By Daniel Hopper Oo’s family after the Citizenship ceremony with Sr Elaine Troy OLSH and Ted Booth SCARF

By Daniel Hopper

Meet our newest Australian family – Oo Reh (husband), Phray Meh (wife), Soe (16), Christina (14), Joseph (10) and Leh Leh (7) – who only this week celebrated receiving their Australian citizenship. Prior to coming to Australia they had spent ten years in a refugee camp. They, along with 600 other migrants, refugees and members of all our cultural communities will be attending the annual “Many Cultures, One in Christ” Mass and Cultural Celebration at St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral in Wollongong at 2pm on Sunday 26 August.

Oo grew up in a remote lowland village in Karenni State (a former independent state in Burma) and worked as a policeman. In his early twenties he met Phray who lived with her family in a small mountain village with 40 other families. After they married, Oo moved into Phray’s village, where they lived a subsistence lifestyle, without electricity, in a region regarded as one of the least accessible and poorest areas in the Union of Burma. Continue reading →