Last modified on Fri 18 Dec 2020 14.02 EST
The jungle north-east of Christmas Island’s immigration detention centre is dark and unforgiving. A person, seeking refuge or release, can disappear from sight in just a few steps.
The terrain runs steeply downhill to the nearby roiling sea. Jagged basalt rock, slippery and sharp, marks the descent. Treacherous country at any time of day.
But how a refugee under Australia’s protection came to be there, running weakened, staggering and disoriented through that jungle on a dark November night, is a four-year saga of punitive indifference, bureaucratic dishonesty and, finally, fatal incompetence.
Fazel Chegeni was already a vulnerable man when he arrived in Australia seeking the most basic of recognition as a human being. Stateless all his life, marginalised in every place he’d been, he had been beaten, tortured and left to die in a desert before he sought asylum in Australia.
To The Courier-Post
âIt takes commitment, it takes dedication. This is for your future,â said author, speaker, and consultant, Christine McDonald.
On Saturday, September 12th, at 2 p.m., graduates joined together with family, friends, and community at Christ Fellowship Church in Hannibal to celebrate the earning of their High School Equivalency diplomas, formerly known as the GED. There were nine graduates this year, with six in attendance. Graduates beamed with pride as, Darcia Miller, test administrator and orientation leader, called their names to walk across the stage and receive their diplomas.
âThe support of family, friends, and community plays a large role in student success,â said Elise Burch, HiSET Teacher at the Missouri Career Center.
Walking around Timbered Island one day in the 1990s I spied something that didnât fit the landscape. When I was closer I saw a chain-link fence about armpit high enclosing a small rectangle.
I suspected as soon as I saw the shape and some plastic flowers stuck to the wire: I went straight up, looked down and saw what I expected.
It was a grave. I was elated.
If youâre a person who understands that reaction, you will enjoy Earle Layserâs new book, âJackson Holeâs Buried History: The Funerary Landscape Unearthed.â Layser, an amateur historian with several previous books, is a man who appreciates a good burial ground.