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Rabia Rezai thought it better she stay at home rather than be reunited with her husband in Australia.
It was unsafe and her children could not go to school in Afghanistan — but at least they were inside their home.
When one of her sons was almost kidnapped earlier this year, though, things changed.
"His father asked us to get to Indonesia by any means," Ms Rezai told ABC News.
And so she did.
Her husband, Hafizullah Rezai, was granted a temporary protection visa by the Australian Government in October 2015 and lives in Queensland.
Ms Rezai thought he was in Brisbane, but did not know for sure. His documents, shown to ABC News, indicated he was in Toowoomba.
Now, Ms Rezai and her five children have been living in what can only be described as squalor in the overcrowded Jakarta Immigration Detention Centre.
A facility built for 80 now houses almost four times that many.
Downstairs, immigration violators — mainly from Nigeria — lie wherever they can find a spot, caged in with barely any room to move.
Upstairs there are almost 80 refugees and asylum seekers, crammed into cells along a narrow corridor.
The families with tiny cell-like rooms are the lucky ones.
Others make curtains out of sheets for privacy.
Habiba Nazari, 38, also from Afghanistan, sat in a room with her six children.
She made the journey to Jakarta in a bid to find her husband, who has been in a detention centre in Pekan Baru in Sumatra for five years.
Ms Nazari had been in Jakarta for six months.
One of her daughters would not eat the food.
"Seven people live in here and it is really difficult for us," Ms Nazari explained, while sitting on a narrow bed in a tiny room as her children watched on.
"All of my kids have been sick. I have been sick."
Indonesia gives no help to asylum seekers
The families in the centre have chosen to come and handed themselves in because they struggled to survive on the outside.
Across Indonesia, 14,000 refugees and asylum seekers are stranded, waiting for third nations to take them — with only a small percentage successful on a yearly basis.
The Indonesian Government itself has no programs in place to help them.
Funding at the detention centre in Jakarta comes from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which provides about $7 per day per person for food.
Upstairs, there was no air conditioning and very few fans.
One woman from Somalia hugged her disabled boy as her other children hovered around her.
Ahmed Sudani, a 28-year-old from Sudan, translated for her.
"She said they don't have a toilet and they always find it difficult to take them at night — because, when she goes to other families, the doors have been locked," Mr Sudani said.
The Somali woman travelled with her children to Yemen, and then to Malaysia, before boarding a boat to Indonesia.
She had wanted to reach Australia or the United States.
'We sleep in two or three shifts'
"The bad thing is the overcrowding," Mr Sudani told ABC News about the detention centre.
"They mix adults and kids together. It's not nice for kids to stay with adults — they smoke cigarettes, they talk differently."
Mr Sudani and others told ABC News the water ran for two hours every morning, but on weekends sometimes not at all.
Wahidullah Akramy, a 21-year-old Afghani man, has been in Indonesia for four years and at the detention centre for three months.
"Most of us get sick because of the sanitary [conditions] here," he said.
"We haven't enough places to sleep so we sleep in two or three shifts."
Once a week, an office-like room is opened.
Inside, newspaper is stuck to everything. The chairs, the tables, the walls — nothing is left uncovered.
That is where the children can play, draw and paint. But there is not a single toy in sight.
Topics: refugees, immigration, foreign-affairs, world-politics, indonesia, asia
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