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Credits:

Video and images:

DOP/Editor - Craig Gladding

Director/ Producer - Ka

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Credits:

Video and images:

DOP/Editor - Craig Gladding

Director/ Producer - Kadambari Raghukumar

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Credits:

Video and images:

DOP/Editor - Craig Gladding

Director/ Producer - Kadambari Raghukumar

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When Summer Xia and Annie Guo came to New Zealand, performing in front of a crowd was certainly nowhere on their model minority dreams.

Not taking themselves too seriously helped with their Kiwi orientation. Roasting friends, family and their new immigrant selves eventually lef them to the world of standup comedy. So in this second part to Accidental Comics, Annie Guo and Summer Xia speak to Kadambari Raghukumar about what humour is to them; how it manifests in their bilingual brains and when do jokes on our collective immigrant experience run out of steam?

They both take to the stage at the NZ International Comedy Festival this May, to share their jokes on navigating life as first-gen Chinese immigrants in New Zealand.

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Hearing Javier Murcia talk about his process as he breaks down each step of making from clay, a human figure, sounds like a class in anatomy. It's close.

In this episode of Here Now, Kadambari Raghukumar chats to the sculptor in his studio at Avalon Studios, Lower Hutt, about everything from Spain to Wellington, traversing his personal and artistic journey.

Between recording his 5 hour long full-render sessions for his online sculpting workshops, to casting hundreds of his signature figurative pieces, Javier Murcia has been up against time, and that’s nothing new. A scan around his studio and it’s easy to see how prolific he has been. Javier’s best known for figurative sculpture, a testimony to his acute understanding the human body and movement – from the poses to the proportion.

Murcia was born in Spain and moved to New Zealand to explore work in the film industry, ending up at Weta Studios for several years in an "amazing bubble" as he calls it.

Working with the human form though, goes back to an interest from his childhood, growing up surrounded by books on anatomy, thanks to a physiotherapist father. While it could seem figurative sculpting is more relatable the more realistic it is to the real human form, but that’s not the case Javier says – whether, distorted or keeping with reality, it’s a language unique to the maker.

Part of Javier's more recent exploration is a newer collection that plays with with enamel, sand, epoxy resin, and a diametric move away from his work with human form. He calls it MaTI – or Matter and Time - they're large, intriguing, circular pieces of illuminated and textured work - outcomes of his curiosity to see where, if pushed, his skills and artistic language can take him.

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The world’s awash with so many mixed messages about Jamaica but what makes the intrigue endure is this incessant stream of positivity, upfulness and the calibre of music that the country puts out.

One of Jamaica's reigning reggae icons Protoje performed at The Bowl stage at this year's WOMAD Aotearoa and Kadambari Raghukumar got to chat with him, pre-show. The conversation goes from chatting about his parents, politics, patties of course, to the idea of why most people nowadays may associate Jamaican music just dancehall.

"People here today they're gonna see me a reggae music artist from Jamaica, their perception of what Jamaican music is going to be also that and other stuff. I think it's just visibility. It's about doing the work, being on the ground, playing the shows, being active and spreading that energy globally. it's action, you know? I can do it by going out there and playing music and letting people see the type of songs we have to offer, which we do on a global scale."

Protoje along with other artists like Kabaka Pyramid, Lila Ike are all part of a group of artists emerging out of Jamaica responsible for spearheading what's been a roots reggae revival of sorts, focussed on conscious music.

"I think we all have some message and if we listen to each other, I'm sure we can decipher the message that all of us have. I just feel that I've been fortunate to have a platform and to share the thoughts that come up in my head on lonely nights and people get to hear it."

Born Oje Ken Ollivierre and raised in St Elizabath, Jamaica, both of Protoje’s parents were reggae and calypso singers - Lorna Bennett and Mike Ollivierre - but there's no sense of pressure when it comes to him carrying forward a legacy he said.

"I don't look at it like that. It's all a good cycle. I'm My parents live within me, I just do the music that I do. I'm privileged to work with my mum. She's my manager. So she gets a second time to live through music and she's excited."

Protoje's even keel attitude is hard to ignore, unaffected and unperturbed by the high energies of a festival like WOMAD.

"It's life sometimes. Your emotions up and down. For me, especially if I have a show. I'm chill, I'm easy. I save my energy for stage because it's real energy. You're giving your energy to people. So I try to just keep it balanced, as low key as possible."

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One of the hottest female reggae artists on the scene right now, born Jenelle Osbourne,Queen Omega, chats to Kadambari Raghukumar in this Here Now episode at WOMAD Aotearoa.

While the carnival in Trinidad And Tobago may have been and gone earlier in March, she came flying that Trinny flag high at the festival in Taranaki.

Born in San Fernando, Queen Omega's rise to reggae fame has been a slow burn of sorts. She's been performing all her life but for people who haven't quite followed her journey or aren't reggae fanatics as such, it could seem like that viral reel, the Little Lion Sound dub plate with the Dr Dre tune, made the world sit up and notice her.

"For me, it really did a great thing because a lot of people who don't listen to reggae get to know who Queen Omega is. I was grateful because it feels good to know that after all that years that I'm now getting some traction."

But beyond that one dub plate, Queen Omega, Queenie, she's also called fondly, has taken on this role of blazing a trail for female artists in reggae, performing alongside greats like Buju Banton, Don Carlos - people she grew up listening to.

"I give thanks for the pioneers before because if it wasn't for Bob Marley and all the legendary singers before, I grew up listening to Skatellites, Don Carlos, I grew up to listen to Burning Spear all the foundation artists. If it wasn't for them, I would not get the inspiration to do reggae.

"It's just brick upon brick, and I'm also leaving my legacy behind. Because when a lot of women see me now, then they would know we could do it.We don't have to show skin. We could perform."

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Congoloese diaspora in Auckland gathered at a rally last month to bring attention to ongoing conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo where since January this year alone, nearly 7000 people have been killed.

About the size of Western Europe, Democratic Republic of Congo – the DRC - has almost 72 % of the world’s coltan resources and a wealth of other mineral resources from gold to zinc.

Vying for control over the east’s vast mineral reserves are more than 100 armed groups.

Precious untapped minerals in Congolese soil have globalized impact of the conflict. Several multinational corporations are vested in the resources while Congolese minerals are an inextricable part of our own everyday lives from phones, batteries, electric cars.

For the past 30 years, DRC has been racked by multiple conflicts that have been called the First and Second Congo Wars that took seed in 1996 contested between ethnic and militant groups on the frontiers with Rwanda and Uganda, and the protracted Kivu conflict in the east, that’s now intensified.

Amongst all the armed groups fighting in the region, the most prominent is the M23 – whom the UN as well as the US and several other countries allege are backed by Rwanda – is violently taking control of the resource-rich territory, Kivu. It's a region nearly five times the size of Rwanda.

M23 are mostly led by ethnic Tutsis, who say they needed to take up arms to protect the rights of the minority group in the east of DRC.

Rwanda rejects allegations that it supports the group with arms and funding.

In this episode of Here Now, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to Congolese in Auckland on how the ongoing conflict in their homeland is affecting them.

The conversation features Redoland Tsounga, Eddy Mokonzi and Nyota.

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This week, we hear the personal reflections of 5 women who this past year have organized or participated in activism over crisis and conflict far from Aotearoa.

How has it personally affected them? What have they learned? And what comes next?

We hear from Aucklanders Fathima Sanussi and Dr Ala Farah from Sudan - where over 8 million are said to be displaced as the fighting between the Rapid Support Forces and the government army has continued for over a year now.

As the year comes to an end with Christmas cheer, the war in Gaza continues, as do the rallies in downtown Auckland, calling for an end to it. In this episode we talk to Israel-born Avigail Allan, Lebanon-born Eva Maria and Syrian-born Palestinian Rana Hamida, on their activism this past year.

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Finally getting to forge their futures on New Zealand soil is a long-awaited moment for so many would-be Kiwis at the citizenship ceremony. Ruwani Periera went to one to find out what it's all about.

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A couple of weeks ago delegates from around the world met at what was at the world's biggest nature protection conference, the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or simply, COP16.

New Zealand had a few representatives at the conference participating in these crucial discussions.

In this episode we feature Lisbon-born, Wellington-based Bruno Marquez, President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects and Manu Caddie, co-founder of Rua Bioscience.

While it naturally was a ten-day period dotted with a lot of music and culture, the Colombian government going all out with wanting to create an impression, the reality that was being discussed by delegates was a little less fun.

The planet faces an unprecedented crisis with habitats vanishing, and up to a million species face extinction and the lives and livelihoods of billions of people who depend on them are at threat.

The reason why being at COP16 is so critical for someone like Bruno Marquez is that landscape architecture goes well beyond aesthetics and covers nearly everything from urban settlement to biodiversity loss and social inequity - all topics that are under scrutiny here at COP16, with a focus on giving the platform to indigenous groups to secure their role in decision-making.

Manu Caddie known best for his work focussed on development for pharmaceuticals, natural health products and bio-derived composites, participated in dialogues with indigenous groups from Colombia around the push to recognize natural genetic resources and allocate funds for profits made from them, be that through biotech or pharmaceuticals.

After brutally lengthy debates, some of which ended in disarray around the lack of funding for conservation, COP16 also had some benchmark outcome - like the first ever agreement that recognises people of African descent and Indigenous Peoples as key drivers in conserving nature. 

The historic decision allows them to participate in future decisions on nature conservation and rules on the use of genetic information.

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Polish settlers Christchurch

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In Wellington this month and next, a series of public programmes mark the 50th year of the Dawn Raids, as part of efforts following the formal apology issued in 2021 by former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

In this episode of Here Now Kadambari Raghukumar talks to artist Liana Leiataua and Pacific historian Rachel Yates Pohulu around their thoughts and experiences of the craickdowns of the 70s that inform their work.

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A hundred years ago Haining and Frederick Streets in central Wellington were the heart of the capital's Chinese quarter. Today, all but a few fragments are gone. Wellington Chinese Historian Lynette Shum takes producer William Ray on a tour of the Wellington's long lost Chinatown.

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A cross-over episode with RNZ's money saving podcast, Thrift.

For more cost-cutting tips follow and listen to Thrift: www.rnz.co.nz/podcast/thrift

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Canterbury-based botanists Dr Julie Barcelona and Pieter Pelser met in the US and in the mid 2000s and it was a love, or obsession really for plants of tropical jungles that really brought them together – what ensued has been years of shared discoveries and adventures, and some peculiar romantic gestures.

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At a stadium in Auckland, close to a hundred people including a large number from the Brazilian community, have gathered to celebrate a Batizado, a graduation of sorts, of new capoeiristas. Maestros and instructors from Australia are here too, and coloured belts are being awarded to visibly excited capoeiristas.

For Rio de Janiero born Leandro Vasquez, this is the big day he's been helping organize for his capoeira school, Abada Capoeira, which he's been involved with for over a year as an instructor.

He talks to Kadambari Raghukumar in this episode about how this cultural treasure from his home country is becoming popular all the way here in New Zealand.

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Rashid Ansorali arrived in New Zealand as a teenager, fresh from fleeing his home in Myanmar. He's now secretary of the Burmese Rohingya Welfare Organisation and one of his roles is to help run events to bring the community together.

