Memoar – Kian (EN) 2

Hello. I’m 20 years old right now and I’m from Iran I was born in Tehran, the capital of Iran, and currently, I live in Makassar.

In the early days that we came to Indonesia, I personally had a really hard time going out of our places because going out meant we have to interact with other people and since we didn’t understand Bahasa Indonesia, I couldn’t interact with them and I felt so bad about it. I had to use sign language to go out shopping if I want to buy something. 

I also experienced some culture shock one thing that stood out to me at first was that people here build their houses with short and kinda open walls but it’s different in Iran, people build houses with tall walls and with gates. It really shocked and surprised me at first. Another shocking thing that I noticed that the number of bikes that people used here which was the enormous number of bikes that I didn’t see before in Iran because people use more cars rather than bikes in Iran. Another shocking thing was that when we were in Kupang, I started understanding basic communication words in Bahasa but after we were transferred to Makassar the languages were totally different. I couldn’t understand anything and after a while, I found out that many languages, different accents, and different words were scattered on the different islands and places.

I wish I made more Indonesian friends during these past 7 years but unfortunately, I have failed at that or at least I haven’t made a lot of friends, and the reason is not that I didn’t want to, the reason is because of the restrictions by the laws for refugees. And also a language barrier, because we were kept in a situation where we were unable to communicate with locals and have proper education about this language. 

Another reason is that I as a refugee and did not feel confident enough financially to go out with Indonesian people and make friends with them and hang out with them. Some people, get help from their relatives sending money to them, but some others that don’t have this privilege they would sit in the street and beg for money from other people just so they can have a simple food to eat and stop them from starving. Personally, myself sometimes I run out of my cash allowance I am forced to stay home 24 hours a day because I don’t have the money for even the transportation for a simple futsal game to play with my other friends. That’s a really big problem for us refugees that sometimes these things happened.

Here we have a lot of free time that needs to be filled with fun stuff. For me personally, the main thing is to go to my friend’s place and encourage myself to have a good time and support myself emotionally By doing that I also play video games, watch movies, TVs, I listen to podcasts, and I also read books. The one that I recently read was a book called 1984 by George Orwell which I really recommend to you who are listening. It’s a good book to read.