Shakerah | Riverhead
“So my name is Shakerah. I live out in Riverhead, Kumeu. Our family, we’ve got a strawberry farm there.
I suppose disappointment, in the sense that I have a lot of people that have expectations, but also people that have really been there through my journey, through thick and thin, and I feel like they believe in me so much. I feel like if I face any failure or I feel like there’s a set standard that I haven’t achieved to their expectations, I worry that I will disappoint them, or that with everything that they had ever hoped me to be, I wouldn’t be good enough. I suppose you could kind of categorise it to a fear of being a disappointment to those that love you and believe in you the most.
There’s not a certain way that I can deal with it, and the reason why I say this is because there are times that I don’t think about it, or there are times that it doesn’t really affect me, but there are certainly times that it comes and it goes. But I feel like when I do have that fear, the only thing that I can do is think positively, in the sense that at the end of the day, I mean, people love me for a reason, and that’s just for who I am as a person. I don’t think their expectations or their love is based on my accomplishments or my success. I think it comes down to your basic traits such as whether you’re someone really happy, whether you’re being kind. I think it comes down to the small things; why does this person really value me and place so much expectation on me?
But I think the second thing that really helps me overcome it is the fact that I’m a firm believer that anyone is capable of doing anything as long as they set their mind to it, and they work hard for it. So sure you face failures in life, but I think failures in some way are probably the best thing that you can learn from. So I always try and take it as a learning outcome, as a good learning outcome, and think that; what can you use, what can you learn from this to better yourself?
So I was born in Afghanistan. My family came to New Zealand as refugees. I was six when I came to New Zealand. I suppose for those that don’t know so much about Afghanistan when I was a little girl something that it really teaches you is to know struggles and pain. Something that quickly transitioned from Afghanistan to New Zealand is the fact that when you look at Afghanistan for example, girls or women, they don’t have an education. Whereas in New Zealand, that’s so easy, and that’s a basic right that everyone has. So, I think for me, I value education, simply because that wasn’t a freedom, or an easy right that I had in Afghanistan. But also I suppose the other thing that I really value the most is the fact that I want to be able to make a difference in someone’s life, and once again, this goes right back to my story.
So I hadn’t been to Afghanistan in for about 13 to 14 years, and to be honest, because I grew up in New Zealand, I’ve become almost set to its language, to its culture, to its customs and laws. The thing about that is that it almost made me forget about who I was and where I actually was from, and that was just because I had grown up here and I value the culture of New Zealand so much. So in 2017 when I was around 18 or 19 years old, I went to Afghanistan for the first time again, and my perspective on life and everything completely changed. Simply, I started to realise what it meant for a person to value their identity, to value their culture and truly where they come from. I mean, I love New Zealand. I call it home, but something that I’ve realised is that Afghanistan is also my home. I guess there’s a lot of things that I personally value but I think if I was to really put it down to three main things, I think it would be to be someone of good character, to be someone of good value, and I think the third is to leave an impact on someone’s life.”
