Paulini has always lived in fear - "As a woman, a single mother, I always felt unsafe. I was always in fear. For myself and my children."
When she made the decision to leave Papua New Guinea, she did what she had to do. She escaped with her youngest daughter. Her other children stayed behind. That separation, the weight of it, the hope behind it, would shape everything that followed.
Paulini arrived in Australia in 2015 carrying almost nothing. When crisis hit and she faced homelessness, she did the only thing she could think of: she picked up her five-year-old and walked for an hour and a half to find the Red Cross. By 4pm that same day, Red Cross had referred her to RAILS, and RAILS called.
"When RAILS called, I felt a moment of joy in my darkness. I said to myself, this is your journey that will start today."
What Paulini found at RAILS was not what she had expected from lawyers. And over the next decade, it would change everything — her safety, her status, her family, and ultimately her place in this country. Because for Paulini, Australia represented something she had never had before: a place where women are protected, where equality is real, where her daughters could have a future she could never have imagined for herself.
"Australia is the place I want to give my heart and soul. It is the place where I want to make my forever, for me and my family."
Paulini had arrived with limited English, no familiarity with formal systems, and no idea where to begin. She had found some comfort volunteering at a local church, packing books and clothes, but had no pathway into the legal and housing support she urgently needed. She didn't know it existed. She didn't feel she could ask.
"I didn't know where to start. I felt I couldn't ask for anything because I was foreign."
What she found at RAILS was not what she expected from lawyers.
"The people at RAILS have so much skill. But the way they talked to me was humble and tender. It touched my heart."
That combination, deep legal expertise delivered with patience, humility and genuine care, is not accidental at RAILS. It is the model. For people arriving from places where authority figures have represented threat rather than safety, where systems have excluded rather than supported, the how of legal help matters as much as the what. For Paulini, who had spent her entire life without protection, being told that protection was now hers was almost beyond comprehension.
"Protection means someone will protect me for the first time in my life. It is hard to explain how important this was to me. Before that moment I felt no protection ever. It was a different language to me to be told I would be protected."
Over the next decade, RAILS supported Paulini through a protection visa, permanent residency, and eventually family reunification with her oldest daughter. They connected her with housing and mental health support, explained complex systems in plain language, and met her where she was, not where the paperwork assumed she should be.
Through it all, Paulini was building something. Stability. Confidence. Employment in the not-for-profit sector, supporting other vulnerable people. And a fierce, quiet determination to give back.
"Because of this I knew I must give something back. Because people were working to make my life better in this country. I could do things to be valuable in this country."
But there was one more milestone. Citizenship.
For Paulini, citizenship was never just a legal status. It was belonging that couldn't be undone. It was safety that no change in government or political mood could take away. It was the right to vote, to work without restriction, and above all to secure her daughters' futures, including access to university at domestic rates, opening doors that international fees would have permanently closed.
The barrier was the citizenship test. For someone who had left school early, whose English literacy was still developing, the standard preparation pathway simply wasn't built for her.
RAILS' Citizenship Doors program was.
Through accessible information sessions, hands-on application workshops, and practice groups that assumed nothing about prior literacy or system knowledge, Paulini and her now 16-year-old daughter worked toward the test together. RAILS also developed an app so participants could practise citizenship questions at home, in their own time, at their own pace, without needing to ask their children for help navigating technology they didn't yet understand.
One of RAILS' educators describes a moment that everyone in this work recognises: "There's a time when you see the penny drop. It's really transforming."
For Paulini, that moment came. In March 2026, she passed her citizenship test. So did her daughter.
"I am learning so much about citizenship and Australia. I want to be here for a lifetime, and I need to know these things. I love the face to face talking. I love the app. It helps me learn."
Paulini's first priority as a new citizen is to be a role model to her daughters. Her second is to keep giving back, the same impulse she has carried since her earliest days in Australia, long before she knew what was possible.
What made the difference, across more than a decade, was not legal expertise alone. It was the way that expertise was offered, with patience, with humility, and with an understanding that for someone who has spent a lifetime without protection, being treated with dignity is not a small thing.
At RAILS, it is the whole thing.
"My mindset was to be valuable from day one that I stepped into this country. I watched and I listened. Now I must put those things I have learned into practice, to show who I am. To give back to Australia."
*Names and photo have been changed for privacy.