Hazara Nation

SMH By Glenda Kwek.
Maria Mehr has just spent her first day as the only 21-year-old in year 10 at Condell Park High School.

But her age is not the only reason she stands out. While her classmates are spending their teenage years going to the movies and the beach, Mehr spent hers selling cigarettes on the polluted, dangerous streets of Tehran - forced to help support her desperate Afghan refugee family.

Mehr knows she stands out in her class of 15-year-olds and is nervous about her English, but says her first day at high school was one of the happiest of her life.

Mehr's journey to Australia from Afghanistan has been long and tumultuous. Her parents and six siblings spent more than

11 years in Iran after they fled the Taliban in Kabul in 1996. But their new home presented new difficulties and the family soon faced a day-to-day struggle to keep afloat through working on the streets of Tehran with no prospect of a formal education.

When Mehr's sister, Sania, now 16, asked why Iranian children wore identical clothes and carried a bag, she was told that they were on their way to school. "Why can't I join them?" she asked her mother. "My mum said to me, 'Because we are Afghani and the Iranian Government doesn't allow Afghanis to learn, to go to a school.' " The sense of rejection the Mehr family experienced during their years as refugees in Iran lingers. For these Afghan children, their only memory of their homeland was of being caught in conflict. When they arrived in Tehran they were deemed outcasts and deprived of financial, educational or social support. Forced to work illegally, the seven children and their father took to the polluted roads of the city, selling cigarettes and lollies. Many Iranians were resentful of refugees at a time of high unemployment. Iran has 1 million registered refugees and the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR estimates there are at least another million unofficially living there.

When Mehr's family arrived, unemployment was running at 12 per cent, and more than 20 per cent for those aged 15 to 29, who make up 36 per cent of the population. Even the UNHCR ended its education support to refugees in 2004, preferring instead to focus its resources on voluntary repatriation to Afghanistan.

Mehr tells how people on the streets would swear at her and her parents when they heard her conversing with them in Dari, their Afghan dialect. "The Iranian Government does not respect us, so the people look at the Government and follow," she says.

"I'm Muslim, but I wear the cross sometimes. You have to respect others," she says, fingering the cross around her neck.

Sania Mehr told of how, at five years old, she was spat at, hit and told that she was a "dirty Afghani who should go home" when she was working on the streets.

There are about 30,000 children, many under 15, who work on Tehran's roads. Throughout Iran they number 200,000, non-government organisations estimate. Like Mehr, many of them are Afghani. They have a high mortality rate - 100 to 150 die every month from malnutrition and disease, according to the Iranian newspaper Dowran Emrooz.

But there was a ray of hope. An Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi, set up the Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child, which established a school and medical clinic staffed by volunteers.

Word spread quickly among the street children, and before long the Mehr sisters were attending English and Farsi (a Persian dialect) classes in a crumbling building in Soosh, a poor suburb in southern Tehran.

They quickly became familiar with the makeshift classrooms. Like the other children, they were happy to attend school whenever they could. It offered a respite from the heat and hard work of the streets, and they enjoyed the attention they received from the teachers and doctors, something often lacking in their interactions with other Iranians.

When the Herald visited the centre in May, children burst in and out of the single-storey building, their dust-covered clothes and slippers barely soiling the powdery walls already marked by years of neglect.

Two young Iranian doctors, Mohammad Tosefi and Mamak Hashemi, tended to the 30-odd children and family members who came to seek their medical advice.

When a lanky boy with a scarred cheek approached Dr Tosefi he set to work quickly, laying him down on a classroom table while reassuring him in a low voice. A curious group of children gathered around the pair, watching as the doctor placed leeches on the boy's cheek. "The skin's rotten," he said.

Dr Hashemi has been visiting the centre for more than two years.

"There are many problems with them [the children]," she says. "[The parents] are poorly educated and they don't know how to bring up their children and there are many cases of child abuse. Many of these children work. These are very bad things. They need love very much."

The sisters contributed to a magazine set up by one of their favourite teachers, Bahram Rahimi. It was his way of helping the refugee children express their thoughts about their old life in Afghanistan and their new life in Iran. The current editions are glossy with snazzy graphics, but Mehr still treasures the first edition, a black-and-white booklet, handfolded and stapled. Her voice softens when she flips to a story written by a young Afghan boy. "He is writing about his parents and how he is sad after they died in Afghanistan," she says. "I cried when I read it.

After five years of struggle in Iran, with Mehr's father earning only 200,000 tomans ($250) a month working at a mirror store, the family decided to leave Iran. But it took them years to find a way out. "We tried all the embassies but they always said no," Mehr says. "Even our uncle [who came to Australia 18 years ago] tried to help us come to Australia, but couldn't."

Rahimi referred them to a friend, who worked for the International Organisation for Migration. They were asked to write a letter about their situation and their father's fear of retribution from the Taliban if they returned to Afghanistan. Two years and four interviews later, the Mehr family obtained refugee visas from Australia. "We went to the Australian embassy to pick up our visas on 29 March, 2007," Mehr says proudly.

On May 2 last year the family arrived in Australia, with another 1401 Afghans, who were granted humanitarian visas in 2006-07, about 11 per cent of the total intake. They were provided with a Dari-speaking case officer and lived in government housing at Mount Druitt for three months, with assistance from Centrelink and Medicare.

The Mehrs now live in Sydney's south-west in a house rented from Granville Presbyterian Church. They live simply.

Yet Mehr knows her family is lucky. Many of her fellow Afghan friends remain in Iran, trapped in poverty, while others have returned to Afghanistan and are uncontactable. "After 10 years, we have had to start all over again," she says. "But I am very, very happy here."