In this episode of Here Now, Liz Garton joins Rashid at an Eid celebration and discovers why these types of events are so important.

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As an indigenous Trinidadian with Lebanese, African and Indian roots, AUT's Dr Camille Nakhid has been a leading voice in studies on Aotearoa's multiculturalism and Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and constructs of identity and indigeneity.

In this second of our four-part series, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to Camille talks about championing the cause for Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) through her research and activism.

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In this four part series of conversations, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to four black women in Aotearoa New Zealand about their experiences across different lines of work from medicine to activism and academics.

Dr Carolyn Providence was born on the tiny Caribbean island of St Vincent with a population of roughly 100,000 people. Her pursuit of a career in medicine took her around the region, to the UK and the US before she finally arrived on the shores of New Zealand about ten years ago.

Carolyn was recruited as an International Medical Graduate from the UK, but the journey of settling into New Zealand wasn't an easy ride. After many years of reconciling those struggles, she joins Here Now in this epsidode to talk about what life has been like as a woman of colour moving to New Zealand to carve out a career in medicine.

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It's been quite the adventure for Nalini Singh who decided to give up a career in law in the early 2000s to become a romance writer, with what's now a worldwide cult-like following.

Fiji-born Auckland-based Nalini Singh is a best-selling author of complex paranormal romances set in deep shadowy worlds, supernatural love stories set in times of Armageddon, rife all at once with Archangels, telepaths and dark beings that change form.

Her first book Desert Warrior released in 2003 and since then her novels have made it to the New York Times and the USA Today bestsellers lists and some them can be found in about 20 languages. Nalini is now branching out into murder mysteries set in New Zealand's rural landscapes and her first thriller, Quiet in Her Bones, was a finalist in the Ngaio Marsh awards in 2022.

In this episode of Here Now, she chats with Kadambari Raghukumar on finding her creative reset through going between writing romance and mysteries.

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From 18 to 26 July at Auckland's Capitol Cinema, the African Film Festival New Zealand deep dives into cinema from across the continent. Boubacar Coulibaly has been part of the team for the past nine years and joins Here Now in this episode to talk about his favourite picks and why the festival is crucial for telling stories reflecting the complexity of the continent.

Some of the films to watch out for this festival are Mali 70, directed by Marcus Schmidt, Sira by Appolline Traore of Burkina Faso, and African Glory that tells the story about one of the world's least known historical accounts that was referred to as the "forbidden story" - a kingdom from ancient Mali whose people navigated the new world before Christopher Columbus.

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Zurkhaneh translates to "house of strength" in Persian and is a system of exercise based on combat using equipment that mimic weapons from centuries ago - from wooden clubs and maces, to shields and strips of metal that mimic the bow. But beyond strength and agility, at the center of Zurkhaneh is the practice of spiritual devotion and humility.

The art is said to date back over 2000 years ago to the Persian-Roman war that went on for nearly 600 years, making it a necessity to train men in combat to ensure generations ahead were prepared for war.

In New Zealand, thanks to a group of enthusiasts in Canterbury, Zurkhaneh is thriving and growing in popularity.

Amin Daneshwar, Esmail Fathi and Hossein Faraji spoke to Here Now is this episode.

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Starting life afresh in New Zealand as an Afghan refugee wasn't easy for Naeem Hashemi but within a month of arriving, he was dealt an added challenge - the amputation of his arm. Listen to his remarkable story of grit in this week's Here Now episode.

This month on Here Now, we are marking World Refugee Day with some special stories on remarkable journeys refugees undertake, and their stories of overcoming difficulties and rebuilding lives in New Zealand.

Refugees like Naeem Hashemi rely heavily on the support they receive from volunteers and community members in resettling in New Zealand.

The New Zealand Red Cross is one of six organisations that provide community settlement support to former refugees who have arrived in Aotearoa under the government quota system, which works jointly with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Different providers in New Zealand include Kāhui Tū Kaha, HMS Trust and the Safer Mid Canterbury Charitable Trust.

Refugees have no choice where they get resettled once they've left their homes.

New Zealand Red Cross Community Engagement Lead Aklilu Habteghiorghis said whatever the option is, they will accept it. "And once they come to New Zealand, most people love it here."

As former refugees like Naeem Hashemi begin a new life in New Zealand, the Red Cross will work with them for up to two years. Habteghiorghis said in the last decade, New Zealand has been settling people from more than 25 countries and of more than 50 different ethnicities.

"Each ethnicity, each nationality has a different need."

Cross-cultural workers help provide language support while they learn English, supporting their right to inclusion.

"Culture is another shock, barrier and struggle," Habteghiorghis said. "Imagine moving from city to city and how you can struggle. These people are moving from country to country; it's a whole new challenge."

Habteghiorghis pointed out some former refugees were living in large urban cities before moving to New Zealand and have to adjust to small towns here. Others have lived in refugee camps for years.

"It's a life totally different in big cities or towns. Some people who come from refugee camps can't turn on the heat pump as they have never used one before."

Overcoming challenges

The Red Cross has several engrained programmes for assisting with building a new life in New Zealand. This includes the pathway to settlement and pathway to employment. …

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In March 1999 a brutal war in Kosovo exploded into an international crisis as NATO commenced an air campaign against Yugoslavia.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia led by Slobodan Milošević and the Kosovo Liberation Army had been in full-out warfare for more than a year.

After the failure of peace talks, the NATO offensive was the international community's response to a new wave of ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces against Kosovar Albanians.

More than 850,000 Kosovars started to flee or were forced out of their homes, seeking safety in Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro, and some eventually in Aotearoa.

In this episode of Here Now, we look back at 25 years of life for Albanian refugees to New Zealand, featuring Osman and Julieta Lleshi and Ermal Fusha.

The Lleshis married in Kosovo, and look back fondly at their 50-year-long relationship's beginnings in what was then Yugoslavia.

A happy life took a different turn from 1989 when the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under Slobodan Milošević began to break up. The separation of the Balkan Peninsula into the nations we know today was anything but peaceful.

Many ethnic Albanians in Kosovo had long been engaged in nonviolent resistance against Yugoslavia. But that resistance took up arms after Milošević began revoking their rights to autonomy.

In June 1999 the NATO aerial intervention ended and Serbian and Yugoslav forces pulled out of Kosovo. By then, more than 800,000 Albanians had been displaced.

In 1999, 400 people from the region of the Balkans were received as refugees by New Zealand under a special arrangement, above the then-yearly quota of 750.

Listen to the full story on Here Now with the community commemorating that journey 25 years ago.

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Each year, New Zealand accepts about 1500 refugees in about seven intakes. In part one of the three-part series - what determines the makeup of these intakes and which countries our refugees come from?

All of June, we're sharing stories of the refugee experience in New Zealand to mark World Refugee Day later in the month.

As the crises around the world continue to rage in Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond, the world's seeing some of the largest number of both refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) face catastrophic conditions. How are refugees received by New Zealand get resettled into wider New Zealand across 13 regions from Auckland to Invercargill?

In this episode of Here Now, Kadambari Raghukumar is at Auckland's Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre, talking to Qemajl Murati, Head of Refugee Quota Programmes, Immigration NZ.

At the Refugee Resettlement Centre in Auckland, new arrivals are oriented to the country, and both kids and adults spend their days learning English and generally about life in New Zealand.

The Mulaji family from Democratic Republic of Congo are amongst those here who are about begin their new life very soon. 15 years ago they escaped civil war in DRC to go to South Africa. Diudonne Mulaji was a nurse with Medicin San Frontier in DRC when he had to flee after threats from rebels, and his wife Juliet left after rebels killed her first husband in DRC. The pair met years later in South Africa. Diudonne says he will soon be in Invercargill, where his kids will go to school and he starts a new job, and wants to make his way back to nursing eventually.

In 2022, the Government agreed to grant Special Ukraine Visas to people from Ukraine with family members in New Zealand. As of April this year 759 Special Ukraine Visa holders arrived in NZ. In March 2024, a new Ukraine Resident Visa category opened.

While war continues to displace thousands across Gaza and Sudan, New Zealand hasn't put any special scheme in place to accept refugees from either place as yet.

Immigration NZ says that only Palestinians who are also citizens of a third country, and their immediate family members are currently being granted exit permits to leave Gaza. The New Zealand Embassy in Cairo continues to petition the Israeli and Egyptian governments for valid New Zealand visa holders to be permitted to leave Gaza. …

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Iceeland and Aotearoa - are they twins? Two nations separated at birth? Well, that's the impression you might get from reading travel blogs about our two countries. And true, there are some remarkable similarities. Mountains, snow, fjords, hot pools, geysers, a small population and mind-blowing natural beauty.

Phil Vine decided to take the matter up with two Iceland women, Bjorg and Hera Hjartadóttir, who've made their homes in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Despite the geographical doppelgängers there are some pretty well-defined cultural differences between Iceland and New Zealand.

Icelanders eat rotten shark, drink Black Death and put something unmentionable in their mashed potatoes.

At Christmas time there are 13 Bad Santa's, one of whom steals your sausages. And they have a pretty unique attitude towards weekend drinking.

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The conflict in Sudan has caused the forced displacement of over 8 million people and over 15,000 have been killed in fighting across the country. While the world remains focussed on Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan is on the brink of hunger.

In this episode Kadambari Raghukumar speaks to Sudanese-American rapper and producer Oddisee on how the war in Sudan has impacted his family members living there and what he hopes for the country.

Also featuring in this episode are Auckland-based Dr Ala Farah and Leena Kheir who helped put together Yala for Sudan - an art exhibition featuring the photography of Dubai-based Sudanese photographer Ala Kheir.

Exactly a year ago, Here Now ran this story after fighting broke out in Khartoum between two factions of the military government - the army or SAF and the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. It featured conversations with diaspora members like Dr Ala Farah and Dr Reem Abbas whose family members were amongst many thousands who started fleeing the main cities, hoping to find safety away from the seats of power to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Port Sudan. In this episode we follow up on how Dr Ala's family has been faring.

Here Now contacted Immigration New Zealand to find out if refugee visa pathways are being planned for family members of Sudanese-New Zealanders in Sudan. Immigration Policy Manager Sam Foley said "at this stage there are no plans to create a special humanitarian visa pathway for people from Sudan and Decisions on whether to create a pathway would need to be made by Cabinet."

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Perched on a hill in West Auckland, BirdCare Aotearoa receives and treats nearly 6000 birds every year - native and non-native species.

Of late, the talent BirdCare has been attracting has been increasingly international - from Chile, to South Africa and the UK. In this episode of Here Now, we're looking into what their experience has been like when it comes to working hands-on with animals in New Zealand.

BirdCare's work with Cook's Petrels featured in an episode of Our Changing World last year.

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At the Takanini Sikh temple where an intense Kabaddi match is underway, the teams are tussling it out one final time after six weeks of playing matches all around the country.

The stands behind the temple are filling up, samosas and chai are being served up generously and the passion's running high. It's bit of a spectacle this game in action - a lot of tussling, wrestling, bare-bodied brawn, speed and serious technique is in play.

International promoters are keeping a close an eye on New Zealand, keen to pick up players for the global circuit after watching NZ matches online. For promoters like Kantha Dhaliwal, this is ideal and makes New Zealand the perfect launching pad for new players' careers.

