Refugees call Bribie Island home
YAM Bista and his Bhutanese family came to Bribie Island 13 months ago after spending 18 years of their lives in a refugee camp in Nepal.
All six of them lived together in a small bamboo hut and shared a single water tap with 15-20 other families but now they live in picturesque Woorim.
The Bhutanese King expelled the Bistas and tens of thousands of other Nepalese-speaking Bhutanese in the early 90s in the name of preserving the country's cultural identity.
The children were so young when they left they couldn't even remember their time in Bhutan.
The only home they knew was a refugee camp before they came to Woorim.
YAM'S parents don't speak a lot of English but he was happy to translate as they told of the hardships they faced.
"It was very hard with all the children on the back of a truck," they said.
"Eight or nine hours we had to travel on the truck with small kids, three or four months old."
Bhutan is a tiny, land-locked country surrounded by China on the north and India on the other sides.
Yam's parents said travelling through India to get to Nepal was a harrowing experience.
"We had no money but people in India asked us for money," they said.
"(When we got to Nepal) we were not allowed to go outside of the camps and the people in Nepal thought that refugees were not good people."
Despite the demonisation of refugees by many of our politicians, they've yet to encounter any of this sentiment since moving to Bribie.
In Bhutan the Bistas lived in a nice house on a farm with plenty of pets, so to make the move to a foreign country with no control of their future was difficult.
In the beginning they even thought they were going crazy.
As of 2008 some 107,000 refugees from Bhutan remained in Nepalese camps, including many of Yam's friends.
He guessed about 2000 Bhutanese refugees were now living in Australia while many more have found homes in other countries, like the USA.
"We had a lot of friends. They went to America and Canada and somewhere else. We miss them," Yam said.
Yam's friend Miriam Battersby helped bring the first Bhutanese family over in December 2008.
She said there were many advantages to settling refugees in a small community like Bribie.
"I think it is really really good if a community can support a small group of refugees rather than big groups in big cities," she said.
"They get lost there (and) don't have the community involvement that this lot have had. They don't integrate so well so they tend to stick together."
There's no question Yam and his friends have integrated well, though.
They regularly volunteer with St Vincent de Paul and the Lions club on the island but Yam said it was simply returning a favour.
"They are helping us so we wanted to help them," he said.
Miriam agreed and said the boys were some of the kindest she knew.
"These are really nice kids. They're overwhelmingly appreciative of all the help and support they've got from the community," she said.
Each Bhutanese family on Bribie has at least two long-time residents who help them practise their English and teach them about Australian culture.
Miriam's husband, Don Podwin, also gives driving lessons to many of the families.
Yam's youngest sister is in Year 11 at Bribie Island State High School and Yam isn't far off finishing his diploma in English and is looking forward to finding work. Three other refugees are studying degrees in biomedical science, one is studying to be a nurse and another two are already working as nurses.
