Melody | Māngere Bridge

“I’m Melody, and I live in Māngere Bridge. The immediate thing that comes to mind is my friend Cas. She now lives in Samoa, and she’s a teacher, and I was like madly struggling with an assignment that I had to do, and I was crying in the wardrobe and I called her and she came over and she gave me a pep-talk.

She made me little cards to remind myself of how to get through hard times and how to overcome things that I’m struggling with, because it was much deeper than just my assignment that I couldn’t do. 

So I grew up all over Auckland, and a little bit in Nelson. So I’ve got both islands experience and what is important to me is my family and spending time with them, particularly my grandparents, just learning from them, growing in wisdom from them, listening to their stories and then I think just meeting people and saying hello, being kind to people. I really value that, because I think how we treat people really matters, and we should treat people as we want to be treated ourselves, and I value having a faith in God that I guess guides and directs my life, in how I want to live.

I think it’s really important to have people that you can call on, to speak into your life during any time, like hard times, good times, because I think if we become isolated, and try and go through it ourselves then it’s all in our mind, and it can become too overwhelming and we can make silly decisions,and that’s not the best. So I think having others walk with us really helps, because they can tell us they’ve been through it themselves, or they know someone else has, and say that it’s going to be better and there are ways through this.”