The odyssey of Life

Some taxi drivers are great storytellers. This is a story of my Afghan Uber Driver (lets call him Mr. ‘M’) in Sydney as he drove me to the airport recently. A short story of grit, determination, perseverance and fighting for survival. This is a story of victory over adversity.

As I settled myself in his car next to him, Mr 'M' taught me about his tribe, the 'Hazara' ethnic group of Afghanistan that has had experienced some of the worst religious persecution. He shared about Eastern Afghanistan province where he grew up, a region that is naturally beautiful but witnessed destruction, bombings and genocide for many years, that does not have governance and continues to be restive. Being one of the five siblings, he had no choice but to work early in childhood in his uncles’ grocery shop to support his family and save money for the ultimate odyssey he was planning for. At the age of seventeen in 2001, he decided to take a big gamble with his life - go to Australia illegally through the sea.

His escape from Afghanistan marked the beginning of his odyssey that saw him take to the seas in a rickety Indonesian fishing boat bound for Australian shore. With the help of people smugglers, he paid his life savings and embarked on a risky life-threatening journey. He had seen neither a boat nor the sea in his life, Afghanistan being a landlocked country. The boat was rickety and dingy packed to the brim with barely any space to stand. Food and water was sparse and without any sanitation. The thirteen-day journey in the rickety boat had near deathlike situations of the boat capsizing, swinging violently, being flung ten meters in the air because of rough weather and sea water overflowing inside. However, on the thirteenth day the boat was accosted by Australian navy, the immigrants taken to the detention centre in Port Hedland near Darwin and screened.

After 4 months in Port Hedland detention centre, ‘M’ received a four-year temporary visa and was offered care of a family in Perth who hosted him, taught him English and helped him integrate. His search for lively hood took him from Perth to Melbourne and finally to Sydney which is now his home for many years. In the meantime, he got citizenship, got married, had two beautiful children and sponsored others in his family to join him. Today he works with one of the lagest retailer in their warehouse and dives his own car as Uber driver. Australian minimum wages are AUD 19 an hour and I was curious to know his earning with his combined incomes, given the high cost of living in Sydney.

He shared that he works in the warehouse of one of the largest retailers in Australia 10 hours a day; 4 days a week earns at AUD 45-50 per hour. The remaining two days of the week, he drives his own car as Uber and in one shift of 10 hours he earns AUD 400 a day. A back of the envelope calculation that I confirmed with him is his post-tax salary of AUD 100,000 (and he pays around AUD 30K tax over and above the AUD 100k). Just for reference, 1 AUD = 0.72 USD, 1 SGD, 51 INR. Labor market in Australia is very tight and minimum wage high. This ensures that all skills are well compensated unlike other emerging markets where the gap of job price of managerial jobs and trade jobs could be very high. A low difference of job pricing between skills with proportionate high income tax makes it a more egalitarian society.

As I bid him goodbye reaching the airport, I congratulated him on his success, hard work, determination and perseverance. He humbly told me ‘there are thousands of such stories even more courageous than me, but I was just lucky.’ As I reflect on ‘M’s story, many of my own struggles and inconveniences seems pale and trivial in comparison.

This story is not about legitimizing or eulogizing illegal immigration or its about conflict of Afghanistan but ‘M’s story of victory of humanity over adversity.