Emily | Māngere East
“I live in Māngere East, but I actually just grew up here as well. I went away and went to uni and stuff and I ended up in London, and had a great time, but I’ve found myself back at home, and really, really loving it and luckily.
We all need a nice place to live, and somewhere warm and safe, but I’m really lucky I’ve got that, but me and my friends, we’ve just been talking about how we all need more support. We all can get quite stressed out and there’s lots of things to do and when you’ve got a supportive community or a supportive family, or hopefully both, it’s just heaps easier, and when that support goes away it sucks, basically. I feel really lucky I’m quite supported at the moment with church and friends and family, and stuff like that, but I think support’s really important.
The word community means lots of different things. So, for me it’s where I live. That’s my community, and the people around here in Māngere East. Also church is a big part of my life, so I feel like that’s sort of another community, and sometimes it overlaps, but also if you’re a part of different groups, if you’re part of the rainbow community, that’s another group of people that you can be part of. There’s heaps of different communities, and the really cool is when they overlap. Last night, just here actually we had our first night markets, and heaps of different communities just descended, and it was really, really cool, because a lot of different communities live in this place, and I love it when they all sort of overlap and we can share stuff.
Thinking about Christmas coming up, the one thing I’d really like to get across is you don’t have to spend heaps of money to enjoy Christmas. A couple of years ago we decided to do no presents, and it was a game-changer for us, and I really enjoy Christmas now. So we still spend quite a lot of money on food, but we don’t do presents, and it’s taken away a lot of that pressure. The expectation now is just to enjoy each other’s time and hang out and visit people, and that has made it so much easier. I think there’s a lot of pressure, consumer pressure on us to spend and that’ll make us happy, but if you’ve ever tried that and got into debt, it’s really not the way forward. [You] don’t have to spend a lot of money to have a good time.
Myself and my husband started up a little business called Science in a Van, and we’ve got a really cool job where we go into schools and teach kids about science. That’s really fun, because I get to blow giant bubbles for a living, which is pretty lucky. I didn’t know that’s how my journey was going to turn out, so I just feel really, really fortunate and often we don’t know what the future’s going to hold. I just feel really, really lucky that I’m doing something that I love, and I’m living somewhere where I really enjoy it.
Science in Van started in 2010, and myself and my husband started it on a bit of a whim really, because we met while we worked at the Science Museum in London. That’s where the chemistry happened. That’s a good joke!. We came back here and we did these 45 minute theatre shows with science demonstrations, and it happened at a time where teachers were really struggling to get science into their classroom. So it was perfect timing. We come in and do heaps of crazy stuff, and get across very simple messages, like chemistry; we talk to the kids about bubbles, and talk about when two or more things come together you make a mixture. Sometimes they don’t mix; they separate. Sometimes there’s a reaction. So it’s very simple messages, but each show gets across a scientific process of having a question, having a guess, trying it out and seeing what happens. It’s really simple, fun stuff and I think the really nice thing for me is I used to be a teacher in New Zealand a long time ago, and I never did any science because I thought it was too hard. But now with the skills I’ve learned from the Science Museum, coming back and making it easy is just a really nice thing to do. Yeah, it’s really fun.”
