Aroha | Henderson

“Aroha and home for me in Auckland is Henderson. I think probably personally, moving out of Auckland is what I wanted to do last year but hey, I’m still here. I think I’ve just lived in Auckland most of my life, and I’m kind of ready to move back into the country where I’m from, and give back to my community back home.

Take a lot of my learnings from here in Auckland, and take them home and utilise them to benefit my community back home in the country. So yeah that’s still a work in progress, that’s something in the future, even next year that I would really like to focus on and especially round community development. That’s what I do here in Auckland. I work for a local community organisation here in Henderson. We do some really great work, working alongside schools and just local grassroots people, and developing them in their communities. So, I’d really like to take that skill and utilise that back in my iwi and hapū back home in the Hokianga. 

I was born in a small town of Pukekohe, south of Auckland, raised in Bombay, South Auckland, not in India, and so schooled out there. I moved, when I got older, I moved here to the big smoke in Auckland, and finally settled here in Henderson, out West Auckland. I’m the youngest of nine and both my parents are from the Ngāpuhi iwi, and they moved here to Auckland early in their, I think it was the third child they had and then they moved to the city but they always had us connected back to where we’re from. So we’ve always had a strong link with our family back home in our iwi, in our hapū. So, an interesting upbringing, because being the youngest of nine you see a lot of change over the years. You get exposed to a lot of different music. You get exposed to a lot of different sports. So it’s a real awesome family upbringing and we had a great semi-rural kind of upbringing in Bombay, like Mum and Dad always, we always had a mara kai, you know, a vegetable garden. We had little animals that were actually food, not pets. So it was that kind of mentality, about surviving in the city but also having those kind of traditional values as well.

I think what I value most is community and family. I value that quite a lot, and I think that just comes from being part of a large family myself, always being connected to who I am, and my culture, and being able to recognise things and other people that I work with in the wider community in city life, and that empathy that comes along with it. So I think people and communities really mean a lot to me, and finding ways to help our communities thrive and finding our own voices in the community and developing that. So community and family is a huge thing for me and I value that, and I value the relationships that I develop with people.”