More than 950,000 refugees and displaced persons have settled in Australia since 1945, but how many of us can say we understand the heartbreaks and hardships they faced?
A community-led project in Western Sydney is trying to change that.
It's called Refugee Camp in My Neighbourhood (RCIMN), and it's an immersive — and at times confronting — experience led by local refugees and asylum seekers.
Hundreds of visitors take the tour each year. The majority are school students, health professionals and people who work with refugees.
While filming an episode of Compass, I had the privilege of taking the tour twice — first with a group of year 5 and 6 students, then with year 9 and 10s.
The simulated experience tries to help people understand the experience of people fleeing their homeland, taking a life-threatening boat trip and being thrust into a detention centre where names are replaced by numbers.
There's also a taste of refugee camp life: squat toilets, scant food provisions and a hospital tent with barely any medical supplies.
The primary schoolers reacted more audibly than the teenagers — with gasps and squeals — but all of the students shared profound takeaways.
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Asad, one of the tour guides from Afghanistan, said: "Maybe among these young kids, in the future, there will be a politician. Maybe they're going to run the country. They have to know what's going on with asylum seekers and refugees."
The project runs for only a few weeks each year, but classrooms around the country can watch Walk in My Shoes on ABC iview to give students the opportunity to learn, and feel, what it's like to be a refugee.
Here's a taste.
Walking in their shoes
"Who knows who a refugee is?" asks our guide, Oleksandra, in the first part of the tour.
The Year 5 and 6 students are relatively well versed.
"Someone from Ukraine, where the war's happening," says one boy, quick to raise his hand. "Different countries have taken refugees, so then they can start, basically, a new life."
As it happens, his answer mirrors the experience of Oleksandra, who moved to Australia from Ukraine in 2022, after the war broke out.
Another guide, Zarifa, tells us that more than 100 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violations. Shockingly, 40 per cent of them are children.
I notice eyes widen around me as the information sinks in.
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Before long, it's time for the "refugee journey" to start. We're given 60 seconds to write just five things we'll take with us.
"It's time to flee. Escape!" cries Oleksandra. "Go, go, go, go, go!"
Nervous energy spreads as we rush out of the room and onto our next challenge: crossing the border.
A man wearing a black hoodie and headscarf over his face begins yelling at us in a foreign language.
He's the border guard, and he wants to see our "five things". If money isn't on our list, he removes our watches and jewellery — as payment.
The students shuffle behind each other, trying to avoid catching his attention.
Eventually, the guard lets us through the crossing. He introduces himself as Vincent and asks us how we all felt.
"Scared!" the students giggle in unison.
Later on, when I was chatting with some of the year 6 students, they told me this was the most confronting part of the refugee experience.
"It's sad knowing that people have gone through this daily, and it could still be happening right now," said Year 6 student Eden.
'To be a refugee, it's not a choice'
After crossing the border, we visit a refugee camp that's been modelled on real camps in Uganda and South Sudan.
The showers, tents and even the toilet blocks have been donated by humanitarian aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders.
Adama Karama, project coordinator and founder of RCIMN, says the toilets and showers often elicit emotional reactions from visitors.
The primary school students wrinkle their noses when they discover that, in a real refugee camp, 600 people use the same pit toilet.
For Max, a Year 10 student from a Catholic college in Sydney, the showers are the most shocking part.
"The people in refugee camps had to shower on muddy floors and the conditions were not very sanitary," he tells me. "I can't really imagine what it'd be like to share a shower with so many people, but also have your privacy at risk there."
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When you put yourself in the shoes of the refugees — even for a simulation project, like RCIMN — it can evoke real responses: fear, distress, sadness.
For some of the students, there are also tinges of guilt. "My life, compared to theirs, has been a lot more fortunate — and I think that's unfair," Max says.
But the project also shows there is not one "refugee experience". The resilient, brave and generous guides who bring this project to life come from different circ*mstances and countries.
They've faced heartaches, hardships and unimaginable risks, all in the search for safety.
There's something Oleksandra said, which I'll always come back to: "To be a refugee, it's not a choice, it just happens. And it could happen to anyone."
Siobhan Marin is the presenter and producer of Walk in My Shoes, a Compass episode about Western Sydney's Refugee Camp in My Neighbourhood project. The episode won the media category in the 2024 NSW Humanitarian Awards. Siobhan joined the ABC in 2017. She's the digital lead of the Religion and Ethics unit, and she writes feature articles.
