What does community mean to you?

Tim | Tūranganui-a-Kiwa

Tim reflects on how living in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa has shown him both inequities and the deep aroha and manaaki that create lifelong whānau connections.

“One of my friends was doing some education for early childhood teachers and she wanted somebody to come and talk about white privilege. And she goes, ‘who do I know that could do that? Oh Tim, sweet you can do it’.

I said to them, for me as non-Māori in this community, I can operate and I can do things, I could potentially do mahi and have no relationship or understanding, or need for understanding of things Māori. But my partner [who is Māori], she can’t live in this community and operate and work with no understanding of things Pākehā because that’s how most of it operates.

And then you start thinking about the things that happen in your life that track you through that path where you just navigate the system easier. And I can see it with my partner and I.

So she’s Māori, so the way that the system treats and interacts with her is different than the way the system treats and interacts with me.

It’s one of those things when you learn about something, then you start seeing it all the time and you can’t unsee it. So it’s always for me, something that I’m mindful of, especially in a community like ours. Just the experience of living here, it just exposes you to that understanding. But what comes with that I think is being open to that understanding. Cause there’s heaps of people who have lived here for more years than I have and still are not really interested in that space.

So yeah, for me that’s about respecting the place where you are. You can be welcomed into a whānau of this community very quickly, and that was my experience. Like I came here, didn’t know anybody. I met a good friend of mine and was embraced by his whānau and that made other connections and so on and so on. And over those 30 years, got some very close relationships, and relationships that feel like whānau.

I think that’s the nature of this community. You just feel part of something. You feel sort of aroha and manaaki I suppose, and that’s something I don’t know if I’ve felt anywhere else.”