Kabaddi is a bit like bullrush, and players here are proudly calling it 'the hyper on rugby'.

It originally was played on a dirt ground but once it caught on as a sport in countries like the UK and the US within the Punjabi diaspora it's played on grass. There are several variations of the game, indoor on a rectangular court, outdoor on a circular field. There's also the national style versus Punjab style, which is what's underway here in Takanini.

This kabaddi season comes to an end in NZ with this last tournament in Takanini while the second season begins roughly in November.

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Football players from over 26 teams found solidarity through sport at the Football Fest as part of the annual World of Cultures event in Auckland's Walter Massey Park. For Hone Fowler, this is exactly what the game is all about - a shared language and an opportunity to express solidarity with each other. He says "whether you're from the middle of Africa or the middle of Central America, there's some connection, some relationship to the game. And it's about weaving all those connections and sharing that love of the game together here."

Hone has been helping organize the Football Fest for a few years now and his love for the game took him to Gaza over 10 years ago. Manukau City United, his club, has a twinning agreement with the Al Ali footballl club in Nuseirat, Refugee Camp, Gaza. He says "we've had a long standing relationship for over 12 years now with the club, and we have annual fundraising efforts and opportunities to share some of the stories and realities..and football has helped facilitate that connection."

Nuseirat Camp is a refugee camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip, which has been left heavily damaged in the Israel-Hamas war. About 85,000 refugees lived here up until 2023. One of his most cherished memories of his time in Gaza was seeing football played in the alleys on the streets. "You could see in sense that it was a it was a key part of foundation of the kids enjoyment of life. And that was really special and can be related to in many different places around the world. And I think that's the power of the game" he says.

Najji Ghamri set up the Free Palestine team for the tournament today. He's a bit of a seasoned athlete and a love for the beautiful game has taken him a few places so far, particularly with Futsal.

A former refugee, Najji arrived in New Zealand as a seven year-old with his parents and grandparents, who had become refugees at the time of the Nakba in 1948.The Nakba, which translates to 'catastrophe' from Arabic, was the exodus of 1948 when at at least 750,000 Arabs were displaced from their homes.

Since coming to New Zealand with his family, Najji has been back to Palestine once and he longs to return. "The air, and the sea, you know the soil, you just have this weird feeling that you're at home and it's hard to describe. I've only felt it really once and I wish I can go back" he says. …

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In today's episode of Here Now we meet the couple behind the charity that has been helping new immigrants settle in New Zealand and cushion the culture shock.

The Migrant Heritage Trust, run by Prashant Belwalker and his wife Versha helps bridge the cultural gap for Indian diaspora living here by promoting Indian arts. They recently invited acclaimed classical musician, Pandit Anand Bhate, who toured the country.

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Sam Low was a shy 8-year-old when he arrived from Fiji to Auckland. After winning Masterchef 2022 and challenging cliched notions of Asian-inspired cooking, he's now a household name in Aotearoa.

In this episode of Here Now, the food creative and author of Modern Chinese takes a walk through a farmer's market with Kadambari Raghukumar.

He chats about what it means to let go of the idea of pursuing genius and mastery and instead lean into one's virtuosity.

Sam Low on RNZ:

• The Mixtape: Sam Low
• Sam Low on his new podcast Ate Ate Ate
• Sam Low's new cookbook Modern Chinese

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When Dave Phillips first came to the South Island it was a lack of limes for his rum punch that essentially set him on a journey to become a purveyor of all things critically Jamaican, hot sauce included.

In this episode of Here Now, he chats with Kadambari Raghukumar about how along the way he's also picked up the voluntary role of Honorary Consul of Jamaica in New Zealand - taking his role of representing his island, up several notches.

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In this episode of the podcast Kadambari Raghukumar goes behind the scenes at WOMAD to talk to two performers about pushing their craft and cultures through their music - DJ Lady Shaka of Pasikifa, Maori and Cape Verdian heritage and Pongo, Portugal-based Angolan kuduro singer.

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Tarik Rahim's 26 and he's been in Mount Maunganui for about a year now - mainly going between the surf, studios, making the the odd surfboard once in a while thanks to learning tricks from his shaper father, and working the odd job around the place.

Tarik's music traverses a few different areas too - pscyh, surf, tropical, punk - but experimental is how he'd like to call his music.

In this episode of music we're talking about his journey so far from working beside his father shaping boards in Gijón, Spain, to making a life in Mount Maunganui.

For a small town, the Mount is saturated with people from around the world, and people like Tarik are here for it. And with good reason - you could say that moving across continents is in his DNA considering his grandfather arrived from Lebanon to Brazil on a ship in the 1940s and his father Huicif Rahim took the family over to Spain chasing waves and a career in making boards.

From around the late 1800s to early 1900s, thousands of Lebanese arrived in Brazil, driven by economic reasons and the Ottoman empire. In fact they spread across South America, trading as merchants mainly and becoming an integral part of the fabric of society there.

His father, Huicif Rahim is a master shaper, who made his name in Brazil starting out in 1975, a very different time for shaping. While Tariq was born after Huicif moved to Spain, the family's Brazilian and Lebanese roots also continued to hold strong and deep. Music, was naturally, part of that whole mix.

Listen to the whole conversation recorded at Skip James' studio in Mount Maunganui, a friend who Tarik has been making music with these days.

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Auckland's Artham Dance Company are promising a revolution in their new show, Yānum - Fragments of Femininity.

Founded by choreographer and dancer Dr Bhuvana Kannan and creative producer Padma Akula, Artham offer a contemporary take on the Bharatanatyam classical dance tradition of southern India. Bharatanatyam is known for its formal postures, live music, verbal percussion and a precise language of hand gestures.

Bhuvana and Padma see all of it as ripe for reinvention, by blending ancient texts with modern storytelling techniques in what they say will be a "groundbreaking" performance

But innovating a 1500-year-old form isn't without its challenges. Bhuvana says she could stage Yānum in India, but with some restrictions.

"I definitely will be criticised more for bringing new movements into Bharatanatyam. The senior-most people, they probably will resist or criticise it.

"But I'm not into it. This is my chance and I'm a teacher now and I'm changing it."

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Luis Perez left Colombia with his family as a 10 year as refugees, and made it to New Zealand as a 19-year old, exactly 10 years ago. A chance to participate in the challenging 21-day Outward Bound Southern Cross programme this year came at a time when he was ready to reflect and consider his next steps in his resettlement journey.

Listen to the full conversation with Luis Perez, and Malisha Munidasa talking to Here Now from Anakiwa, Marlborough Sounds. The podcast also features Krishan Kumar who's the Community Development Partner at Outward Bound.

Each year the programme sees a cross-section of Kiwis participate, with the aim to foster a deeper understanding of both themselves and connection in their community. Through a rigorous, mobile phone-free 21 days spent in the region's bush, ocean and mountains, outdoor activity inspire participants to realize their full potential.

Anakiwa is a tiny seaside town in the Queen Charlotte Sounds and has been the base for Outward Bound for over 60 years now. The Southern Cross course in particular is about fostering diversity and a better understanding of it. The course is hosted in partnership with the Human Rights Commission and paid for by donors.

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In the first ever live podcast Here Now had a live audience at Q Theatre earlier this month as part of Podfest at Q.

This week Here Now features excerpts from the conversation with incredible thespian and mask enthusiast Pedro Ilgenfritz and Jacob Rajan.

Pedro Ilgenfritz went from counting to clowning in his career and has never looked back since. While studying accounting as a 20-year-old in his hometown in Brazil, Florianopolis, Pedro discovered acting, through the clown nose.

Krishnan's Dairy is the play with which it all began for Jacob Rajan and his creative partner Justin Lewis, brought together by the love of masks 25 years ago to set up Indian Ink, their company.

"When I first put that mask on, I can almost sense the audience lean forward. There's a childlike wonder that is kind of released in them. They're given that permission to imagine."

Kadambari Raghukumar featured both guests in previous episodes of the show. Here's Jacob on Krishnan's Dairy and his love for masked theatre. And you can listen to these Pedro from a previous episode here.

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Izadine Ahmed Abdallah was 13 and in a refugee camp in Chad when he learnt that his family had been offered a refugee placement in New Zealand, a country he'd never heard of.

Now 24, Izzy has found purpose and fulfilment by helping a new generation of displaced people find their feet and their voices at MIXIT, a dance and drama school in New Lynn, Auckland.

"The youth grow too fast, so they forget the youth side. So, my job, or our job, is making sure the youth don't lose their youth side, they can still grow slowly.

"And they can be as creative as they want."

Izzy knows what it's like to grow up quickly. At the age of 11 he left his family at the refugee camp where they were living, and walked to the neighbouring country of Cameroon.

His father had died from illness and Izzy couldn't bear to stay at the camp.

"He was like my best friend. When he passed away. I just didn't feel like being in that area. The best way was like me leaving the place or me committing suicide.

"Because I didn't feel like I belonged there. I didn't feel like I was alive. So, I decided to go to another place."

Not wanting to visit his deep sadness on his family, he took himself off for two years.

"And there's no form to communicate by the way, you know, they didn't know, my family don't know where I'm at. But I know where they are.

"I left when I was 11. I came back when I was 13."

When Izzy returned, he learned his family had been offered a refugee placement in New Zealand, a country he'd never heard of.

Touching down in Tāmaki Makaurau in the middle of the night, Izzy and his four siblings got something of a fright.

"So, we landed we had people coming and do a haka, we were surprised, because we've never seen this before.

"It was scary because we were kids at that time. We were hiding behind our mums. And we were like, what? What is this? What have we got ourselves into?"

New Zealand takes only 1500 refugees a year and according to the last census there are 231 Sudanese - mainly from the South. Izzy's family are the only people from Darfur in West Sudan.

So, does that make it a bit more difficult?

"The language that we speak is called Masalit, in this country, no one speaks it."

It wasn't until he got to New Zealand, Izzy says, that people pointed out the colour of his skin…

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This week on Here Now, we're continuing the conversation around cultural cliches - this time, with Mexico. What do Auckland-based Mexicans make of the stereotypes they're faced with here in New Zealand?

From tacos to mariachi, to tropes around fiery Latinas, it's all part of this episode of Here Now with Kadambari Raghukumar where she's talking to musicians Fidel Pimentel and Fernando Gonzales; and Auckland University's Diana Albarran Gonzalez.

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Not everything in Colombia ends and begins with salsa. In part two of our conversations around cultural stereotypes, Kadambari Raghukumar unpacks some of those classic Colombian cliches with Ana Ruiz and Marlon Ortiz.

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In this episode we're talking to Auckland-based filmmaker Shreya Bhagwat and theatre director Sananda Chatterjee about the classic old cliches around India, and how as diaspora creatives they draw or dispel them.

Listen to the full conversation on Here Now

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Shreya was born and raised in Mumbai and has been based in India for the past year, during which her film Mr Singh's Death made it to the Chicago South Asian Film Festival. She says about Mumbai "​it's ​a ​very ​layered ​city. ​You ​have ​all ​manner ​of ​people ​from ​all stations ​in ​life, ​whether ​it's ​class, ​whether ​it's ​language. ​So ​it's ​a ​real ​melting ​pot, which ​is ​an ​enriching ​and ​nurturing ​space ​for ​a ​storyteller."

