Freeing My Family by Sadam Abdusalam

Author:Sadam Abdusalam [Sadam Abdusalam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

Almas has never heard from either his wife or his mother again or been able to discover anything else about what happened to them or the baby Buzaynab was carrying. Silence.

Almas is a serious dude: hard-working, kind-hearted, focused. Everything I wasn’t. We had become close friends when I moved to Adelaide for a while, and our common dramas bonded us tightly. As you can see, his situation was so much worse than mine, but he never said anything to suggest he thought that. Instead, Almas would hear me out every time I wanted to talk about my fears, and he’d tell me not to worry. His voice will always be in my head, saying, ‘Don’t worry Sadam, it will work out.’ I would say it back to him, too, but I didn’t know if it would. I guess he didn’t, either. He was just better than me at staying positive.

Meanwhile, my three angels were propping me up. I wouldn’t call Michael that often; I didn’t want to bother him too much, and to be honest he was a bit tougher on me than the others. There were moments when I really leaned on him—outside the passport office was one, and there were more to come—but he had always been honest with me about what he could and couldn’t do. No such thing with Sarah since she was as bad with boundaries as I was. She was like a nagging older sister, bugging me all the time. I didn’t treat her that well, I know now, but I think that’s what it’s like sometimes: you bite the hand that feeds you. She was always telling me that she was keeping me alive and it’s true, she was. I would call Sophie often, sometimes several times a day, to ask her what was going on. She was working on the Four Corners story, and as she went deeper in her research into the Uyghur situation, I could tell how strongly she felt about it. She definitely felt for me, and she was determined to help me get my family back.

One reason I called Sophie so much was because she always had something to say that sounded like hope. She’d tell me in lots of detail about the filming, her research, the stories she was uncovering. How she was going to use my story, the footage yet to be shot. Every time, she’d reassure me that things were going well, moving forward, that it was going to make a difference, that in the end it’d work out. She had that vibe, passionate and enthusiastic, that made me believe her.

The date for the Four Corners story to go to air was set for Monday, 15 July 2019. Sophie hadn’t pressured me to identify myself fully; she explained that we could do my interviews with my face in shadow and using a fake name, but that would mean the story would have less impact. I had decided, after the weird incident when Nadila was offered

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