If you asked Nayereh Norzehi’s friends to pinpoint the single most impressive thing about the 24-year-old Afghan refugee, it’s doubtless they’d all offer a different response. Some, for example, might point to the fact that she speaks five languages: English, Farsi, Dari, Bahasa Malay and Arabic, effortlessly.
Others might highlight the fact that despite only moving to Australia on her own in 2019 with the support of the Community Refugee Sponsorship Initiative, she has not only completed Year 12 at a community college, but works as a food tour guide, traffic controller and aged care support worker.
SBS viewers across the country will come to understand the most astounding thing about Nayereh’s achievements to date: she has managed all of this with only the most basic of literacy and numeracy skills.
She is one of the participants in the SBS series , returning for a second season. Hosted by literacy advocate Jay Laga’aia, the show takes nine everyday Australians struggling with literacy and numeracy on a life-changing journey – each step made possible with the support of President of the Australian Council for Adult Literacy, Jo Medlin, and adult literacy teacher, Adam Nobilia.
Hailing from a broad spectrum of socio-economic and culturally diverse backgrounds, personal motivations to improve their reading, writing and numeracy skills vary widely between the students: from wanting to be able to spell grandchildren’s names to being able to achieve a workplace promotion.
For Nayereh, who says that ‘in another life’ she would have loved to have become a doctor, it’s the idea that daily tasks could be easier.
“Being able to read and write solves a lot of problems; you don’t have to worry about whether you can get a train, read a letter, send a job application – everything becomes smoother,” she says. “When you don’t have a chance to have a proper education, you spend your whole life feeling like you’re always wanting things you can’t have.”
Nayereh’s journey is the stuff of Hollywood heavyweight biopics. Having fled her native Afghanistan with her family when she was three, schooling over the next two decades came in fits and starts.
“In Iran [where the family first lived], I would cry every morning as I watched all the local kids go to school. I was always begging my parents to let me go too, but of course, as refugees without any paperwork, things weren’t so easy.”
I remember staring at billboards at the shops and watching all these letters swim around and I would wonder why I could never make sense of them.
Nayereh’s parents eventually found an underground school in a town far away, a journey necessitating a 20-minute walk, three separate bus trips and a 10-minute walk each way. It was a start, but as Nayereh tells it, the school was more often shut than operating.
“The owner – worried that they were drawing too much attention with all the kids hanging around – would shut the school all the time so we would study for a month, then be home for another two months before it was reopened for another month and so on.”
A move to Malaysia in 2014 was a step in the right direction, however there too, Nayereh found the education she longed for lacking. “I attended a school for refugees for a while, but I was in a classroom with lots of little kids and they only taught in English which I did not yet understand,” she said.
“Also, the cost of living in Malaysia is very high so I couldn’t afford to keep up my studies. After a while I had to leave school and enter the workplace instead.” It was in the workplace and watching motivational speaking videos that Nayereh learned the English language.
A disrupted education is one thing, but Nayereh also suffers from dyslexia, a learning disorder characterised by trouble processing words and language. “I remember staring at billboards at the shops and watching all these letters swim around and I would wonder why I could never make sense of them,” she says. “Testing in Iran was difficult because of my family’s financial situation but I was finally diagnosed here in Australia last year.”
Signing up to take part in Lost For Words was an act of courage, Nayereh admits, but adds she felt compelled to be a voice for others like her. The latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows adults struggle with basic literacy skills and with numeracy.
“This is not only my problem; there are millions of people around Australia struggling with the same issues of reading, writing and numeracy, but maybe they don’t have the confidence to make some noise. I was happy to do this for all of us.”
Nayereh says her time in the program was ‘life changing,’ but personal progress aside, she points to the bond that grew between the show’s participants as a key highlight. “As a group we worked, hand on heart, on making a better tomorrow. Isn’t that what we all want?”
