room.
It is stuffed to the brim with various essential food items, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, nappies, and wipes.
As Mr Raad reads out a handwritten note from a child who has donated his toys to Gazan kids, he is almost in tears.
"It breaks your heart," he said.
"I've got even little kids, they come here to drop the donation bags with their parents [and] they come here crying. They want to meet these kids from what they see on the news," he said.
The Al Rahman mosque is located in the city of Hume, where most of the Gazans will be settling.
It has the highest Muslim population in Victoria and has received an influx of refugees from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan in previous years.
The city's mayor, Naim Kurt, who has also been helping gather donations at the mosque, said the war in Gaza had hurt the community on a personal level.
"We’ve got a number of Palestinians in our community. One gentleman lost 30 members of his family in one explosion. So it’s being deeply felt here," he said.
Free housing and a place to rest
The community groups collecting donations say the items will go a long way to helping Gazan families set up in Australia, but what they need more than anything are places to stay.
Al Rahman mosque has donated seven houses rent-free for three months.
Separately, a charity has sourced 15 units across Sydney, with the owners offering them rent-free for between three months and a year.
Merciful Group president Rabih Chamma said the charity put a call out for community support and donations just days before the first Gazans started arriving last month.
"Within hours, the bank account was flooded," Mr Chamma said
"Someone has given us three apartments in Villawood, somebody gave us a house in Greenacre, some real estates jumped on board and said, 'Whatever you need, we're happy to get.'
"There's another guy who had a house [and he] gave it to us for half the price."
'Walking through a nightmare'
Umm Ali* and her son have just moved into one of the donated apartments in Western Sydney, where they can live rent-free for six months.
The ABC was there as they saw their new home for the first time.
It was fully furnished and stocked with food and other essentials.
"We thank Australians for their hospitality," she said.
The mother and son had little more than the clothes off their backs when they first arrived at Sydney Airport three weeks ago.
She told the ABC she lost 23 family members in one night in Gaza and had been in a complete haze since arriving in Australia.
"Don't ask me how I'm feeling … until this moment I can't collect my thoughts, it feels like my head is being crushed," Umm Ali said.
"It's felt like walking through a dream, or rather a nightmare, ever since we left."
Despite being safe now, the horrors she faced back home in Gaza still weigh heavily on her mind.
Especially because her elderly husband is still waiting for approval from Israeli and Egyptian authorities to cross the Rafah border out of Gaza and into Egypt.
She cannot think of any reason why he was not granted permission to leave when she was.
He has been staying in a tent near the border inside a school alongside hundreds of other people and has been struggling to find food and clean water.
"We don't sleep. [We have] constant anxiety," she said.
Her trauma is shared among many Gazans arriving in Australia.
Hundreds of doctors and mental health professionals donating their services
A team of health professionals volunteers, 400 strong, are in the process of treating the incoming Palestinians.
It was put together by the Australian Islamic Medical Association (AIMA) who were quick to get Gazans reviewed by health practitioners.
Among their ranks are doctors, nurses and even mental health professionals volunteering their services without cost.
Melbourne doctor Amireh Fakhouri, a member of the AIMA, says volunteers are treating patients with chronic conditions and many require intensive medical intervention — even surgery.
Dr Fakhouri added that most of the hospitals in Gaza were hit during the ongoing air strikes, which meant many of the visa holders arriving in Australia had not had access to proper health care for several months.
"The health conditions that we are needing to treat from the 15 individuals that we've met so far or have triaged, I would say probably 95 per cent will need mental health services," she said.
Tourist visas do not include Medicare cover, so if Gazans get sick while in Australia the costs incurred fall on their sponsors, and they could be in the thousands of dollars per person.
Dr Fakhouri is calling for the government to grant them urgent Medicare access under these circumstances "just like the Ukrainians had a change in their visa really quickly [so they could access Medicare] as soon as they arrived".
"We're not seeing that push from the government," she said.
"These guys have been through a lot in the last two months, so let's not make them feel unwelcomed by imposing barriers for the very one thing that they need, which is access to health care."
'More to come'
The arrival in Australia of temporary visa holders from Gaza has been a trickle due to the unpredictability of getting on the Rafah border crossing list that allows exit from Gaza into Egypt.
However the volunteers, community organisations and medical professionals the ABC spoke to are anticipating an influx over the coming months.
The visa holders from Gaza have no work rights or access to any government assistance, which means the pressure on the communities supporting them is intense.
Volunteer removalist Wassim Yaghmour told the ABC he had been paying his workers overtime to help move donated furniture to the families' new homes in Sydney, but he was worried he would not be able to keep that up.
"We can only do so much as a community. The government is going to have to step in sooner or later," Mr Yaghmour said.
"I'm willing to [work] as much as I can … day and night, not a problem, but I can only do so much. I've still got to run the business. That's the truth."
Mr Chamma from the charity sourcing housing in Sydney agreed.
"We can probably house a hundred families, but if they do come in [all at once], then it's going to be a bit of an issue," he said.
At Melbourne's Al Rahman mosque, Mr Raad worries for the sponsors and host families who have already spent thousands of dollars to bring their relatives to Australia.
"So they all took a chance in bringing them out and our duty as an Australian community is to help these people," he said.
It is a chance that Um Ali is grateful for but wishes she never needed.
She hopes to return to Gaza eventually, but fears she may not be able to.
"When I was leaving Gaza, if you could see how much I cried, tears, tears, so many tears for my country, for Gaza. If it's lost, we're lost," she said.
*The ABC has used the pseudonym for safety and security reasons.
No comments:
Post a Comment