No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  ‘You’re not explaining this very well,’ said Wolf. ‘Who are you exactly?’

  ‘I’m Cate Carmichael,’ she said. ‘Look, I’m not a lunatic. My father is James Carmichael, the former New South Wales Supreme Court judge; my mother is Anne Carmichael, chair of the South Sydney Hospital board. I was raised in Sydney. I went to SCEGGS (the Girls’ Grammar). I did my gap year in Africa. I met Nudie there.’

  Her explanation made sense: there are a lot of deeply privileged young women in Sydney, educated in wonderful schools to have a social conscience (in my day, it was called ‘counting your blessings’ but those terms have gone the way of the dinosaur; too Christian, I suppose). Spending time on CARE projects, working for the poor, it’s all part of what they do.

  ‘I know Nudie,’ she said, again. ‘I met him in Tanzania. I spent a year there, in the Mtabila camp – the big one – back when he was a kid. This was years ago. I’m married now. I only do the advocacy on the side. They were keeping Nudie in a cage. I couldn’t work it out.’

  I didn’t have a clue, not at that point, what Cate was talking about. All I could see was that she was genuinely, hopelessly distressed.

  ‘Will you let me talk to him?’ she said. ‘I think he’ll talk to me. Please don’t shoot him.’

  I’d have let her jump right in, but Wolf wasn’t quite ready to give Cate the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Tell me more,’ he said. ‘Make it quick.’

  Cate did her best.

  ‘I went to Tanzania in 2004. It was my gap year. I’d gotten into Sydney Uni. I planned to do international law but I wanted to do some volunteer work. I applied to the United Nations to do an unpaid internship. They said no. I went to CARE. I’d been taking French at school for eleven years. I was pretty much fluent. They said they’d take me for the refugee program. I didn’t know what to expect but I looked online. You can read my blog.’

  ‘I don’t have time to read your blog,’ said Wolf.

  It sounded rude but I get what he meant. I have read Cate’s blog. Not then I hadn’t – but I have now. Of course it’s still there – like everyone says, the internet’s forever – and it reads like she speaks: earnest, passionate. There’s messages from her mum on it, saying things like, ‘We’re so proud of you,’ and ‘You should be so proud, you’re making a difference,’ but I noticed that Cate hadn’t been in Africa long before she was replying in anguish. ‘I remember when I arrived, full of energy and hope!’ she wrote in one post, ‘I thought we had the answers. You won’t believe how much money gets wasted.’

  That was written five months after Cate arrived at the refugee camp where she met Ali Khan or, as she still calls him, Nudie.

  I don’t know what you think when you hear the word ‘refugee camp’ but if you’re thinking that it’s a few tents in the desert, think again. The camp where Cate volunteered was home to 40,000 people. It had been there for years and there was no sign, not then, of it ever being dismantled.

  ‘I didn’t know when I signed up for this that I’d be dealing with people who have been waiting years to get out,’ Cate wrote. ‘This isn’t a camp. This is a city.’

  A little over four weeks later, she met Ali Khan.

  ‘He was sitting alone behind a cyclone-wire fence – the only pale kid in this all-black refugee camp,’ she told me.

  ‘At first I thought, hang on, what’s that, is that even human? Because he was right near the back of the cage and all hunched up with his head dipped forward. He had white fuzz on his head and his limbs were pale grey. I hate to say this, but he looked like a bald eagle. He was about that size, and about that colour.’

  She walked toward the cage, put her fingers through the wire fence and said, ‘Hello?’

  Ali Khan looked up. I think Mouse has already made this clear, but he was not attractive when she first saw him in Cups and Saucy, and I take it from what Cate’s told me that he wasn’t attractive when he lived in the camp, either. His skin was grey and pockmarked; his lips were swollen. His eyes were blank, with lower lids that hung open, all pink inside.

  ‘I tried to get him to talk to me but I wasn’t sure that he could speak, let alone in English,’ Cate said. She went to the UN office on site to enquire about him but instead of telling her anything, one of the African women in the UN aid office just shuddered and said, “Ibare” – “Something bad.”

