Lovet Lahai escaped fighting in Sierra Leone with her mother, Jeneba, and her sister, Juliet. Their mother, terrified of losing her daughters, tied them to each other so they would not be parted on the journey.
So that's how we have to keep holding, we have to keep calling. Mum will call, you respond; you call your sister, she responds and then that's how, even if the rope is cut, we have to keep calling. If you don't answer, we stop straight away. Something is wrong.... We don't want to separate any more
They spent 15 precarious years in a various refugee camps. At any time, they might be thrown into a truck and moved to another camp. Anyone protecting an older person was forced to trek on foot. Jeneba kept her daughters close for safety.
I couldn't go to school, because my mum scared, because so many girls lost their lives and a lot of horrible things happened. Somebody could just get missing, never know where they are, so that's it. That's camp.
They were often hungry. The United Nations provided 1kg of Bulgur wheat per person a month and it was never enough.
Not just hungry, some days we'd go without food. Some days we have to go with just potato, but even that one is a bit hard. Some days we go to bed without food.
Now safe in Australia with her husband, Isaiah, Lovet hates it when her children waste food.
Reproduced courtesy of Lovet Lahai
There's more to this story:
Isaiah Lahai
Isaiah became a refugee when he was 14. He fled Sierra Lieon for Guinea whent he civil war begain in 1991.
Innocent Karabagega
Innocent fled Burundi after an attempted assasination attempt on his father. He didn't even know what a refugee was when he became one.
Matter Machar
Matter was one of the 20,000 lost boys who fled Sudan to Kenya in 1992. He came to Australia in 2002.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Groves Wright Anderson, VC, MC
Charles Anderson was born in 1897 in South Africa to a British father and Belgian mother, but raised on their farm in Kenya. He served with the King’s African Rifles during the First World War.
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