Nina & Rizzy | West Auckland

“My name is Nina.

Okay, so my name’s Rizzy, the place I call home in West Auckland, to be honest, I don’t have a particular home, because West Auckland is like one whole big place. So, I kind of grew up everywhere, like Henderson, Glen Eden. I kind of moved around, so I call West Auckland a complete home to me. So not from a specific place. 

Maybe just helping others out mostly, like especially in our community, because there’s a lot of homeless people on the streets, and you walk past them every day going to school and it’s kind of heart-breaking. So, you don’t know what to exactly do, and the fact that you don’t have much yourself, and the fact that we talk about community a lot is that we can’t really do much. Well you can, but not a lot. You can do bits and pieces and stuff to help them, like shelter, money but it’s just small things that we wish we could do. Since we talk about community a lot, we have all these community functions and stuff, but we can’t see much going on, like we still see people on the streets sleeping.

They talk about changes, but here’s not much of a change around here, like ever since we’ve been born and brought up around here, no stuff has changed. I think things have just got worse, in our opinion, like in our generation. We just hope that next year there could be a massive change. 

What I would like to see in the future would just be not many people on the streets, like homelessness and stuff, in our community. We don’t want to see anyone on the streets. We just want it to be a kind of a clean environment that’s more enjoyable, seeing actual changes happening. Not just all talk. Just be honest.

We’re hoping as a generation, we’re wanting to actually help them go out on the streets, talk to them, see what they want to do and just small things like that. They want food like, try and help them in small ways and just to see if we can do more, maybe just that at the moment, because at this point, we can’t do much, because we’re still young.

We’re still young, and we’re doing things for ourselves, so we’re kind of just hoping that if we bring a group of friends we can go out and just plan stuff with them and just talking to them, having a small chat, get to know them better, and like how this happened, and what we can do better.

I was born in West Auckland, and I was like brought up with a big family, to be honest.

What I value in life. Okay, so I was born out West Auckland, too. I was brought up everywhere. I was brought up in West Auckland, and other countries, but I find West Auckland as my home. The most thing I value, or is like valuable to me is family and friends, and especially just enjoying the moment, yeah.

Yeah, and as a religious person, God. 

We go to the same school.

I’m a senior, as you can see, and she’s a junior.

I’m a senior, too.

Oh, she’s a senior.

How rude.

And my best friend is her sister, her older sister. So, from there, we kind of just grew close.”