Sananda Chatterjee spent her early years in Delhi and most recently co-directed The Little Clay Cart with Prayas Theatre. She says about tapping into stereotypes and cultural cliches "I think when somebody from looking in tries to do that, it becomes caricature and it becomes clownesque. It's my toolkit to use".

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In this episode, we're talking to DJs Banty and Nadine about their journeys to New Zealand to make a life for themselves that revolves around advocating for music from Africa.

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With its roots in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), the phrase 'staying woke' was born out of racial justice and popped up around 1938 as part of a song by a protest blues singer Lead Belly in which he refers to the need to 'stay woke' in the light of racially motivated threats and attacks. In his song Scottsbro Boys, he refers to nine Black teenagers and young men accused falsely of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931.

In this episode of Voices Kadambari Raghukumar looks at at how the word 'woke' has morphed, been coopted, and some will say appropriated even. How did 'woke' become this catchall word across different global movements now, and some times weaponized and used in a pejorative way?

Ira Munn joins us in the podcast to provide some background to the word's past and his understanding of it growing up in the 80s in the US. Ira's African American, a former history teacher and an entrepreneur now who's called NZ home for a few years.

Also joining the conversation is Romania born Andreea Calude, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Waikato.Calude along with her research students recently decided to look into the widespread social media use of the hashtag #WokeAF. She talks about the significance of 'intensifiers' in the English language and how some words go through an amount of 'semantic bleaching' taking on a broader meaning than it's origin and the use of novel structures, such as #WokeAF.

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This month, Prayas Theatre puts on their rendition of Mricchakatika, The Little Claycart, a Sanskrit play written in 5th century BC. We're talking to people behind the theatre production by Prayas.

Also in this episode, Kadambari talks to Thabani Gapara, music director of Jingle Beatz - a first-of-it's-kind Christmas concert with musicians and singers from the African diaspora, being held on December 9th in Auckland with Black Creatives Aotearoa.

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In this episode of Voices we talk to Siddharth Nambiar, an wildlife filmmaker based in Dunedin. Over the years he's gathered an impressive list of credits having worked on documentaries for broadcasters like National Geographic, Animal Planet, and Discovery.

In this podcast Sid shares his story of living in Aotearoa New Zealand thousands of miles away from his home in Kerala, India and building a successful career as a wildlife filmmaker, all the while navigating the challenges of being an immigrant from India.

"For a long time, I think I was in denial that racism exists in New Zealand and around where I work or whatever. I think just saying that makes me uncomfortable when it shouldn't. But there's subtle racism everywhere."

Over time Sid came to a realisation about racism.

"I think I have changed over the years. I've learned from my wife, Swaroopa, not to be apologetic when I ask people to pronounce my name right. This country's a work in progress, and I think I'm a work in progress."

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The Caribbean Southern Stars, a steelpan orchestra that used the Marist Rugby league clubrooms in Mt Albert as a rehearsal space and to store their instruments, have lost a crucial part of their cultural group to a fire last week.

The blaze entirely gutted the club rooms destroying all the band's instruments and equipment that had been stored there, along with club trophies and about a 100 years of history.

The Marist Saints rugby club was founded in 1919 and the clubrooms moved to Murray Hallberg park in Mt Albert in the 1970s. Over the years the association of this place grew beyond rugby for community members as a cultural space.

In this episode we chat to Camille Nakhid of AUT, founder of the steelpan orchestra The Caribbean Southern Stars about the history of steelpans in the Caribbean, and the band here in New Zealand that was set up back in 2005.

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In this episode we're meeting two people who moved to New Zealand in the pursuit of their love for winemaking. Aman Chowfin, vineyard manager at Villa Maria in Blenheim, began his journey working in tea estates at the foothills of the Himalayas.

We also feature Guillaume Thomas from France in this Voices episode. He arrived from Bordeaux to the Bay of Plenty in 2007 and now makes wines from his vineyard, Maison Noire.

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In these past few weeks across cities in New Zealand, thousands have been showing up to rallies and marches to condemn the bombings of civilians in Gaza and demand an immediate ceasefire.

In this episode we're talking to Ahmed Saadeh, national coordinator for Palestinians in New Zealand - who's been helping organize rallies and vigils across the country, Louis Frayse of the Jewish community in Auckland, and Wellington-based Marilyn Garson, cofounder of Alternative Jewish Voices.

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A vigil in Auckland being held in solidarity with the people of Gaza, October 2023

The 7 October attacks that killed 1400 Israelis, including 29 children, and saw more than 220 people taken hostage caused Israeli retaliation with nearly four weeks of intense bombardment of the Gaza strip.

2.3 million people live in Gaza, confined to a space that is 10 kilometres wide and 41km long. Gaza has been under an Israeli land, sea and air blockade since 2007.

Since the war began, more than 9000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. According to the charity Save the Children, more children have died in Gaza in this war so far, than in all conflicts around the world in each of the past four years.

Listen to the full podcast on Voices:

An excavator clearing rubble as people search for survivors and the bodies of victims in buildings destroyed during Israeli bombardment in Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip, on 25 October.

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Each year, the New Zealand social enterprise SpaceBase runs a research incubator to help explore space-related technologies for climate change.

In this episode of Voices, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to the co-founders of SpaceBase Eric Dahlstrom and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom.

Phillipines-born Emeline and US-born Eric recently received the KEA 'Friends of NZ award' for their contribution towards helping put New Zealand on the global map for space innovation.

Emeline and Eric moved to New Zealand a few months after the New Zealand Space Agency Space Agency was formed in 2016.

Since then, space research has been on an upward trend in Aotearoa. By the end of 2019, the industry was worth about $NZ1.6 billion.

Listen to the full conversation

Related:

Space entrepreneurship in Aotearoa

Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom explores whether asteroids will deliver humanity doom or salvation

Making space exploration sustainable

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The ACT Party intends to shut down demographic ministries, and this week on Voices we're out in the community talking to groups with concerns around how this policy could possibly impact them.

The Ministry for Ethnic Communities administers funding of about $4.2 million through the Ethnic Communities Development fund (ECDF), helping better economic outcomes for ethnic communities while improving inclusion into wider society.

Ethnic communities make up around 20% of New Zealand's population and several organizations across the country benefit from the ECDF. In 2021, nearly 310 community initiatives were funded. Formed in July 2021, the Ministry took the place of the Office of Ethnic Communities, employing many new staff. ACT Party's David Seymour sees demographic ministries like MEC as a waste of resources and the party proposes to reorient public services based more on equal opportunity as opposed to ethnicity; while attempting to cut government spending.

In this episode we speak to Minister for Diversity, Inclusion and Ethnic Communities, Priyanca Radhakrishnan, ACT's David Seymour, Sharron Ward, CEO of Refugees as Survivors and Rochana Sheward, COO of Belong Aotearoa on the impact the closing down of the Ministry could have on communities.

Listen to the full conversation on Voices:

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It takes a bit of grit to grow veges in the Christchurch winter, but a group of Fijian families are rising to the challenge via a University of Canterbury-led project.

The project, which has established 20 backyard vegetable gardens, is led by PhD student, Dr Esala Vakamacawai, a former medical professional in Fiji.

As a surgeon in the Pacific, Esala saw the impact of type 2 diabetes first-hand and says it's also present among indigenous Fijians in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Some of the risks associated with type 2 diabetes are lifestyle factors like exercise, diet and obesity that can be changed, he says.

Tending to backyard gardens produces both healthy produce and a form of exercise.

"Gardening is a way of making people move!"

One participant, Mosese Vilivilioyawa, has taken up the challenge of gardening, experimenting with capsicums, spring onions and even eggplant - and even built his own hothouse.

As well as enjoying the gardening work, he's also been training with his children, walking up hills and playing touch rugby.

"Learn new things and different kinds of foods, new lifestyle," Mosese told Voices.

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One of the portraits, likely taken between the 1910s and 1940s.

Sometime in 1998 Te Papa Museum in Wellington acquired a collection of 4000 glass plate negatives that had been found in a cupboard in what was once the central city's Cuba Photographic studios.

In this collection were about 95 images of early Indian immigrants to the city - portraits of men, women and some children.

Voices talks to Lalita Kasanji who's been on a mission with curator Stephanie Gibson to identify the people in the images and their descendants in the wider Indian community of Wellington.

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How it all began though was with the first port of call, 92-year-old Ruxmaniben, who is Kasanji's mother, and identified one of the men in these portraits - her husband.

Lalita Kasanji and her mother, Ruxmaniben Kasanji, of the Wellington Indian Association

"Stephanie had emailed this image, and it was of a gentleman in a white pinstripe jacket, and probably in his mid to late 20s. And she said do you know who this person might be? And I had a look and I thought, I wonder if it's my dad?"

Kasanji's not sure what made her think the image might be her father.

"Maybe I saw an image many years ago, and it kind of registered at the back of my mind. Or maybe there was something about his face that was just sort of familiar, because I don't ever remember my father looking like this. I was born when my dad was almost, I think 40, so he was bald by the time I remembered him.

"Anyway, I had it printed off and I showed it to mum a couple of days later. And I said, do you by chance know who this is? She was cooking and she had a quick look and said, 'that's your father'."

Kasanji has developed a questionnaire with Te Papa to try to identify the people captured in the images. The pictures are all digitised and available at the Te papa website, with the prompt: 'Is this your grandfather?'

Gibson hopes the questionnaire will give the ancestors of these men and women a better sense of their history.

"In the future, if the future generation want to explore their genealogy, it would be helpful for them, not only to know the names of these people but also where they came from."

The Wellington Indian Association turns 100 years in 2025, and by then Kasanji is pretty sure they'll get enough responses to help build the blocks to tell the stories behind these portraits…

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Floods in India claimed hundreds of lives this monsoon season, but an Indian expat in New Zealand is hoping his new invention will help bring the toll down.

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Massey doctoral graduate Areef Shaik came to Aotearoa in 2018 and has spent much of the past five years designing a new type of lifejacket for flood rescue workers at the Indian National Disaster Response Force.

Areef said the lifejackets currently used by rescuers in India were not up to the job.

"They just use one size of lifejacket, which doesn't fit everyone," he said.

"It doesn't really fit someone who is very small or very big."

The jackets were uncomfortable and difficult to move in, hampering rescuers while rowing, swimming and bending over.

"I put them on in my office and I couldn't even wear them for an hour. It was so uncomfortable," Areef said.

As part of his PhD thesis at Massey University in Wellington, Areef decided to create a new type of life jacket specifically for the conditions rescuers face in floods. The design he ultimately landed on was inspired by a traditional Indian garment.

"This idea I got from the Indian sari," Areef explained. "So, it doesn't have a centre front when you have buttons or zippers.

"It has the potential to spread across your body and fit to a wider range "

Areef said his designs were currently under evaluation by the Indian National Disaster Response Force.

He was in talks with a manufacturer to translate his design into something which could be mass-produced, he said.

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Researchers at Nelson's Cawthron Institute are working to help Marlborough's salmon industry survive the challenges of climate change.

This week Voices visited the institute's fin fish breeding lab, where large tubs contain salmon that are being monitored for growth and feeding habits. Sea water is pumped into these tubs from the ocean that's just a few metres outside the aquaculture park at Cawthron.