  ‘They basically had two names for him,’ Cate said. ‘He was ibare – bad, or he was erbu – ghost. They’d point at him and they’d shudder. I’d say, “What do you mean, ibare? He’s a little boy,” but then they’d say, “Ju-ju” – roughly translated, “He’s black magic” or “He’s cursed.”’

  I asked Cate how old she thought Ali Khan was the first time she saw him.

  ‘I’d say fourteen,’ she said. ‘But who really knows? He’d never been to school. That’s pretty normal in the part of the world that he came from, but it wasn’t like he’d learned at the knee of his ancestors, either. He’d never been taught anything.’

  The way Cate understood it, Nudie had turned up at the camp with his mother, some ten years earlier; he was maybe five years old but still small enough to fit in a pouch on her back.

  ‘Nudie’s problem was that people thought he was albino,’ she said. ‘I don’t actually believe that. People don’t believe me, but it just happens sometimes that Africans are born white.’

  I happen to know that she’s right and, in some communities, the white-born black have tremendous status. Ali Khan was not so lucky: he was born into a part of the world where people are either terrified of albinos or want to cut them into pieces and use their body parts for medicine.

  ‘They’re hunted down by witchdoctors,’ Cate said. ‘Their bones are so valuable, you would not believe. They crush them into powder, to put in special medicines, and try to cure AIDS with it.’

  I’m the first to admit I knew precisely nothing about albinos in Tanzania before the siege at Surf City, and I’m including in that the fact that I had no idea there were any. Since then I’ve made it my business to find out what I can: they don’t have a great life. Most don’t go to school. They’re plagued with skin problems. Plenty of them die before they get to adulthood. Those who make it can’t find jobs.

  Nudie must have done alright as a baby, in that he wasn’t immediately killed at birth by his outraged father. Maybe the dad wasn’t on the scene. Nudie made it to age five before he was carried out of the village, apparently by his mother. I can guess why: the witchdoctors weren’t interested in babies but they did like adolescent boys, whose bones are nice and long but still soft enough to grind up to make medicine.

  The main source I found for all this, when I went and looked it up, was an article by a reporter from the BBC who ventured into Tanzania specifically to study the trade in albino body parts. He paid what’s known as a ‘fixer’ – a local – to take him into a village where a witchdoctor was known to be working, and to tell the villagers that he – the reporter, who was Western, and white – was HIV positive. He had access to Western medicine but it wasn’t working. He wanted a consultation with a witchdoctor. He was taken out of the village and told to bring a chicken with him. He had to spit in the dust and to put his forehead on the ground, both of which he did. He was asked to hand over $200 in the local currency, which he also did. The chicken was killed. When the reporter asked what he needed to do to get cured, he was told that he needed to buy the bones of an albino for $2000. The witchdoctor would do the grinding up, for free.

  ‘It’s sorcery,’ Cate told me. ‘You probably understand this better than most. The people in those villages, they have their beliefs. They make no sense to us, but it’s what they believe. No different to believing Jesus turned water into wine.’

  ‘Or that Jesus came back from the dead,’ I said.

  Cate looked a bit shocked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m just making the point: I agree with you. Not everybody believes what I do, either.’

 
‘There is no way that Nudie would have survived into adolescence in his village,’ Cate said. ‘The witchdoctors might have let him live, as a baby, because his limbs were short and not yet valuable, but it was only a matter of time.

  ‘I tried to figure out where he’d come from. Nobody seemed to know. I figured it must be the lake region in Northern Tanzania, where albino killings are most common, up near the border with Burundi.

  ‘The witchdoctors up there, they’re like snake oil salesmen. They’ve got no special powers but they’ve got status and they don’t want to lose it. They boil up chicken feathers and talk to the trees, and in return ask people to hand over their money.’

  If it was only chickens they slaughtered, it might be alright, but sometime in the late 1990s, word had spread that the bones of an albino could cure a man of AIDS.

