"You have one minute to leave your home. What five things will you bring?"

Common sense goes out the window, as I quickly calculate my list: husband, passport, family photos, medications, mobile phone and charger.

Before I can second-guess myself, we're ushered from the room.

Outside, a towering figure awaits. He stands in front of a metal fence — the sole passage to safety.

None of us speak his language but, instinctively, we form a line and offer up our possessions.

There are murmurs, gasps and tiny squeals as he makes his way down the queue.

The lucky ones pass through the border crossing, the others are sent to the back.

The border guard looks at me — cashless, useless — before pointing at my engagement and wedding rings. I don't want to remove them, but what choice do I have?

This is the price for the promise of a better life.

Walking in their shoes

I wasn't standing in a war zone, but rather Western Sydney, as part of Refugee Camp In My Neighbourhood (RCIMN).

It's an interactive tour that's led by refugees and asylum seekers who want Australians to walk in their shoes.

They transform into tour guides and assume roles like 'border guard', sharing their own experiences along the way.

Hundreds of visitors take the tour each year. The majority are school students, health professionals, and people who work with refugees.

In the simulated journey, you experience what it's like to flee your homeland, take a life-threatening boat trip, and be thrust into a detention centre where names are replaced by numbers.

There's also a taste of refugee camp life: squat toilets, scant food provisions, and a hospital tent with barely any medical supplies.

Project coordinator Adama Kamara dreamed up the project more than a decade ago, when she was working at Auburn City Council. The area had one of the highest populations of asylum seekers in Australia.

It was a time, Adama says, when the portrayal of refugees "was not very positive".

"To me, it's a sign of resilience, that [refugee] experience, but people were worried about how they would be treated."

For Adama, the community's story was akin to her own.

She was born in Sierra Leone, but moved with her family to Australia for her father's university study.

In 1991, civil war broke out in her homeland. It lasted over a decade, and forced more than 450,000 Sierra Leonean refugees to leave the country.

"It also meant that my family wasn't able to return home," Adama explains. "We sought safety here in Australia."

Waking up to war

War is what brought many of the tour guides to Australia's shores.

They've fled different lands — Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Sudan and Sri Lanka are among them — and found different ways to get here.

Some spent years in refugee camps, others were detained in immigration detention for equally long stretches of time.

Ukrainian refugee Oleksandra's story was different.

On February 23, 2022, she had a magical night at the ballet.

"Me and my friends went to the state opera house [in Odesa]," she recalls. "[There] was an amazing performance of the Nutcracker.

"I remember all these costumes, decorations, everything so bright, a lot of diamonds. [It was] so beautiful."

The next morning, the Ukrainian woke up to war.

"The first four days I was in shock," Oleksandra recalls.

But there wasn't a retraction or a military backdown. Instead, the fighting escalated.

After those four days, Oleksandra says it sunk in.

"Life stopped. Everything became dull, grey," she says.

"You don't know what to do."

The realities of a refugee camp

There's no rule book for being a refugee.

I went on a RCIMN tour twice — first with a group of year 5 and 6 students, then with teens in year 9 and 10.

Both days, I was struck by the impossible decisions asylum seekers must make.

For instance, sheltering in a refugee camp might seem like the safe option.

But as an Iraqi-born guide named Kathreen tells our group, people without proper identification or money to pay for translators can spend years waiting to be processed.

And the facilities within camps are often hotbeds of disease.

On the tour with the primary school kids, a Sri Lankan guide named Neeraja shows us what a pit toilet looks like.

"Imagine 600 people line up, and going again and again," she says. "How the smell is terrible."

All of our noses wrinkle on cue.

The stench isn't the worst part, of course.

Neeraja, who herself lived in an Indian refugee camp, explains that malaria and diarrhoeal diseases often spread from shared toilets.

According to UNHCR, these diseases along with measles, acute respiratory infections and malnutrition are major causes of morbidity and mortality among refugees.

After our toilet stop, we're led into the medical tent and introduced to Ahmed, a Sudanese man who spent 7.5 years at a refugee camp in Egypt.

Instead of beds, there are camp-style stretchers with mosquito nets overhead.

One stretcher has a hole cut through it and a bucket underneath. This is for patients with diarrhoea, Ahmed explains.

Despite its shortcomings, Ahmed says this medical centre is "much better" than the one he had access to.

Unfortunately for Ahmed, these harsh realities can't simply be forgotten.

In 2023, war broke out in Sudan, forcing 8.6 million people, according to the UNHCR, to leave their homes. Among them, were Ahmed's wife, daughter, father and siblings.

"They're in a refugee camp right now," he told me .

Ahmed is an Australian citizen and hopes his family can be brought here. For now, all he can do is wait.

Living in limbo

Waiting is an experience that Asad knows well.

After fleeing his home in Afghanistan and travelling to Australia by boat, he spent nearly 2,000 days in immigration detention.

When he tells the school children that number, they're wide-eyed, mouths agog.

He paints a picture of life in detention: being woken at six o'clock for room searches, eating the same food day after day, and trying to learn English when your mental health is crumbling.

He tells us how 500 people would gather around the one TV, cheering for the Australian soccer team, only for the match to be switched off mid-way by a guard.

But Asad says the uncertainty affected him the most.

"Living in limbo is the hardest thing."

Asad doesn't find it easy sharing his story. It takes him back to "dark days".

But it's his goal to educate people, particularly the next generation.