Jane Symonds is an expert in genetics and selective breeding, but working with fish wasn't exactly something she'd foreseen growing up in a landlocked part of the UK.

Listen to Voices

"I grew up in industrial Northern England in a mining town in Yorkshire, and never really saw the sea."

Once she came to Christchurch that all changed.

"I suddenly realised there's a whole beautiful world out there and having the sea on your doorstep was fantastic."

This started her on her path to genetics and aquaculture, she says.

Jane's been at Cawthron for about five years now. She's part of a global team of experts, with nearly 300 scientists from 35 different countries.

New Zealand's salmon industry in Marlborough is based on farming a cold-water species of salmon that's susceptible to even half a degree or one degree change in water temperature. It faces huge challenges as a result of climate change and global warming.

"We've been selecting for these traits like growth and product quality. How can we now look at what we need to do to make our stocks resilient to climate change? And so that's an important question as part of the industry adaptation to what's coming or what's happening now because they're already being impacted," says Jane.

To give a sense of the scale of that impact, last year was the first time New Zealand's King Salmon had to close some of its farms because of higher ocean temperatures.

That caused a net loss of $55.7 for the company in the 2022 financial year, with thousands of tons of fish having to be dumped in nearby Blenheim's landfill.

The team at Cawthron have set up a temperature challenge working with New Zealand King Salmon and their breeding program to test salmon.

Early results are promising, Jane says.

"There is a genetic component to temperature tolerance. It's got a good heritability you can breed from it."

The scientists test the salmon by warming water to a point that is sub-optimal for the salmon, she says…

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A growing, intergenerational community is taking shape at a Takaka cohousing cluster of houses.

The last few houses, including the common house, are being built in a race towards the finish line in the next few months. The ethos of the project is natural building and living in community.

Golden Bay is relatively sparsely populated, but the region's hard pressed for housing.

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About a third of the homes in the region are empty - they're holiday homes and people moving here for work or to live are struggling to find rentals or just to get into the property market.

Liv Scott and her husband Graeme moved to the area about 11 years ago and along with their business partner Simone Woodland started experimenting with designing tiny homes and natural builds.

This project began in 2020 after they got together with others to buy a 14-hectare property on which this cohousing cluster is now being developed.

The houses in this eco village aren't cheap at about $700,000 each. But cohousing does help with savings on living costs by sharing resources and shared spaces, like the planned permaculture gardens and a large common house.

There are 34 houses in the development, Liv tells Voices.

"It's an optimal number for cohousing. A good number of people; enough people to share the load of looking after the land, the veggie gardens and looking after the wider land and all of these different things with different working groups that have been set up.

"And it's enough people to do the work without being too many, when it comes to the community meeting so that things not things don't get stalled."

Co-housing in a modern context was adopted in the '70s in Denmark, and it's been catching on elsewhere in the world. One of the biggest pluses of living in community is really the social connection.

For Liv, she's found the ideal way of life after moving to Golden Bay from the UK with her husband.

"My husband had already fallen in love with New Zealand before I met him and had fallen in love with Golden Bay. So, when we met, he was like, I'm actually going to emigrate in New Zealand. And I was like, OK, that sounds fun. Let's go."

The idea of natural building is to reduce the amount of volatile organic (VOCs) that are in the materials or being released from the materials over time. So instead of concrete, the development is using hempcrete…

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A group of South American migrants spoke out recently about allegedly misleading job contracts they signed with the Auckland construction company Buildhub as part of New Zealand's Accredited Employers Work Visa (AEWV) scheme.

On Voices, Kadambari Gladding sits down for an exclusive interview with Buildhub's commercial administrator Ricardo Corona-Perez, and also speaks to some of the complainants.

Listen to the full episode

Related: Buildhub disputes claims migrant workers not given jobs, hours

People from Chile, Peru and Colombia who signed contracts with Buildhub in their home countries tell Voices that they were not given the jobs or number of work hours the company promised.

Several people from the group of families say they are desperate and struggling to make ends meet in Auckland. Many are living off favours and borrowed money to support themselves and their families, and their hopes of a new life in New Zealand have been completely shattered.

Some of the migrants have now been given the Migrant Exploitation Protection Visa (MEPV) based on their reports of being exploited by Buildhub. The MEPV gives them a period of six months to remain in New Zealand while their claims are being investigated.

Buildhub defends its position, saying it has complied with Immigration New Zealand's contractual terms and rules.

According to Ricardo Corona-Perez, 92% of its recruits have work and only 8% are not working - because they either resigned or were dismissed.

The Accredited Employers Work Visa is now being reviewed by Immigration New Zealand.

According to licensed immigration advisor Paul Janssen, while the visa is a smart idea, there hasn't been the due diligence required to ensure it is a robust scheme.

He says it will be tricky to discern between complainants who may be taking advantage of the system and those who may have been genuinely ripped off by accredited employers.

With several claims of immigrant worker exploitation coming to light in the past month, "this is not the image we want to put out", he says.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

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Supporting their families back home in Samoa is the main drive of a group of ten young men who have jumped at the chance to work at Ngai Tukairangi Orchard Trust, a multi-million dollar Maori owned Kiwifruit orchards in Tauranga.

Orchard Manager Andrew Wood will oversee the winter pruning and as the weather warms up the summer pruning and fruit thinning. He recognises the importance of providing work for RSE from the Pacific islands.

'We've got a policy where we try to employ from a village and work with just a village rather than individuals so we can see the village is gaining some good out of it...the first pay that one group had last year they sent it home and they brought weed eaters for the village" he says.

Fu'a Salistina Fisher is from Satapuala in Samoa and helps with pastoral care of the RSE workers, she lives in Matapihi and is married to local leader Anthony Fisher, the RSE programme is a way to connect with her family.

"Most of the boys here, they have arrived from my village are my relatives, its an honour...to have this opportunity...to have Ngai Tukairangi open it up to our island people, I'm over the moon"

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

After a three-year absence, the most powerful images from professional photojournalists across the globe are now showing in Auckland at the World Press Photo Exhibition.

In this episode of Voices, Justin Gregory speaks to the exhibition's curator Marika Cukrowski (who is visiting from Amsterdam) and one of the winning contestants, Egyptian photographer Mohamed Mahdy.

Listen here

Check out all of the award-winning images here.

Mohamed Mahdy's photo series Here, The Doors Don't Know Me is one of the standouts at this year's exhibition and won the Open Format Award.

In it, Mahdy combines found imagery with his own photographs of daily life in the small fishing village of Al Max, near Alexandria.

Two years ago, the Egyptian government began evicting people from their homes in Al Max and relocating them to housing several kilometres away from the canals, citing the risk of rising sea levels.

Already a third of the community has been relocated, but not all the residents believe these evictions are really necessary.

Mohamed says the name of his series - Here, The Doors Don't Know Me - was inspired by a conversation he had with a local woman.

The World Press Photo Exhibition is showing at Auckland's Smith and Caughey Building until 20 August.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Timpanist Steven Logan chats with Voices about his love for classical music, growing up in the US and joining the APO seven years ago.

Steven's always passionate about timpani but right now he's even more excited than usual due to the arrival of some new toys - a set of timpani from the Netherlands.

The timpani's roots go back to medieval infantries when it was used as a military percussion for drummers on horseback and since the late 1700s its magnificent sound has been a staple of the classical orchestra line-up.

The drums are made with a membrane of calf or goat skin stretched over the head, making them quite sensitive to humidity and heat which affects the pitch as a consequence.

When Kadambari Gladding visits, it's peak concert season and Steven has been playing with APO at the Town Hall almost every week.

Between rehearsals for the German opera Die Tote Stadt and Troy Kingi's Matariki performance, Steven chats about his love for classical music, growing up in the US and joining the APO seven years ago.

Listen to the full conversation with Steven Logan recorded at the Auckland Town Hall

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

United States forward Megan Rapinoe in action against Vietnam during -the FIFA World Cup match at Eden Park.

The sheer scale of the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023 presents opportunities on several levels, particularly in driving messages of sustainability and inclusion.

In this episode of Voices, FIFA WWC 2023 Head of Sustainability joins Kadambari Raghukumar to talk about what those look like when it comes to sport, and why they've become an increasing focus with FIFA.

US-born Sheila Nguyen started her sport journey as a 10-year-old in love with the 'beautiful game', forging her dad's signature to get into training. Her family arrived in the US as former refugees from Vietnam and when it came to Sheila's upbringing, veering from academics and piano into sport was near impossible.

Listen to the full conversation on this week's Voices episode

This year's FIFA World Cup will see more than 1.5 million attendees across New Zealand and Australia, with millions more watching the matches online.

The scale of the event presents opportunities beyond the game from a sustainability perspective.

Nguyen says it's a very interesting time right now.

"It is transitioning, you know the terms are transitioning, the way we think about ourselves and the world is transitioning - but also the dots are connecting. And that to me is really exciting, so that is a really foundational piece of this is that environmental health means the health of us and our wellbeing."

Since the FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil idea of football and sustainability has taken mainstage with the organisation.

Football and other sports have their own eco-systems whose impacts go way beyond just the match to affect social, environmental and human rights issues.

'I actually forged my parent's signature to play football'

Nguyen says even though she's not playing football now, when she was younger she was very good and on a "junior professional pathway".

"Football changed my life," she says.

"It got me outside, I was obese at the time of course and I had this sticker in my room that said 'I'm not fat I'm just short for my weight' but that changed my health profile, it changed my social profile, I was able to connect with people and be a mainstream and be outdoors."

Now her two loves are environmental sustainability and football, she says.

Nguyen's parents arrived in Massachusetts in the United States in the middle of winter as refugees from Vietnam…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Yoga - when does appreciation become appropriation?

In this two-part series, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to New Zealand practitioners about the commodification of ancient Indian practice.

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Megan Sety is a US-born yoga student and teacher and India-born Vinny Lohan is a wellness and social entrepreneur.

Over the past three years, the pair say their relationship with yoga and the New Zealand yoga community has seen an evolution of sorts.

"I just found many ways to rationalise that what I was doing was okay, to excuse my role in contributing to commercialisation of yoga."

In some ways, their journey has taken the form of efforts to find paths to newer, more nuanced ways of both practicing and sharing an ancient physical and spiritual practice.

What's needed, Sety and Lohan say, is a new path that avoids reducing the practice of yoga to just physical form while acknowledging its Indian roots and encouraging more inclusivity in classes.

"If you teach it, you really need to deeply, honour and respect all of it. That's, I think, where it's been problematic - where we cherry-pick in a way particularly that's attached to profit"

"Inner transformation and the science of consciousness - that is the power of yoga," Vinny says.

"Systems which have the ability to bring about a transformation carry a lot of power. The dilution we are seeing in yoga is actually a dismissal of indigenous power.

"Knowledge truly does belong to everyone. The problem that we are seeing is that certain people have taken that knowledge and the power that comes with it and held it. "

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Yoga - when does appreciation become appropriation?

In this two-part series, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to New Zealand practitioners about the commodification of ancient Indian practice.

