The horrors of life as a refugee on Nauru take on a new dimension when they are being casually discussed by teenagers at the kitchen table.



For the first two years, the family lived in tents in the camps. Nauru is small — you can get around the island in an hour — and was a complete mystery to them.

“Then day by day and month by month they tell us we can go out a little. It was like an open camp,” Zainab says.

Kauser, picking at her lunch of fish, chicken curry and rice, snorts at the phrase “open camp”, as her sister continues.

“We have to put in our name, request it. Then … they give us a letter that you can go at this day and this time. And then we go, at that day, at that time.”



Some of the officers were nice, but others were “rude” and “would treat us bad”, says Azizah. Their weapon of choice? Bureaucracy.

“Checking for like one hour. Checking checking,” Kauser says.

“They wouldn’t let us go,” adds Azizah.

After their refugee claim was determined, the family moved to a mobile house outside the camps, which was better, according to the girls. But the lack of freedom on the island, and the stress of living in limbo — particularly for those who remained in the camps — led to significant and widespread mental illness.

“Some people were drinking the shampoo. I saw it with my eyes,” Kauser recalls. “Some people … tried to suicide. They had gone mad.”

She remembers watching a video, passed around among the refugees, of Omid Masoumali setting himself on fire in one of the camps. Kauser regularly visited the camp where Masoumali, who later died from his injuries, lived. It was by coincidence, she says, that “on that day, I didn’t go”.

Azizah remembers numerous protests. “All the people would go on the road and just shout, and then we would walk, and then the police officers would try to stop us. There was even one teenage boy, I think he was 17 or 16, he stitched his mouth.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot,” says Kauser. “They stitched their mouth. They don’t eat. He tried to protest. So many people. I forgot. It was in the camp.”

The girls told of people vanishing — some retreating to their tents in a deep depression, others apparently taken to Australia at a moment’s notice.

One day, a “really nice” girl Zainab knew simply stopped going to school. The rumour was that the family’s asylum claim had been denied.

“They just stay in the tent for a very long time. She just stay in the room and I never see her. Never,” Zainab says.

Azizah chimes in: “It’s like she disappeared.”

Kauser remembers another girl, around her own age, deliberately harming herself. She was taken to hospital, and shortly thereafter sent to Australia.

From Kauser’s perspective, it seemed whoever did a “sacrifice for their life” had the opportunity to go to Australia. This is consistent with reports from advocates that a contagion of self harm spread among the vulnerable children on the island, who believed it was the only way to get their family to Australia.

“Some got separated from their families. Their mother and children get to go, but their father was left behind,” Azizah says. “There was one of my friends, her mother got pregnant and her mother and her brother went to Australia and they wouldn’t let her father and her go. So she stayed inside her house for a long time. She didn’t get out. She kept crying. It was sad.”

By mid-2018, after the Amins had gone, public outrage grew over the intensely ill children on Nauru, some of them suicidal, and others catatonic.

Under mounting pressure, the government eventually promised to remove all the kids from Nauru. Earlier this year, the very last refugee children left for the United States, starting again in Texas and Colorado.

“Most people go mental,” Kauser says. “We feel like we’re in stress too, but we don’t want to separate from our family.”

How did the sisters cope?

“We spent time at school, mostly,” Kauser says.

“When we go to school it’s like, I only focus on education,” Zainab adds. “I just forget that stuff.”

Mohammed insisted his daughters attend — something for which they are grateful — but it was not without difficulties.

“At first the kids didn’t like us,” Zainab says. “They’d shout my name. They’d talk behind us, like ‘they’re refugees, asylum seekers’, all that stuff.”

Many of the other refugee kids stopped going. At one point, Azizah says, in her grade “there was no-one else except me going to school”.

She learnt to live with the teasing from local kids. “I just have to give up, not saying stop or anything,” she says. “Just do whatever they want and be friends.” It got better with time.

Now right in the middle of her teenage years, Azizah often wonders how her life might have been different had she not been on Nauru.

“My whole childhood is gone there,” she says, matter-of-factly. “There was no freedom there. Nothing there. That was the hardest thing.”

If she hadn’t been on Nauru, she thinks she would have, “A better life. Better education. Be a better person”.

What does she mean, be a better person?

“Like right now, after wasting time and coming here, I missed out a lot,” she says. “At school I’m like the quiet person that nobody knows about.”

