A place to call home

An aromatic rice dish, stirred through with finely chopped carrot and cardamom, is warming on the stove. A pot of fragrant lamb karahi bubbles beside it. Fatima Mohseni and her younger sisters, Atefa and Tahira, are busy in the kitchen of a suburban Sydney bungalow, filling it with the aromas and flavours of Afghanistan, which until last year was their home. They’re preparing a feast to say thank you to their Australian friends – all 15 of them part of a mentor group that has pulled out all stops to help Fatima and her family settle into their new life in Australia. “They are like family to us,” Fatima says.

This time last year, Fatima, who is 41, was working for an international aid organisation in the Afghan capital, Kabul. She’d begun her professional life managing a women’s shelter in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, a part of the country populated by the much-persecuted Hazara people, to which Fatima’s family belongs, and a part of the country that she loves. But Fatima is capable and compassionate in equal measure, and in 2018 she was promoted out of the regions. By the time Kabul fell to the Taliban in August last year, she was designing and coordinating national programs for women’s rights, child protection, food security