Shayma’a’s parents are originally from Iraq and Syria, both places where they don’t feel safe to return to. 

“I feel like I really wanted to see Syria but now it’s too late,” she says. “But I see all these white people going there all the time. This is what I get really sad about. How come they get to go back to our homelands and enjoy our countries, but we’re not allowed to go and enjoy our own countries?”

In this last episode of Conversations With My Immigrant Parents, the Arif whānau talk about how differently immigrants and refugees experience Aotearoa, displacement and grief.

Scroll down to listen to the podcast.

Conversations With My Immigrant Parents is a podcast/video series where immigrant whānau have conversations they normally wouldn’t, crossing barriers of language, generation, and expectation.  

Co-hosts and producers Saraid de Silva and Julie Zhu travelled Aotearoa meeting families from different countries, sitting in as they spoke to each other about love, disappointment, what home means to them - and where home really is. 

Made possible by the RNZ/NZ On Air Innovation Fund. 

Watch more from the series:

Judah, Tafara, and Pako: Not your white boy

A Sri Lankan family talks about guilt, obligation, and what freedom really means

A Zimbabwean mum, dad and daughter interrogate colonial tools in New Zealand