By Akech Manyiel and Pamela Scriven*

  Melbourne - They come from Cambodia, China and the Philippines but the choristers of the Many Moons choir are united in song.

By Samantha van Zweden

 MELBOURNE - Victoria’s Indonesian community jammed the Immigration Museum in mid-March for a one-day festival celebrating the diverse culture, activities and food of their homeland.

By Akech M Manyiel

 Melbourne - Sudanese youths have moved to counter racist attacks by holding a national Sudanese basketball tournament.

By Thuong Du

 MELBOURNE - A new television show aimed at increasing the status of  young Vietnamese women in Melbourne will be underway soon.

The driving force behind the project is Helen Huynh and her team, already successfully transmitting radio programmes from the Yarraville studios of Channel 31.

 “Nothing we set our minds to is unachievable.We’re just joining the dots - skills we can acquire, resources we can beg, borrow and steal. People will support you if you really believe in what you do,” says Huynh.

By Frud Bezhan

  Melbourne -  Nazifa Nader endured more than her fair share of  the upheavals in Afghanistan for two decades before coming to Australia.

After the death of her husband, father, brothers and uncles during the war between the Soviet Union and the Mujahidin in the 1980s Nazifa, then a 26-year-old widow, was left alone to fend for her six-month old daughter, two sons aged three and five and an elderly mother.

In April 1992 Nazifa fled Afghanistan and escaped to a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, teeming with widows, children and elderly men and women.

By Frank Lin*

 Melbourne - A new satellite TV installation at the Atherton Gardens Public Housing Estate in Melbourne means many migrant residents now enjoy television in their mother tongue.

By Rosemary Kelada, CEO, Spectrum Migrant Resource Centre

  Melbourne - An opportunity is knocking for both employers and retrenched manufacturing workers, like the latest group from Pacific Brands. It is easy to become depressed about the global financial crisis and to consider the prospective unemployment of many of the manufacturing workers, many of them migrant men and women, as being a further layer of disadvantage for them. In our experience, however, migrants have much to offer potential employers.

 Melbourne - Members of the public can record personal messages to those affected by the bushfires in a condolence book available in the foyer of the State Library in Swanston Street.

By Ayan Shirwa     

 MELBOURNE - “Excuse me”, the woman whispers. I smile politely at her, wondering what she wants. “That thing on your head, you know you don’t have to wear it," she tells me.

I glance around the crowded bus. My critic speaks not just to me but the other passengers as well.  The woman is smiling, seemingly oblivious that maybe, just maybe, she should not be critiquing a stranger's choice of religious dress. "You're a pretty girl. You shouldn’t hide behind that head wrap.”

By  Keren Leizerovitz

 MELBOURNE - Labelled ‘the lost tribe’, Russian-Jews or Jewish-Russians depending on where you sit, the Jewish community from the former Soviet Union in Melbourne has often been misunderstood or not sufficiently acknowledged.