Sydney's Sudanese Community should SAIL

“We wish that there was room in this country for all the children who are
hurt by war. We wish they could all live here in Australia with us” –
-
Tina, Sudanese refugee living in Melbourne, and member of the Sudanese
Australian Integrated Learning program.

NSW receives the majority of Australia's Sudanese refugees but lags behind Melbourne in active community intergration.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that since 1996 the Sudanese community has been and continues to be the fastest growing ethnic community in Australia.

This growth is sure to continue at a time when two of the three warring parties in Sudan’s conflict cursed region of Darfur have refused to sign a peace plan based on two years of negotiations.

The latest Federal government distribution by State Census published on the Department of Immigration’s website: http://www.immi.gov.au/statistics/stat_info/comm_summ/textversion/sudan.htm States that New South Wales has the largest number of Sudan-born residents.

Sudanese Australian Intergrated Learning or SAIL, a successful educational support system for Sudanese refugees has untill now been unique to Melbounre.

Co founder, Matthew Albert, visited Sydney this week to investigate the possibility of establishing SAIL in Sydney.

SAIL began with students, Anna Grace Hopkins and Matthew Albert, who offered their services as English tutors to a Sudanese family in need.

Since its foundation in 2001 the program has developed and gained strength, students, tutors and positive affirmation from all corners of the community.

SAIL currently operates out of three community centres in Melbourne’s western suburbs and although still based on language, learning feels more like a mass exercise in cross cultural companionship.

A dilapidated church in Footscray is the site of a Saturday morning SAIL meeting.

Parking is an impossibility as people pour in to greet each other in a manor which suggests friendship rather than student teacher relationships.

Confident teenagers catch up on a week apart and younger siblings play and laugh in a way that allows the onlooker to forget about the painfully recent atrocities they may never talk about.

The day’s activities are a loosely based around a schedule but are guided by individual students and tutors synchronizing only for a lunch time feast provided by the SAIL team.

There is a sense of mutual respect as students look to their tutors for guidance while tutors are visibly in ore of the young faces of the Sudanese conflict in which over 180, 000 lives have been lost.

“I sometimes believe that I get more out of the experience than the kids, but I know at the end of the day, when my two girls give me a thankyou hug that they also enjoy the time” said SAIL volunteer, Sharon.

“Volunteering at Sail may prove addictive” joked Ben, another regular member of the SAIL team.

The SAIL website http://home.vicnet.net.au/~sail/ claims “SAIL maintains a regular voluntary staff of 190 giving people, who tutor, mentor, prepare lunch, maintain the library, administer the Program and assist the Sudanese community in any other way they can”