Ella | Glen Innes
“When one of my relatives passed away, I was inspired by his hard work, before his life passed away. All of his inheritance passed on to his families, especially for the poor ones. That includes me.
My relative lived in Ōtara, but he never married, and he was a nurse and he retired very soon because our family’s a bit complicated. It’s not the families in New Zealand, because our family is like whatever they tell you to do you have to do it or else you’re labelled as trouble. So yeah, that was the guy who inspired me.
I didn’t grow up here. To be honest I’m not from here, I’m just here on visitation visa. I’m from Tonga, and I think after next week I’m going to apply for a student visa here. I’m enrolling at medical school, and my goal in this life is to help out with my families, but my real goal is to help out with the people who are poor in New Zealand, and to help out wherever I can. That’s it.
I don’t really know what’s ahead of me, I’m just going to try to be more successful, so I can help out with my relatives. To make sure the little ones, like my little cousins, nieces and nephews will survive, since we are not citizens in New Zealand. So I can take care of them, instead of being homeless or asking people around for money, because the country that I came from to be honest, the people here in New Zealand, they are lucky. There’s food, there’s so many opportunities. The place that I came from, if you go there to Tonga, bet you guys will be touched just what we do to survive. In Tonga you can survive without money, but you have to work three times harder than here in New Zealand, like you have to kill. For instance you have to kill a dog by yourself, or a chicken or a pig, but yeah that’s why I wanted to help other people here in New Zealand. I don’t want the small kids to see what I’ve seen, pretty much.”
