We caught up with Sister Diana Santleben during Harmony Week to recount some of her experiences and discuss the current state of refugee services in the region.
Sister Santleben’s work in the region started with an offer to lend a stranger a hand, but it quickly turned into much more.
“About four years ago I rang Sister Betty Brown, who I had never met, and I said to her ‘Sister Betty I believe you work with refugees…could you use me because I’ve got a trailer?’ and that was the beginning of our friendship and our work together as a refugee support centre.”
“What we do is just love people, basically. We help people with furniture, and clothes because when people first arrive in Australia they come with whatever is in their suitcases…so we often have clothes, often a business rings us and say they have five computers that are really good so they give it to us and we give them to them. Every stick of furniture in Panola House has been given by someone, either the university or the TAFE or the old Newcastle Hospital or DOCS when they moved or when people move house…even at the tip, they don’t charge us at the tip to take rubbish. All of those little things that are given to us by the people of Newcastle can be used as a sign of people being welcoming in Newcastle.”
And it is this generosity and community support in Newcastle that makes it, in her opinion, one of the best environments to welcome refugees.
“I worked with refugee’s in Sydney long before I worked here and it’s much better here, because we know everybody’s name and if you are not a relative of somebody in Newcastle, then you went to school with them. And then with the new people, welcoming them into those sort of networks, means that it’s very quick before they become perfectly comfortable. I’ll use an example, I had this young Sudanese boy in my car a couple of months ago and I said to him can you play soccer and he goes ‘Soccer? That’s for sissy’s I’m a rugby league bloke, I’m a Knight!’, just like that and I thought that is what we want to hear, it’s the sort of answer any Australian boy would give….and that’s what it is all about.”
But when it comes to what could be changed she claims refugees are being let down by the current housing situation.
“One thing that I really strongly believe is that we have to get state government funding for proper housing. It is a national disgrace that there is a 15 year waiting list on department housing.”
“Fifty percent of Australians are either born overseas or have a parent born overseas…that’s the most multicultural country in the world, and we don’t realise how clever we are and how wonderful and how welcoming we are but we need to hit government and do something that really will make a difference over generations and that is housing.”
“Housing is somewhere to go when you want to feel at home, housing is a human right, it’s not an economic investment and until the people of Australia realise we are bringing families of ten to Australia…who’ve lived with the most appalling experiences…just about every woman who comes to Australia as a refugee has been at least once pack raped. The men have been slashed, they have scars on their bodies that you wouldn’t believe. People have been shot, you know little children have been raped and they are in our schools, now those people are condemned to homelessness. They will be refugees forever unless we fix up this homelessness issue. For the refugee community it would only take about $5 million and we’d solve the problem in the Hunter Valley.”
