“At the end of the day, we’re all humans. We all want to feel loved, we all want to feel accepted and we all want to be part of the Australian community.
Prudence Melom was four years old when her family fled Chad. Her father had spoken out against government corruption and disappeared after police knocked on their door – he’d told Prudence, her sister and their pregnant mother to hide under the bed. “We made our way out of Chad in the middle of the night,” Prudence recalls. “We [walked through] Cameroon to Nigeria where we settled for about two months. We survived because of people’s random acts of kindness. But life there was very difficult and it was too close to Chad. My mum heard about a refugee camp in Benin. They can’t just accept everybody. You have to prove to them that you actually need help.”
Processing took two months. They slept outside the UNHCR office while they waited to be granted refugee status. It was seven years before Prudence and her family received a letter from the Australian government saying they’d been accepted through the humanitarian program. “I always
