‘If I give up, all my effort is for nothing’: international students thrown into Melbourne lockdown despair

Nibarchana Oli has tried to avoid thinking about the prospect that she might soon be, as she puts it, “sitting on the road”.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. “We don’t have money and we don’t know how we are going to pay rent for next month.”

Oli, 19, is an international student from Ghorani, Nepal and is in her first year of a three-year IT degree at the Melbourne campus of a university based in another state.

She arrived in Australia in February, just before the coronavirus took hold and the lockdowns that followed dispensed with her chances of getting a job.

With that, Oli has seen her savings reduced to about $400, she says. That is also how much she pays each month for a shared room in a modest house in St Albans, in Melbourne’s west. She shares the place with seven other Nepali students who are all in similar positions.

“It’s a really hard situation right now,” Oli says. “We are all jobless.”

A range of organisations, large and small, is supporting some of Melbourne’s 200,000 international students with food parcels and other essential items.

For those like Oli, who have managed to cross paths with groups such as the Kasih Project, which sprang up during Melbourne’s first lockdown and delivers meals and non-perishables to international students, it has been possible to keep the stomach full.

The City of Melbourne council, which covers the CBD and inner suburbs and is home to 30,000 of those students, has provided food vouchers to about 10,000 people worth about $2m.

But financial support has been more elusive. Universities and training colleges have established hardship funds, though the none of the five students Guardian Australia spoke to for this story mentioned receiving support through those schemes.

“They have not helped me at all,” Oli says of her university.

After the commonwealth ruled out federal access to welfare benefits, the Victorian government created a one-off $1,100 payment to struggling international students in April. More than 21,000 international students have received the payment. Oli and others say the payment was incredibly helpful, but not enough.

And the food relief, though vital, only goes so far: it won’t pay the rent.

As the economies of other major cities have reopened, so too have the industries that international students rely on to support themselves.

But in Melbourne, the opposite has happened. The stage four restrictions introduced in the first week of August put to the sword another 250,000 jobs across the city’s already decimated economy, according to a state government estimate.

It has made a tough situation much worse for the city’s international students.

Ahmad Madkur, a PhD student in education from Banten, Indonesia, lost his job of five months as a dishwasher at a restaurant in July.

“When the restaurant is takeaway, there are no plates to wash,” he says.

Madkur, 32, is on an Indonesian government scholarship to a Melbourne university but the scholarship is modest and, without part-time work, it needs to cover his rent and bills and also support his wife and son back home.

“Honestly, I don’t buy meat any more, I just choose another food like tofu or vegetables,” he says. He also depends on food packages from the Kasih Project, while Oli says she has mostly relied on the rice and eggs she receives from the same charity.

Others have been left entirely dependent on strangers. Soyi, a 23-year-old IT student from Incheon, South Korea, has been allowed to stay with a Melbourne woman in her city apartment during the pandemic.

Soyi, who did not want her surname used, has a vision impairment condition called nystagmus which causes reduced vision and depth perception.

She had already struggled to find work but since March has been employed as a cleaner. That work has now dried up, and she is also no longer receiving support from her family.

Soyi is unsure if will be able to afford to stay. “It’s just one year left and so I feel like if I give up on my education, all my effort is for nothing,” she says. “I wish the government could have a little bit of compassion.”

Federal government ministers have noted that international students are required to confirm they will be able to support themselves financially when applying to come to Australia. In April, Scott Morrison said visa holders are “obviously not held here compulsorily”.

Of course, in many case flights are scarce and expensive, especially for those who cannot find work and, in the case of younger students, whose parents’ incomes have also been hit by the pandemic.

Oli says she had already spent $8,000 on her course and is desperate to stay. She is in her first year of a three-year degree.

But for the time being, she cannot rely on her parents, who are also in lockdown, she says.

“I don’t want to go back to Nepal, I came here just now,” she says. “I think after Covid I can get a job.”

Soyi has been told there is a 28 August deadline to enrol for her course next semester. It is unlikely she will be able to pay.

“I think I will lose [my] visa because the government also said just go home if you cannot support yourself,” she says. “And then there is no ticket that I can afford. Maybe I will just be kicked out forcibly.”

The Guardian approached the Department of Home Affairs to ask what would happen to people like Soyi, but did not receive a response.

The Melbourne woman who took Soyi in did not want to be named in this story. But Soyi says, without her, “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything if she didn’t help me out.”

Madkur says from time to time he has considered returning to Indonesia, where he works as a teacher.

He is worried about how long he will need to be away from home, particularly when he cannot even return to Indonesia to visit his family.

“Sometimes I joke that my son will call me uncle, you know,” he says. “Because he’s never met me.”

So why stay?

“It’s like my dream,” Madkur says of his PhD course, noting he was “not from a well-to-do family”.

“This opportunity doesn’t come twice. It’s difficult for me to get a scholarship in Indonesia, and without a scholarship it’s impossible for me to come.”