being an ethnic minority in my own environment

one night this week i had a really strange experience. for a while i had been intending - with a few of my hazara friends (all seperately to eachother)- to go and have dinner at an afghan restaurant in dandenong. miraculously, we organised it.

after a lot of yes-i'm-coming-no-i'm-not-can-i-come-too etc, we finally got there. the party consisted of two friends of mine, a guy whom i'd never met before in my life who had kind of invited himself through a mutual friend, the wife of one of my other friends, and the 12 year old foster son of mutual friend! so - 5 hazaras and me, little aussie jess.

there were two women present - me, and my friend's wife. she and i had an odd sort of common link. all of the boys there - 4 of them - speak dari, hazaragi and english. my friend's wife, A, only speaks hazaragi and dari. of those languages, i only speak english (and i also know how to say "if you see a camel, don't *say* that you saw a camel" in dari - extremely helpful!). so, no matter which language the group was speaking, one of us was completely excluded from the conversation.

it was an eye-opener. i was in dandenong (which may as well be little Kabul sometimes!), and we were in a restaurant completely immersed in afghan culture. we were sitting on a carpet (me with my gammy, post-car crash dodgey knees, them cross legged like they've been doing it since birth), shoes off, ordering in dari, no worries. and it was really beautiful to see my friends in *their* environment, rather than mine, which is imposed on them by circumstance. it gave me a glimpse of the kind of massive cultural and environmental transplant that people have to undergo. on top of all the other trauma which goes along with being a refugee. yikes.

anyway, i just wanted to post about this.

most of my brainspace has been taken up by this stupid stupid stupid migration amendment, so i wanted to post about something which *didn't* involve writing to senators...!

cheers

jt x