Ranmaya Gautam is picking kale as the sun breaks first light. Sweat has started to pool near the 54-year-old’s sindoor, a vermilion stroke that powders her hairline, a symbol of marriage in Hinduism, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
She and her husband Ram have worked at the same farm in western Sydney for the past decade.
They arrived in Australia as refugees from Bhutan with no money and no English, armed with desires.
“My first day on the job … my boots got stuck in the muddy field and I couldn’t pull them out. When I stepped, only my legs were coming with me.” Ranmaya laughs.
Two years later, in 2014, their small refugee community did something different to help them buy a home. They sacrificed their own savings to top up Ranmaya and Ram’s to help them reach their dream.
“We had around $70,000 saved after two years working, and about four friends helped us with about 40k,” she says.
Through this highly unusual borrowing custom, the Bhutanese refugee community has managed to beat Sydney’s soaring house prices of recent decades, with 78 per cent of the entire cohort living here now owning their homes, according to the Australian Bhutanese Association. This is 11 per cent higher than the national average.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet penned an op-ed last October about how scrapping stamp duty would cut two years from the time it takes people to save for a deposit.
“We can – and we must – harness new ideas to get more people into their own home faster,” he wrote.
But in 1998, Om Dhungel was already thinking outside the box – out of necessity.
Om was one of seven people who made up the entire Bhutanese refugee community in Sydney at the time.
A former high-ranking official in Bhutan’s Telecommunications Department, in Sydney he worked on the assembly line at a phone factory in Penrith.
“I was constantly chasing the deposit, so my friend lent me 20k to buy a house in Blacktown, it was 2004.”
The interest-free gift was repaid by Om within a year, but the gesture remained as a blueprint for the rest of the community.
FULL STORY
How the Bhutanese beat Sydney’s soaring house prices (Sydney Morning Herald)
PHOTO
Husband and wife, Ranmaya and Ram Gautam in their backyard garden in South Penrith. They bought the house in 2014.CREDIT:MRIDULA AMIN
