Uncommon nonsense

Yes, I’ve been terribly lax with updating this.  I guess the thesis bogged me down and this just seemed like a side-thing.  Yesterday, however, that changed.  James, Purdy, Tamara, Gina and I are working on an online news feature about the Sudanese community, focusing on refugees’ experiences in Melbourne.  

Getting contacts seemed really difficult, none of us really wanted to just cold-call and say “Hi!  Can we have an interview about your community?”  As good as our intentions are, I personally worried about how we would come across.  How would we ask people if we didn’t even really know our angle?  What would they think? 

This in mind, and with a bit of nervousness (on my part certainly) yesterday three of us went to the Lost Boys Appreciation Day organization meeting.  It was fantastic!  There was so much positivity in the room, and we had no problems making contacts, but that’s not really the point of this post.  

As Trent McCarthy (who we are interviewing on Tuesday) commented, there aren’t any other migrant communities around who put on anything like Appreciation Day.  The day is run by the Lost Boys organization, who use the day to do volunteer work in Melbourne.  They liaise with The Red Cross and go donation collecting, the Collingwood Children’s Farm to garden, cook for the homeless and, at the end of the day, put on a concert.  We thought it was fantastic, and the news feature project is sort of taking on a life of its own now.  We’ll be covering most of the day hopefully, and really hopefully getting to help out a little too as it is an amazing organization of people!

What was Kevin Andrews thinking?  The Sudanese people I met yesterday were so friendly, so welcoming and so wanting to be part of Australian society, in the sense that they seemed to really genuinely want to say thank you for living here, something most of us take for granted.  As trite as it sounds, this really touched me.  As Acoc, I believe it was, said: that is part of the Sudanese way.