FOLLOW Voices on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

"What it comes down to I guess culture, Indian culture in yoga, it's just that there's a lack of awareness. Because there's this view that yoga is only spiritual when people want it to be spiritual for them" - Reha Kumar

Auckland yoga teacher Reha Kumar is one of a group of NZ-based yoga practitioners and teachers advocating for a new approach within the local industry to protect against the practice being separated from its Indian roots, the misuse of iconography and a lack of inclusivity in studios and classes.

This conversation is already well underway in the American and UK yoga communities, says Auckland business consultant Melanie Sharma Barrow, who was born in the UK.

Here in Aotearoa, Melanie finds that there's a sense of people ignoring that elephant in the room.

"The problem lies - for me - when there is a certain ethnicity or ethnicities of women being gate-kept. I've actually never been to a yoga class where I have been taught by an Indian, or somebody of Indian descent, or somebody who has a strong awareness of the culture of yoga"- Melanie Sharma Barrow

In most yoga classes, the Indian roots of the practice are not acknowledged, Reha and Melania say, and it is reduced to a commercialised form of exercise.

Then there's the bandying-around of words like 'namaste' - often out of context - or the mispronunciation of āsanas (yoga poses). No dearth of parodies on that phenomenon all over the web.

"If you have perfected a pose perfectly to actually show that on social media, it looks great and you can do it, you can do words!" says Reha who finds the traditional asana names are often mispronounced and sometimes ignored altogether.

US-born former yoga teacher Megan Sety has been practicing and teaching yoga for a few years now.

In New Zealand, yoga instruction is too often neither inclusive or safe, she says.

"In countries outside of India, where there is a history of colonisation, the type of yoga that we are predominantly seeing and practising, is a very colonised version."

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

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In this Voices episode we look at the significance of celebrating 50 years of bilateral relations between Mexico and New Zealand. Mexico is one of New Zealand's most significant trading partners in the Americas and an event marking the five decade milestone was held at the parliament in June focussing on government, academic, and people-to-people connections.

The conversation in this Voices episode features Ambassador Alfredo Perez Bravo and Matthew O'Meagher, Director, Latin America Centre of Asia-Pacific Excellence who talk about why this relationship between the countries is of importance.

We also speak to Natalia Albert of The Opportunities Party(TOP). Mexico-born Natalia Albert is TOP's candidate for Wellington Central. Raised by a diplomat mother around the USA, Canada and Mexico, she's been closely connected with the Mexican and wider Latin American communities in Wellington since 2009.

In this episode she talks about the barriers she has seen the wider Latin American community and other immigrants face - both socially and professionally - from finding and staying in jobs, to making it to leadership positions.

Following her own tough experiences of job-hunting when she first arrived in New Zealand armed with a degree and international work experience, she decided to study political science aspiring to influence policy and decision-making that affects underrepresented communities. Natalia Albert makes her foray into politics this year.

Listen to the full episode of Voices:

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In this episode of Voices, UK born standup comic and screenwriter Jessica Karamjeet shares her story of coming to New Zealand and making her foray into comedy, while managing a chronic health condition.

…

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As house intensification is on the rise and measures to increase climate resilience become critical, what does the future of green spaces in New Zealand look like? In this episode of Voices we discuss how cultural and social contexts change they way we use, see and occupy public green spaces, how in New Zealand, does this affect the future of urban planning.

This episode features Mirjam Schindler, who grew up in Germany and is a lecturer in human geography at Victoria University, and Prof Matthew Bradbury Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, UNITEC.

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

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Vukan Cavor may have lived in New Zealand for almost thirty years, but he's still as connected as ever to his beloved country of Montenegro.

He's passionate about teaching Montenegrins about their history, helping to document the suffering that took place under Serbian occupation between 1918 to 1939.

It's the events in the early 1990s after the collapse of Yugoslavia that drove Vukan's Montenegrin family to flee to Aotearoa.

But it was a difficult transition: speaking no English and not having work, it was a time marked by depression and disappointment for his parents, but in that time the Cavors have managed to carve out a life, half a world away from where they were born.

Listen to their story on this week's Voices episode by Ruwani Perera:

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

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Across Xinjiang, the United Nations and human rights groups estimate that since 2017 more than a million Kazakhs and Uyghurs have been arbitrarily detained. China denies these accusations, saying the camps are voluntary vocational and de-radicalisation programmes.

In Auckland, Rizwangul NurMuhammed (Riz), from the Uyghur community, still hopes for news of her brother after he was arrested in 2017 in China.

Maiwulana was arrested on charges of separatism - charges Riz denies - and detained ever since in Xinjiang.

Rizwangul first featured in Voices in 2021.

In this episode of Voices, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to the people behind a new documentary called All Static and Noise.

Directed by David Novak and produced by Janice Englebert, the film makes its world premier in New Zealand on June 1 at the Doc Edge Festival.

This episode of Voices features the filmmakers, one of the protagonists, Jewher Ilham, and Rizwangul NurMuhammed. Jewher's father, Ilham Tohti has been held incommunicado since 2017 with no access to his family or lawyers.

FOLLOW Voices on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Professor Edwina Pio's latest academic manuscript, "Aotearoa & Bharat, Māori-Indian" honours historical connections between Maori and Indians as well as more recent families that are Maori-Indian.

In this episode of Voices we feature Matt Renata's family and Professor Pio, talking about how this history came to be an integral part of New Zealand's evolving social fabric.

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

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Briar Prastiti is the latest Composer-in-Residence at the New Zealand School of Music-Te Kōkī for 2023. The vocalist-composer draws deeply from her Greek background and in this episode of Voices, she talks from the Lilburn Residence in Wellington, about how being Greek-Kiwi shapes her world view -- and compositions.

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

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In March this year, Ibrahim Omer - a list MP since 2020 - was selected as Labour's candidate in Wellington Central at this year's election.

Arriving in New Zealand as a refugee in 2008, Ibrahim rose through the trade union movement and became first a list MP in 2020, before deciding to stand in Wellington Central. To win the nomination he had to beat a strong slate of competitors.

"It's going to be tough given all the candidates involved. But we're into it to win it - I have no plan B."

Up against Tamatha Paul of the Green Party, Scott Sheeran of National and Natalia Albert of Opportunities Party, if Ibrahim wins, he takes over from Grant Robertson who's held the seat since 2008. He calls Robertson his mentor and friend and they now share the electorate office in Wellington's Willis Street.

Ibrahim Omer talks to Kadambari Raghukumar in this episode of the Voices podcast, on his journey into politics so far and what the nomination means for him. Listen to the full conversation here:

Listen to the podcast free and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

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As the conflict in Sudan drives thousands of people to cross borders, members of the diaspora in New Zealand are trying their level best to help family members reach safety.

Since April 15 when fighting broke out between the army and the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, thousands have been fleeing the cities to reach safety.

Members of the Sudanese diaspora in New Zealand have been desperately trying to coordinate efforts to locate and relocate their family members to safety in Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Port Sudan. Many have been stuck for days either at the Egypt border or at Port Sudan hoping to get on a ship to Jeddah.

In this episode, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to Dr Reem Abbas, Dr Ala, Rahman Bashir and Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta about the conflict in Sudan.

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

A new music fund from NZ on Air will soon be open to Kiwi musicians and artists of pan-Asian descent.

In this episode of Voices, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to some of the arts practitioners who helped get the New Music Pan-Asian fund up and running.

This conversation features Yee Yang 'Square' Lee of SquareSums&Co, Swap Gomez of Yoko-Zuna, Clarissa Chai from the education programme Asians in Music, and Teresa Patterson, Head of Music at NZ on Air.

https://youtu.be/rEjpbrZ_cz8

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"There are many race-related issues New Zealand still needs to address and the Race Unity Speeches are one small part of that journey we need to be undertaking" - Māori cultural advocate Aperahama Hurihanganui.

Aperahama Hurihanganui

Each year, hundreds of high school students compete in New Zealand's Race Unity Speech Awards.

For many past winners, the awards have been a career springboard.

In this episode of Voices, three past winners talk about how the awards help young Kiwis find their voices.

Listen to the episode

This episode of Voices features 2022 Race Unity Speech Awards finalist Leo Mwape, 2015 winner Mira Karunanidhi and 2010 winner Aperahama Hurihanganui - the first national champion to deliver his speech entirely in te reo Māori.

https://youtu.be/zs92E50omoE

https://youtu.be/7eRwKYRhKeI

https://youtu.be/NxXi3NEBdDg

https://youtu.be/-tBH3rENbYI

Related:

Two young speakers named joint national champions at the 2022 Race Unity Speech Awards

Jess Jenkins - winner of the 2021 Race Unity Speech Awards

Zoha Shuaib - runner-up at the 2018 Race Unity Speech Awards

Takunda Muzondiwa - finalist at the 2019 Race Unity Speech Awards

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Malaysia-born Hweiling Ow is best known for her horror films that've got millions of hits online, and last week she turned her eye to theatre with Not Woman Enough which was directed by Sananda Chatterjee and presented by Proudly Asian Theatre (PAT).

The story revolves around three Asian women going through three distinct chapters of their lives, is in-your-face funny and confronting, starring Isla Mayo, Anjula Prakash, and Shervonne Grierson.

Listen to the full conversation with Hweiling Ow and Isla Mayo here on this week's Voices episode as they talk about what it means for them as Asian creatives to part of a vibrant theatre scene and why platforms like Proudly Asian Theatre are essential to the community.

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Nowroz Ali Atayee was a former interpreter for NZDF and when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, along with hundreds of others, Nowroz was waiting in limbo to leave the country on one of New Zealand's mercy flights.

Kadambari Raghukumar spoke to him in September 2021 in this episode, and this week, we catch up with him over a year after he finally arrived in New Zealand on an evacuation flight. He was joined by his siblings Sultan Ali, Marvah and Tamanna, a month later in late 2021.

In this episode we talk to him about what it's been like settling into New Zealand, and to his sisters about the ban on women's education imposed by the Taliban.

Listen to the full conversation here:

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

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In this episode of Voices, we meet with a delegation of Banaban people including elders, who travelled from their Pacific island of Rabi to attend a recent climate march and an art exhibition highlighting their story.

The community of Banaba were displaced from their homes to the Pacific island of Rabi in 1945 due to large scale destruction caused by extractive mining of phosphates by British Phosphate Company (BPC) of which New Zealand was part.

What does restoration and rehabilitation of their homeland of Banaba look like and how have they been campaigning for it? Listen to the full conversation in this episode:

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

A month on from Cyclone Gabrielle ripping through the north Island, volunteers in Hawkes Bay are busy doing whatever they can to chip in and help the community there back on its feet again.

In this episode of Voices, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to some of them on the ground - Tui Kanthavong, Rizwana Latiff of the Hawkes Bay Multicultural society and Harry Singh of Sri Ravidass temple in Hastings.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

In the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle and the flooding in February, we talk to policy adviser and professor Bruce Glavovic about his global career in critical disaster studies.

South Africa-born Glavovic is an advocate for the importance of looking at not just the geography but the human geography of disaster-prone regions - what are the root causes that make some communities more vulnerable than others in the face of a changing climate?

Listen to this week's Voices podcast episode in which Bruce Glavovic talks to Kadambari Raghukumar:

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Kartikay Lal came to New Zealand as a 15-year-old with a pre-existing obsession for all things mechanical - picking them apart, fixing them and learning how things work really. That became a love for robotics when he discovered electronics as a student. In this Voices episode, we speak to him about this journey that's seen him help students in Rotorua enter national and international robotics competitions.

