John Ali remembers the exact date he first landed in Launceston – July 9, 2003.
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The date was the first of four moments the city would make a major impression on the lives of both he and his family. However, the feeling around this one was a little more ambiguous.
“It was one of those days that highlight your life and you just can’t let it go,” he told me. “I remember it very well still, to the point of even the hour.”
“It was a mixture of things – excitement and fear of the unknown. You’re going to a place you don’t know much.”
That hour of arrival marked the end of a years-long journey for Ali, now the finance and community liasion manager at Migrant Resource Centre North, and his family.
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Leaving his home village in Sudan, the family lived in Egypt for four years. Within that time a friend left the country, bound for Tasmania with the help of the UNHCR, and proceeded to help Ali’s family follow: sending forms to fill out and lodge with Australian embassy in Cairo, offering to sponsor them in their Launceston home until they found one of their own.
After completing the rigorous visa application process, and flying into Melbourne on a flight that would connect to Launceston, Ali had some concerns about this new home.
“Coming from a warm place we didn’t actually have jackets; we’d packed them in our suitcases. We arrived there at around 8pm,” he continued.
“What frightened me is that I knew people in Cairo who were Australians – we worked together – and they told me two things.” One was that the place had few jobs available; the other was that the state, recalling his Sydney-based friend’s words with a laugh, was a “very very cold place”.
Stories of the island’s green landscape, with plenty of vegetation and forests, had also made their way to Mr Ali. “My area is green with big forests – mahogany,” he said. “Thick forests and Savannah grass. I prefer living in a place like that because I can relate to where I come from.”
With 15 years now lived and worked in Launceston, Ali’s view of the state – and country – has been significantly expanded. Further moments, ones where the city’s great generosity was revealed to him, played a key part in this.
A lift offered to Mr Ali and his wife as they walked home in the rain with groceries marked the second, another offered after missing a bus to university was a third. The fourth was a car gifted from somebody Ali knew during his studies at the University of Tasmania, three years after they last spoke. “That one thing gave a big impression of the whole people,” he said.
“I’m a Christian and I always believed that everything happens for a purpose,” Mr Ali said. “I believe that when I came to Tasmania it was not by coincidence, he’s showing me his goodness through these people and how they welcome me.
“This actually motivates me as I work here. When I see people come near me I always reassure them that as long as they are committed there’s a future, there’s hope.”
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