Shared learning as refugee from Sierra Leone speaks with Winmalee students

Sierra Leonian refugee Clavenda Bockarie spoke to Winmalee High School,students at their school assembly on Tuesday 4 June. Ms. Bockarie fled Sierra Leone, a country in West Africa, during the country’s bloody civil war. Throughout this time many journalists were harrassed, detained or murdered for reporting unfavourably about the government of President
Ahmed Tejan Kabbah. In 1998, when Ms. Bockarie was three years old her mother, broadcast journalist Olivia Mensah, was arrested and imprisoned as an enemy of the state. Eventually Ms. Bockarie, her siblings and her mother escaped and reached asylum in Australia via a refugee
camp in Ghana.