December 29, 2005
Met by a contract caseworker at Sydney Airport, the family stood clutching a detailed medical file which told how Richard, just 2½ years old, was suffering from sickle-cell anaemia.
Once they handed it over, they say, they were transferred to a dingy first-floor flat in Fairfield, and left on their own, and told to dial 000 in case of emergency.
But the family from Burundi spoke no English, and say they had never used a phone before.
Eighteen hours later, on November 5, Richard was in convulsions. Under pressure, his father picked up the phone and heard only the steady beeping on the other end. He could not make it work.
His son died, on his first night in Sydney, just kilometres from a large hospital, while the father, Protais Ntiranyi, desperately roamed streets crying for help in his native tongue.
The Department of Immigration, already criticised over a series of bungles, is investigating. It has begun an inquiry into the death and the NSW Coroner is awaiting an autopsy before announcing an inquest. The department has expressed condolences and sympathy to the family.
In October, the Government took the task of caring for refugees in a number of parts of Australia away from non-profit organisations and volunteers. Some of the new multimillion-dollar contracts were handed to a company called the Australian Centre for Languages.
Circumstances surrounding the handover of responsibility have resulted in a surge of complaints and the Australian Centre for Languages has been criticised over its staffing and resources. For months, volunteers and health workers have been warning those responsible for resettling refugees that the health of new arrivals was being put at risk.
The centre’s managing director, Helen Zimmerman, told the Herald that “the claims of poor performance brought to the attention of ACL do not match the facts as ACL or I understand them to be”.
Nevertheless, the company has hired extra staff and has appointed a lawyer, Richard Fiora, to review a range of issues, including the child’s death.
Richard Niyonsaba, who does not share his father’s surname, was born in 2003 in a crowded African refugee camp. His parents had fled from war-torn Burundi, where 12 years of civil war has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Most of Richard’s life was spent in Tanzania’s sprawling Mtendeli camp, where the little boy suffered chronic illness.
According to Mr Ntiranyi, Richard had been discharged from hospital in Kenya just before the flight to Australia.
If he had been in the camp, surrounded by people who spoke his language when he awoke on November 5 and found Richard convulsing, he would have known how to get help. At 4am in suburban Sydney he was utterly at a loss.
His downstairs neighbour at Fairfield, Paul Mochag, a Sudanese who had himself been in Australia just eight months, said he saw Mr Ntiranyi racing around on the footpath at about 6am, shouting for somebody to help him.
“He was calling out but I couldn’t understand him. I am from a different part of Africa and I don’t speak Burundi,” Mr Mochag said.
“He saw me on the balcony and he ran over and grabbed my arm. He made me understand he wanted me to follow him. I went up the stairs and into the room where I saw the little boy lying. It was the first time I saw a dead person and I was shocked and scared. As soon as I knew he was dead I called the ambulance.”
Mr Ntiranyi said the police arrived at 8am and took away his son’s body.
The centre, which is contracted to provide resettlement services to the dead child’s family and which employed the caseworker who met the family at the airport, has expressed “profound condolences to the family during this tragic event”.
On November 2, the Newcastle Refugee Health Clinic wrote to the Government, warning that the centre’s staffing and resources appeared inadequate and that this could lead to adverse effects on the health of refugees.
In the letter, the clinic’s Dr Murray Webber referred to “several unacceptable incidents which have already occurred”.
In October, for example, clinic doctors saw a family of eight refugees. “We didn’t arrange interpreters because we were told by ACL that the families spoke good English. This was clearly not the case,” the letter alleged.
“When an interpreter arrived, the family told our health-care workers they had not had any food for three days, as they had not been supported adequately to obtain access to funds from Centrelink, nor were they offered assistance with transport to the shops or the daunting process of their first attempt at grocery shopping in Australia.
” … They were told if they have any medical emergencies to ring 000 (despite the fact they don’t speak English).
Dr Webber said that Australian refugee workers at all levels appeared to have been taken by surprise by the very high needs of African refugees.
Some problems had been apparent well before the Australian Centre for Languages had appeared on the scene. In two cases African children had been relocated to the Hunter without authorities being aware they were suffering from malaria.
Dr Webber said the death of Richard Niyonsaba raised a number of serious issues about responsibility for medical care of newly arrived refugees.
Richard’s parents spoke to the Herald through an interpreter and friend, Ibrahim Mduwamungu of Tighes Hill, who knew the couple in the Tanzanian refugee camp of Mtendeli. Mr Mduwamungu, who speaks fluent English, said the family had come from a poor Third World rural environment almost inconceivably different from suburban Australia.
Their four children were born in the camp, where Richard’s illness kept him often in hospital.
His condition was so fragile that the family’s departure was delayed some months while he received life-prolonging blood transfusions and other treatment at the Coptic Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. That was where his sickle-cell anaemia was diagnosed and where reports on his condition were written for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which has the job of medically screening refugees.
Mr Ntiranyi said Richard was still in hospital up until the day the family left to fly to Australia, but according to the Immigration Department Richard and his family were cleared by the IOM for travel on October 31.
On arrival at their Fairfield flat, Mr Ntiranyi said the centre’s case worker had told the family he had missed a lot of sleep lately, was very tired and needed to leave them and rest. Mr Ntiranyi said he and his family were very hungry, but could not operate the stove after the case worker left.
He mistook a bottle of disinfectant for drink and made himself ill by swallowing some. The family put some raw rice in a saucepan of cold water and ate that before going to sleep. Hours later Richard was dead.
Mr Ntiranyi said it was two days after his son’s death before anybody showed the family how to operate the stove in the flat.
The family’s youngest child, Zainabu, also has sickle cell anaemia.