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Dr Andreea Calude of Waikato University was born in Romania, is a polyglot and a linguist.

She has long been fascinated with te reo Maori and in her latest research, along with Dr Hemi Whaanga of Massey University, she looks at the significance of te reo loan words into New Zealand English in the world of young learners.

"Language is a vehicle, but if you take the wheels off, it's not going anywhere"

Dr Hemi Whaanga

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Gaia Dell'Arriccia left the south of France to research seabirds on Auckland's coastal islands.

When Kadambari Raghukumar visits, it's peak breeding season and the Italy-born scientist is busy gathering data about the birds' lives.

In this episode of Voices, Gaia tells how life a long way from the Med has been going.

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

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How do you create culturally respective design practices? How do you get past that 'imposter syndrome' when you feel the need to represent your cultural background through your aesthetic as a designer?

These are questions that are constants when you come from other cultures and work in an increasingly plural and diverse design world.

In this episode, Kadambari Raghukumar speaks to Kerry Ann Lee during the graduate show Exposure, about her views on decolonizing of design and the part young and upcoming designers play in the practice

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

The hyper-commercialization of Frida Kahlo's image has seen it being indiscriminately deployed in the form of those very controversial Barbies a few years ago, to socks, stationary, makeup, you name it - 'Fridamania' world over has been framed in this cult-like phenomenon.

While Fridamania took Kahlo's story and style to the world, it's also been responsible for a disassociation from hugely significant aspects of Kahlo's identity beyond just her personal style.

In this Voices episode, Mexico-born Dr Diana Albarran Gonzalez of Elam School of Art, shares her views on Fridamania, growing up in Mexico, culturally respectful practices for designers - and her practice of decolonizing design.

We need to understand design is political. It's more comfortable if you're in power, to talk about the 'universality of design'.

Dr Diana Albarran Gonzalez is a lecturer at Elam school of Art- and indigenous Mexican design and textiles are her thing.

Diana recently gave a talk at at a sold-out lecture series at Auckland Gallery's Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition that runs until January 2023. She sees the show as an opportunity for audiences to look at the symbolism and significance of Frida Kahlo beyond her pop icon, revolutionary chic status that's caused 'Fridamania' world over.

Diana's an advocate for the recognition of the contribution of unacknowledged indigenous weavers and artisans from Mexico and Guatemala - without whom the textiles and garments that Frida Kahlo famously wore, would never exist.

Through her talk, Diana shed light on the indigenous significance of the embroidered Huapils that Kahlo wore - the square blouses, her braids and the indigenous beliefs behind them, the Tehuana dresses, the rebozos - the square shawls, textiles she wore and even some motifs in her paintings.

"The hierarchies between art, design and craft that puts art above everyone.. so fine arts, it's European, and if it's indigenous from other countries - folk art? So who's making these these decisions, who's defining what is art?"

Diana's PhD was on the decolonizing of design, and even further, she speaks in this episode of "decoloniality" - which is in effect, a confrontation of and delinking from Eurocentrism, and an untangling, especially when it comes to knowledge systems, taught through the western lens of 'modernity'.

Listen to the full story…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

In February this year, 37-year old Colombian, Juliana Bonilla Herrera was violently murdered by her neighbour, a convicted rapist being rehabilitated in the flat next door.

In the days and months after the death, Juliana became a symbol for Latin American feminists in New Zealand - her brutal killing sparked gatherings, discussions and activism from within the community desperately seeking answers and responses to violence against women in New Zealand.

Last week, to mark the International Day for Elimination of Violence against Women, 25 November, a large group of Latin American women gathered near Auckland's Victoria Park.

Alejandra Perez, Alejandra Jaramillo and Juanita Rojas spoke to Kadambari Raghukumar about the issues their community faces and why they think New Zealand needs to recognize femicide.

Femicide in general terms refers to the killing of women because of their gender, at the hands of men, most often motivated by revenge or entitlement over women's lives and bodies.

In Latin America, femicide kills approximately 4000 women in each year but here in New Zealand it's difficult to estimate what that figure could be - it's not a category of its own.

According to the New Zealand Family Violence Death Review Committee, from 2008 to 2018 125 women were killed by their partners. Most are classified as homicide - a person killing another; but what activists like Alejandra want is a recognition of femicide.

Listen to the full interview on Voices this week:

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A marae is a place that embodies Māori culture and for new migrants in Tauranga a special pōwhiri hosted just for them was a chance to experience just that.

For the second year local iwi authority Te Rūnanga o Ngai Te Rangi and its leaders hosted the formal marae welcome ceremony and a lunchtime feast for around 300 migrants and their families at Whareroa marae.

Listen to the full story on Voices:

"A pōwhiri is the ultimate expression of manaakitanga towards new immigrants to New Zealand"

-Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon

Prathima Rao is the secretary of the community organisation Multi-Cultural Tauranga which comes under the umbrella of the Multi-Cultural Association - she moved here 20 years ago. The powhiri was also a chance for her to reflect on what her sense of belonging is after becoming a recent NZ citizen.

"It's not something we really think of, you can love two countries. We feel welcomed by everyone."

-Prathima Rao

Multi-Cultural Tauranga was established 30 years ago and in the early years it ran annual festivals. As more migrants move to the Bay of Plenty the organisation focused on services to help new migrants settle in.

According to the last census there are eighteen thousand pacific islanders that reside in the Bay of Plenty. Esther Martin, CEO of The Pacific Island Community Trust Bay of Plenty attended the powhiri too. She says part of theTrust's work is to connect migrants with the health services.

"We heavily support our season workers that come through and work out in the orchards. There's a huge Pasifika community or Kiribati mainly in Te Puke. (We support) their health needs, social needs, pretty much anything" she says.

Listen to the full story in this week's episode:

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

https://players.brightcove.net/6093072280001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6315930632112

Exactly 20 years ago this month, Vivio decided to make a life in New Zealand bringing with him his infectious love for Cuban dance.

In this episode Vivio looks back on growing up in Cuba in the 60s and 70s, studying dance and sharing his love for Rumba here in New Zealand.

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

In 2002, while on a last leg of a tour with a salsa company Vivio decided he wanted to stay teach dance here in New Zealand - a long way from his home in the easternmost province of Cuba where he lived in the 60s and early 70s until he was about 10. Guantanamo, known not just for the controversial US Navy base but is also a part of the island that's rich in natural beauty and indigenous culture.

With the constant American presence in Guantanamo, it was a cultural diet of American jazz, baseball, soul, and traditional Cuban music that Vivio grew up on in these parts.

Vivio got his big break and left the countryside in Guantanamo when he got selected to study at the prestigious National Arts School in Havana where he spent seven years before becoming a professional dancer.

Listen to this full story on this weeks Voices episode:

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Growing up in Skopje, Misko Cubrinovski witnessed not just the immediate impact a quake had on his city but how the incident shaped the place even years on from the incident.

In this Voices episode he talks to Kadambari Raghukumar about his geotechnical research as a civil engineer and how a journey that began in Macedonia, former Yugoslavia, led him to internationally recognised quake research from here in New Zealand.

Professor Cubrinovski is based at University of Canterbury and recently received the UC Research Medal for his contribution to quake research through geotechnical engineering.

"I was at the right time, the right place. from a professional perspective."

He's played a key role in research into the Christchurch earthquake of 2010, where he's been living for the past 17 years.

"All that knowledge that experience in preparation that I accumulated over my whole career, I was able to turn to fruition and to use it and to support New Zealand geotechnical engineers and the community as a whole."

Professor Cubrinovski's research focuses on soil liquefaction - the biggest cause of the damage after the tremors in Christchurch.

"Liquefaction is complex. What we are trying to establish is really what are the key factors that govern damage, what is causing the damage, because if we understand what is causing damage, then as engineers, we can mitigate those effects and we can reduce damage."

Listen to Misko Cubrinovski's conversation with Kadambari Raghukumar on seismology, former Yugoslavia and a lifetime's worth experiencing tremors.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Almost 40 percent of New Zealand households experience food insecurity, while 19 percent of children live in households that experience food insecurity.

On Voices today, how an award-winning Wellington non-profit feeds hundreds of people each week through its network of volunteers.

We're at St Peters Church this morning where EKTA, a non-religious non-profit founded by Malaysia-born Manjit Grewal, is busy setting up food stuff under its new programme called DYA.

EKTA took out the Supreme Award at Wellington Airport's Community Awards in September this year.

There's a long history of food banks right here at St Peters in central Wellington. The story of the Freestore is tied to the history of the "Soup Kitchen" of Wellington which began in 1901.

The Freestore cart still runs out of St Peters five days a week, a service that EKTA modeled itself to complement by serving on weekends.

"Some people who come here are quite old and get lonely. Seeing them connect with some younger people and talking with them is really moving."

-Krishmeeta Shan, volunteer

Every Saturday morning struggling families and individuals queue up at the back of the church to pick up ethnic groceries of all sorts.

Inside a room at the back, several tables are being laid out with food items - lentils, Asian veggies, spices, meat and a lot of fruit.

"One of the big challenges is to find volunteers who are prepared to give up time and to sacrifice their ability to make money, to spend time in the community.

In summer, winter and windy Wellington, if you're not seen, you are missed. That's a big challenge for EKTA"

-EKTA founder Manjit Grewal

The queue this morning seems to be growing in size and eagerness by the minute, and it's being pretty deftly managed by one of EKTA's main volunteers from it's inception - 25-year-old Krishmeeta Shan.

"It's all about our volunteers. They are always here every weekend and even in the week, although they have full time jobs they still make the time. It's amazing."

-Krishmeeta Shan

Some of the volunteers serve as translators and are keeping things moving this Saturday morning as the room echoes with Cantonese, Arabic and dialects of Hindi amongst others languages.

"It really shows how diverse Wellington actually is"

-Raj, volunteer

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

What are Pacific values and how can they be incorporated into the classroom to help Pacific students thrive?

Three Victoria University academics explore this question in their book Pacific educators speak - Valuing our values.

Listen to the full interview with Fuaepe Rimoni, Ali Glasgow, and Robin Averill

Tapasā - a new Ministry of Education framework for teachers of Pacific learners - is part of a recent drive to build better cross-cultural competencies into the New Zealand education system.

The framework incorporates nine Pacific Island values - but how do these look in a classroom?

In Pacific educators speak - Valuing our values, Fuaepe Rimoni, Ali Glasgow, and Robin Averill examine values like inclusion, service and respect by asking Pacific educators some insightful questions about their teaching experience.

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app

"How can we do a better job of preparing our student teachers so that they feel confident that they understand and know how to work really well with Pacific learners and their families and schools?" - Robin Averill, co-author "Pacific Educators speak - Valuing our Values

"We did have people in tears when they were sharing and sometimes, I think it was because that person was the only Pacific teacher in their school and carried a huge load for the Pacific community and Pacific children in that school of being the voice. And it was a bit of a release for some people." - Fuaepe Rimoni, co-author "Pacific Educators speak - Valuing our Values

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Caribbean-Kiwi playwright Estelle Chout's confronting and comedic new play Po' Boys and Oysters wrapped on a high last week.

Kadambari Raghukumar speaks to the cast about what it means to be black creatives in Aotearoa New Zealand.