  ‘They were hunting down albinos and basically cutting off their limbs,’ Cate said. ‘I heard about a father of two – he was a gentle man, a maize farmer – and he was eating dinner outside the family hut when some teenagers burst in and started hacking at him with machetes. They were saying, “We want your legs, we want your legs.”

  ‘The man was killed but they didn’t get his bones. What passes for police in those villages came and said the witchdoctors couldn’t take his body. His family had to bury him in a cement grave to stop them coming back to dig his bones out of the ground.’

  Others weren’t so lucky: the body of another farmer was found in the river, the bones already removed.

  ‘The witchdoctors were telling people that the bones of the albinos didn’t just cure AIDS. You could get rich by rubbing the ground bones over the palms of your hands. You could become invisible, and be able to steal things without being caught. It’s black magic, basically, but half the country believes it. They might have gone to English language schools. They might have travelled. But they still believe it.

  ‘Everything that goes wrong in a village is the albino’s fault. If the crop fails or a baby dies, they’re held responsible.

  ‘That makes the villagers keen to have them killed. And the more bone there is to harvest, the more there is to sell. It’s not small amounts of money they make. It can make them very rich.’

  It was a brave move for Ali Khan’s mum to walk out of the village with her white baby on her back.

  ‘I admired her,’ Cate said. ‘He was worth a small fortune – but only dead. It’s why I wanted to get him out of the refugee camp. He’d been in there for years by the time I arrived. I kept thinking he was worth more to his mum alive than he was dead, and that’s saying something when his bones alone would have bought her 5000 cattle.

  ‘The refugee camp hadn’t wanted to take him in. An Australian guy who was there at the time – an aid worker, somebody I met later – he told me, they were all, “He can’t come in, he’s got the bad spirits in him.” A five-year-old boy, on his mother’s back, being told he was evil.

  ‘The Australians who ran that part of the camp, they arranged for a witchdoctor to come and have a ceremony. They put some old coins and some cowry shells in a bag and shook it over his head. They burnt some incense and spat on a chicken’s head, all of which was supposed to make it safe for this boy to be inside the camp.’

  By the time Cate got to meet Ali Khan, he’d been there nine years. His mother had never been back to visit him.

  ‘The way they treated him – it was awful,’ she told me. ‘He’d walk to the well, and they’d throw a rock at him and cut his head open or else the older boys would come and try to break his arms. Nobody wanted him in their quarters. They had to fence off a part of the camp just for him. It was basically a cage, like a cage you might keep chickens in, with a corrugated iron roof. His skin gave him problems. He couldn’t venture out from under the roof because he’d blister and burn. His eyesight was affected.

  ‘None of the camp children had ever played with him. He couldn’t go to the school. People think because the camps are UN camps, they must be safe, but that was a hard lesson I had to learn. That’s basically a joke. The guards are corrupt. They barter eggs for sex, that kind of thing. The murder rate – you don’t want to know about it. Anything not nailed down is at risk of being stolen. They circumcise the girls. And if you’re like Nudie, and people think you might be albino, they just want to kill you.

  ‘I asked around but there was no plan for his future – he couldn’t go back to his village, he wasn’t on the list of people being considered for refugee status.

  ‘One day I came out of my quarters and I went to see him – I tried to visit him most days – and he was crouched in the corner, covered in blood. I was screaming for help, screaming for the key for the lock on the gate but nobody wanted to touch him. Somebody must have got into the cage, got him while he was sleeping. His legs, his arms – they’d basically hacked bits off him, and his head . . . he looked like he’d been hit with a machete, across the top of his head. And that’s when I thought, I’ve got to get him out of here.’

  It was Cate who arranged to get Ali Khan into the queue for refugee status. I’ve never been to a refugee camp but I’ve met enough refugees here in Australia – people on protection visas, and people waiting to get their visas approved – to know how tough it is to get a place or even to get into a UNHCR office. People can literally be standing barefoot in the dust for six to eight hours at a time, for days and weeks on end, battling mosquitoes, with babies hanging from their breasts, waiting to see a UN officer, but that’s no guarantee that any country is ever going to take them.

