Sabry

I’m originally from Egypt. My wife is Filipino, she got a job offer as a nurse. Then I decided to come to visit. So I visited, but I never went back. I just like the environment, like the people. We came here, maybe, in 2005. I come from an Arabic background, so of course, the […]

Tarryn

It’s only since I’ve been in my 30s that I’ve had proper conversations about being Māori. I started to question all of that stuff when I moved away. I left New Zealand just before I turned 19. I went to Australia for a few years, to the UK for a couple of years, then back […]

Raviv – Part 2

Sarah (ranger) came to me last year and said, Look, we have these health and safety boards, would you like one? I said, Yeah, that will be lovely, but what about one in te reo Māori? She gave me the one in English, and about three months later, she comes to me, here it is […]

Raviv – Part 1

“I’ve worked for corrections for 14 years and so far, 220,080 trees in the ground. You know, a guy goes through the park. He sees one guy digging holes and one covering it. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘The guy that puts the plant in is off sick today!’ That’s a little Russian joke. I’m from […]

Elissa – Part 2

A lot of adults don’t play. I was in the city for whatever, I think I was with a colleague. We had just been to the convention centre and we walked back to where we parked. There were some puddles, and instead of walking around, I jumped onto one of the blocks, and ‘boink, boink’ […]

Jonty

“When I was five, my family left England on a boat, and over the next three years, we sailed around the world before arriving in New Zealand. We checked out all these awesome locations, the Galapagos Islands, Palmerston Atoll, Trinidad & Tobago, Panama Canal. Alongside that, we had all these books about animals. Travelling with […]

Adam and Anna

“I went to Australia in 2010 with the intention of being there six months. I got offered a full time job as an assistant winemaker, so I decided to stay. Our winery wasn’t set up for processing our whites, we did it at a contract facility which was Adam’s work and I met Adam there. […]

Helen – Part 1

“I grew up in the North Canterbury back country. My father managed a high country station called Esk Head up the South Branch of the Hurunui River. We lived in a sod house with a thatched roof. Outside had corrugated iron because there weren’t people to re-thatch any longer. We had a diesel generator for […]

Noel

“I took to bikes from a very young age, I got into Penny Farthing riding when I was 12. There were Penny Farthing races happening in Oamaru and I asked a guy if I could have a go on one. Half an hour later, I won my first race, and six months later, I built […]