When an international student is granted a visa to study abroad, that visa will usually have conditions imposed.
For Australia, those conditions will usually include restrictions on hours of work, and conditions imposed on the mode of study – as a general rule of thumb, international students must attend a minimum of 80 per cent of their classes in person.
In 2011, I found myself in a predicament: I had been left inside my head without supervision. The result of this was a failure to attend classes for weeks.
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At the time, I had no language for what I was experiencing, but in hindsight it’s clear that depression had been holding me hostage for months.
I was missing home, missing people who looked and sounded like me, missing the food that I grew up eating, I was fed up of little things like tending to my 4C mane and big things like making sure I ate a well-balanced diet – all this with no language or tools to navigate what I was experiencing.
Since I had never been socialised to speak about my problems especially with strangers, I just stayed at home locked in my bedroom, with most of my days spent in bed watching something on my laptop and trying my best to avoid any human interaction, even with my housemates.
As a result of not attending classes as required, I received a phone call from the International Student Centre that jolted me back to reality – I had been asked to attend the Centre in person, something I found strange because from the day I landed in Australia in 2007, no one had been minding my business.
I reported to the International Student Centre to find a really concerned lady waiting for me. She informed me that it was her job to keep track of international students’ academic performance, and she had noticed that my performance had changed drastically in the preceding months, to the point of non-attendance.
It was at that point that I allowed everything I had been feeling to spill out of me like a broken dam. I held nothing back – the lady had informed me that she was required to report me to the Department of Home Affairs for breaching my visa conditions, following which I would be required to leave the country either voluntarily or by force. I had nothing to lose.
After about an hour of spilling my guts out and explaining to this lady that I could not understand how to navigate life in this very foreign land, she gave me the most precious gift – the gift of time.
She told me that provided I did not break the law or breach any other visa conditions, she would find a way to buy me six months – one semester.
The price of those six months? I was to figure out whether I wanted to remain in Australia – if I did, then I’d have to re-enroll in classes after the six months and repeat the one I had failed.
If I decided the opposite, she would provide me the opportunity to leave the country of my own volition. Grab your copy of The Sunday Standard next week to find out what I did next!
–The writer is a Kenyan-Australian lawyer and podcaster based in Nairobi
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By Dorcas Mbugua