  ‘Nudie got the nod because the people in the camp were terrified of him – and of me,’ Cate said. ‘I basically told them, if there’s a plane leaving, I want Nudie on it.’

  I asked her, ‘They didn’t argue?’

  ‘Not with me. I was white. I was rich. I was what they called “a bird”, meaning I had a foreign passport. I could fly out any time. That alone was evidence that I must be a witch, too. Because who on earth would stay in one of those camps if they had a chance to leave?

  ‘How could I leave him sitting there?’ she told me. ‘I knew what the future held for him. You’re not supposed to rig the paperwork but believe me, everyone does. And now we’ve got 20,000 people arriving on boats every year, we’re taking even fewer people from the camps. A kid like Nudie, with nobody to sponsor him . . . he’s never going to get a place.’

  An additional problem Ali Khan had – besides the problem of being albino, which the Australian government didn’t like at all – was his age. How old was he? Cate thought he looked thirteen, maybe fourteen, but who could tell? There are plenty of places in the world where nobody has a birth certificate and that’s especially true in Africa. If he was underage – and he looked it – he’d have to enter Australia under the supervision of DIMIA – that’s the Department of Immigration, basically, although the name changes all the time.

  ‘It was a two-step process,’ Cate said.

  ‘I took him out of the refugee camp – coaxed him out from under the tin and had him walk with me to one of the UN vans – and drove him to the Ocean Cancer Institute. It’s a famous place, famous because they’ve got a clinic for albinos. Albinos need constant treatment for the lesions on their skin. They can get melanoma very easily. I didn’t believe that Nudie was albino – he didn’t have red eyes and I know not all albinos do – but anyway, it was under the mango trees there that I filled out the paperwork for him. It was torture.

  ‘The whole time I knew him, he never said a word. He can communicate: he can look at you, and his eyes, they’re droopy, but he’s not frightening, not up close, and he does this little nod, which I took to be his way of saying yes, but he never spoke. He never refused to do anything I suggested, either. I’d say, this is where we’re going – to the cancer institute or to Australia – and he’d look at me with those eyes, and I’d say, is that okay, Nudie? And he would give the little nod and go along with me.

  ‘Trying to fill out the paperwork was a nightma
re, too. I’d done that kind of thing before; stupid questions that nobody can answer – when were you born? Where were you born? – nobody in a refugee camp can answer those questions. And when it came time to put a name down for Nudie, well, one of the workers had told me he was Nudie, and I’d been calling him Nudie, but when it came time to do the paperwork, I thought, we can’t put down Nudie, so what are we going to put down? I asked around, trying to find a common name but African names, Tanzanian names, they are really complicated, so I thought, what’s a simple name, and I can’t say why, but I came up with “Ali”. And then I was thinking, what goes with Ali and it seemed like “Khan”, which actually isn’t that common in Africa but maybe “Ali Khan” just sounded right to me, so that’s what I put it down.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  I often wonder what people from overseas make of Australia, when they come to visit. We’ve got such a beautiful country – beauty rich and rare, with boundless plains to share – but pick up any newspaper or turn on talkback radio and you’d think that the biggest problem we’ve got is that we’re about to be swamped by refugees. Pretty much every day, people are bringing up the boat people or the refugees or the new arrivals, either because they’re sick of how many are turning up or because they want to say, ‘Australia is a racist country. That’s why we’re so cruel to the boat people.’

  I don’t agree that Australia is a racist country. I’ve never agreed with it. We have the odd lunatic shouting racist slogans and calling people towel-heads. We had the Cronulla riots a few years ago. For the most part, what I see is people getting along with one another pretty well. What I also used to see, back when I had a parish out west, were people who went out of their way to help the refugees. Whole networks of volunteers – people who call themselves ‘refugee advocates’ – would form to help people settle in. They’d meet them at the airport, help them enrol in English language classes, take them to the supermarket, help them with Australian money and how to count the change.