Laura – Manurewa
“What I would say to my eleven-year-old self would be to be grateful for what you’ve got – don’t take things for granted, you’ve got a lot right now and not a lot of people have what you have.
I come from a family of five siblings, my mother is Fijian Samoan and my father is Tongan Samoan and I live in South Auckland – Manurewa. I’ve lived here and I was brought up here as well. I mostly identify as Samoan, brought up as Samoan, and I am more associated to my Samoan side.
I think one of the hardships of living in South Auckland is my parents are from the Pacific Islands and they’ve come from a place where they’ve never had much, never lived on anything, and coming here when I was younger I used to always complain about not having the latest clothes, the latest shoes, but now that I am growing up I sort of see that there is a struggle, and my parents try to make ends meet even if it didn’t satisfy my own needs. But as long as I had a roof over my head, food to eat, something to drink, then I am pretty happy as it is now.
I feel safe around Auckland. Majority of the people here I know – I’ve grown up in this town and I associate with a lot of the communities here, and to me I find that they’re all family.
Currently I am in my first year of Uni – I am at AUT studying Midwifery and health science. Obviously studying to be a midwife, but I am taking my studies further and hopefully going back to the islands to give back to the people there, and just helping out the community.
What interested me to become a midwife was I come from a big family so on my mothers side there are 12 siblings and those 12 siblings obviously gave birth to a lot of kids and so I have always been around babies and I have always been passionate about that. Me being a midwife – I kind of figured it out on one of our last family vacations to Samoa where I saw the health issues there and it’s like midwifery isn’t really a very important job in the islands and so I thought that maybe if I could probably in the future go back to the islands and educate people more about pre-natal health and care, then death threats and mortality rates would drop as well.”