From left to right - Layla Pitt, Estelle Chout and Sandra Zvenyika

Listen to Po' Boys and Oysters cast members Sandra Zvenyika, Layla Pitt and Estelle Chout on 'Voices'

Po' Boys and Oysters ran for two weeks of mostly sold-out shows at Auckland's Basement Theatre.

For it, Estelle Chout became the first Afro-Caribbean to be nominated for the Adam New Zealand Play Award.

The play is also the first New Zealand theatre piece about the experience of being black and queer in Aotearoa.

The characters in Po' Boys and Oysters are drawn from very real references - such as the cast's own families - which brings a raw authenticity to the play.

The script is packed with the distinct dynamics that play out in families when there are conflicting worldviews.

It shines a fierce yet comical light on the complex and nuanced diasporic experience and the determination to adopt a child.

"I could be sitting here and wait for a role for you know, a black woman with a Martinique accent - how is that gonna happen? That's never gonna happen. So you create your own opportunities" - Estelle Chout

"When you have that representation, like it changes everything. It changes how you view yourself, and how you kind of navigate the world. And I just feel like that's what New Zealand needs" - Layla Pitt

"It's just lovely to be able to just bring your whole self without thinking about how you look and whether that fits with the story or not" - Sandra Zvenyika

Po' Boys and Oysters was directed by Dione Joseph and made with the support of Black Creatives Aotearoa. It also features the actors Andrew Johnson and Jack Briden.

https://youtu.be/WIZjlcamCdk

Related:

Estelle Chout on Po' Boys and Oysters (Standing Room Only)

Estelle Chout on The Eternal Queers (Standing Room Only)

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

The World of Wearable Art Awards is back this year in Wellington.

What's it been like for the host of international designers who finally got to attend and show their designs after a two-year wait in limbo?

We meet Jayati Saraf, who won the overall winner of the International Design Award for her two creations Mocarabe and Neoru.

FOLLOW Voices on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Radio Public and iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

"The judges loved the shape of them, the volume she achieved and the clever use of colours. Something really fresh" says Kat Sprowell, head of competition at WOW, of Jayati's winning garments.

Jayati says the WOW competition is very popular amongst students at India's fashion design schools.

"In my college, there were 40 students in Delhi applying to enter WOW - it's really big, it's quite a thing there."

This year, WOW saw 88 finalist entries by 103 designers from 20 countries, many of whom applied with their entries in 2020.

"It's been 35 years but what's at the heart of it in terms of the relationships and the trust - that's the absolute magic and that hasn't changed," says Kat Sprowell.

Related:

World of Wearable Arts back on: 'Everyone is super amped'

Jacinda Ardern models at World of Wearable Arts award show

https://youtu.be/JRr16n8q3R8

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

What's it like representing Afghanistan in rugby, from here in New Zealand?

This week on Voices Kadambari Raghukumar talks to two players from the Afghan rugby team who returned home with a silver at the Asian Rugby Sevens championship in Indonesia - and to a massive welcome at Auckland airport in August.

For Bilal Slaimankhel, Mohammed Safi and their families, the medal is a welcome win after huge personal losses in the past few years.

Mohammed's father died in the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019.

"When I lost my dad, you know, I had no way of dealing with it. The opportunity to play for Afghanistan, it helped me so much. He would have truly been so proud - he loved Afghanistan so much."

For both their families, rugby has been instrumental in helping tackle some of their hardest moments.

Listen to their full interview on Voices

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

Bilal Slamankhel and his brothers got right into the sport in Auckland pretty soon after they arrived in New Zealand as refugees in 1994. It was their uncle who helped bring the family here - Dr Hashem, the founder of the Afghan Association and a well-loved community figure in Auckland. He also played a big part in nurturing the Slaimankhel brothers' love for rugby.

Dr Hashem died in a suicide bomb explosion in Kabul in 2018 while on holiday visiting family.

"If he saw us playing rugby now, I reckon he would have come with us, he would have been the on the sideline watching.

"Sport can really bring a lot of happiness to people that are going through difficult times. The sport has always been there for us."'

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

As New Zealand marks Mental Health Awareness Week, we talk to South Asian health advocates about the gaps and challenges they see in the community.

The stigma toward people with mental illnesses in New Zealand is a huge cause for concern.

98.7% of Asians believe the public holds negative stereotypes against people with mental illnesses, while 47.9% of Asians cannot access language and/or cultural support regularly when they use health services.

Fiji-born Shirleen Prasad is a counsellor at Asian Family Services - an NGO service provider for Asians who have been affected by mental health issues and gambling harm.

Also joining us on the podcast is Jennifer Janif, an Auckland-based and Fii-born community development advocate.

Shirleen and Jennifer speak on Voices about the several challenges specifically South Asians face when it comes to dealing with mental health and reaching out for help - including stigma, language and cultural barriers.

Listen to the full episode here

FOLLOW Voices on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Where to get help:

Need to Talk? Free call or text 1737 any time to speak to a trained counsellor, for any reason.

Lifeline: 0800 543 354 or text HELP to 4357

Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 / 0508 TAUTOKO (24/7). This is a service for people who may be thinking about suicide, or those who are concerned about family or friends.

Depression Helpline: 0800 111 757 (24/7) or text 4202

Samaritans: 0800 726 666 (24/7)

Youthline: 0800 376 633 (24/7) or free text 234 (8am-12am), or email talk@youthline.co.nz

What's Up: online chat (3pm-10pm) or 0800 WHATSUP / 0800 9428 787 helpline (12pm-10pm weekdays, 3pm-11pm weekends)

Asian Family Services: 0800 862 342 Monday to Friday 9am to 8pm or text 832 Monday to Friday 9am - 5pm. Languages spoken: Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and English.

Rural Support Trust Helpline: 0800 787 254

Healthline: 0800 611 116

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Wellington poet Ya-Wen Ho tells Voices why a collection of lead typefaces is so precious to the New Zealand Chinese community.

https://players.brightcove.net/6093072280001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6312284680112

New Zealand's longest surviving Chinese type collection is made of over 300,000 metal typefaces, has about nine font variations and about three character typefaces.

Ya-Wen Ho, poet and a researcher at Victoria University's Wai-te-ata Press, has been working on re-organizing, cleaning and transferring this collection from their cases that have suffered the damage of time and weather.

"We very much believe that the legacy of this collection lives on through use."

Listen to the full podcast:

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

Between the 1950s and 70s, the letter collection was used to print the Growers Journal - the longest-running Chinese Language publication in New Zealand.

The collection was rediscovered in a Pukekohe onion-packing shed in 2007.

Eventually, in 2016, Victoria University was given the guardianship of the collection in agreement with the Dominion Federation of New Zealand Chinese commercial growers.

This month, Dr Sydney Shep, a Reader in book history and the printing press, and Ya-Wen plan to host "The Voice of Kai-Shu - A Typographic Journey" at Wai-te-ata Press - an exhibition supported by the Ministry of Culture in Taiwan.

The exhibition coincides with Chinese Language Week and celebrates the Kaishu or "regular" script, adopted widely across Taiwan in the early twentieth century as the de facto face of Taiwan and its people.

It's also the script that the Growers Journal was printed in.

"I think it's very hard to ever imagine that you would spend your time working on a Chinese language letterpress collection in New Zealand," says Ya-Wen of her involvement.

Founded by editor Dan Chan, the journal and covered things like market news, cultivation techniques, articles and ads and literary pieces as well, all printed in full-form Chinese characters.

"I have a particular connection to full form because I was born in Taipei and all of my Chinese language learning has been through full form."

"When I saw this, it was there was a real sense of like, oh, a little piece of home very far away from home. How do I connect to this?"

To use these again, the whole collection needs to be cleaned of decades of debris and dust. It's not just all really intricate, but can be super heavy being made of lead. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Could the answer to many of the world's problems - be food?

Tracy Berno, Professor of Food Studies at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and New Calendonian chef Gaby Levionnois believes so.

"We've got a lot of systems problems on the planet and a lot of those have at their source contemporary industrialised food systems," said Berno, "So if food is a big part of the problem, then food must be the answer as well".

Listen to Voices - Tracy Berno and Gaby Levionnois finding solutions to big problems one bite at a time.

Tracy and Gaby hosted an event at AUT's Culinary Arts and Gastronomy Winter Series, called 'Not Just Another Coconut: The Work of the Pacific Food Lab' where they discussed the work of this organisation and its goals for improving the health of eaters and the world in general.

Tracy and Gaby whipped up a fish kokoda, marinated venison and a duck dish as they discussed things like beneficial recipes and being more conscious about what we are eating.

"It's about feeling good and food making you feel good, as well as engaging with food and food systems that are healthy for the planet," said Berno.

Levionnois adds, "We take it for granted now. We have food on the table so easily, but if we run out of it, then you will start thinking more about it. But the goal is for everyone to understand what food is about and not take it for granted."

He said we learn to count, talk, write and read, but we have not been taught how to eat.

The work of the Pacific Food Lab is about doing all of that.

Before lockdown, Tracy worked with students at AUT's south campus to plant and tend their own garden beds.

"We had a big harvest dinner where we brought I think was eight students into the kitchen, only one of whom had ever cooked before and we catered a meal for 90 people," she said.

"The buzz, the look of sheer accomplishment on the students faces was just incredible. And it's all about that engaging with that that food system and the food and really getting a lot of enjoyment about it and using it as a tool to bring people together as well."

Listen free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google Podcasts or any good podcast app.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

International education has been forever changed by the pandemic.

Now that borders have fully reopened, we hear from two students about their experiences and find out what the future looks like for the sector.

Listen to the story

When Akira Myojo first arrived in Christchurch as an international student, she was just 14 years old and couldn't speak a word of English.

Two weeks later, New Zealand's borders closed for the Covid lockdowns, forcing her to remain in the country without visiting her family in Japan if she were to continue her education.

Now, New Zealand's borders are opened once again, and international students from across the globe are starting to trickle in.

The 2023 academic year looks set to bring in the tens of thousands of students that New Zealand had attracted in pre-pandemic years.

Heather Knox, Manager of the English Language School at Ara Institute of Canterbury, says with the return of international students, educational institutions are busy rebuilding the international education sector.

She says it's not only the academic side, but "the pastoral support, the non-academic support that we provide, the accommodation provision - there's a whole infrastructure which supports the international student experience, and all of it needs to be scaled up. "

Himasha Gunasekara, like Akira, found herself unable to return to her native Sri Lanka during the pandemic while continuing her PhD studies.

But having the support of the university and its community was vital to her well-being - especially when she and her husband discovered they were pregnant with their first child not long after the borders shut.

Knox says the international education sector will have a greater focus on mental health and pastoral care issues, and that rebuilding the sector is not about recreating the same business as we had in 2019.

"Now," she says, "we have different products to offer, we have different organisational strategies to contribute to, and our partners are looking for different programmes. It's like two old friends who are meeting again, after two or three years apart. I've changed, and they've changed and we still have that friendship, we still have that business relationship. But actually, we're coming together as quite different people."

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

One of the main human-made noises that can permanently or temporarily injury marine mammal hearing is the sound of piling - when ports are being constructed and piles are being hammered into the sea-bed.

The impact of coastal development on marine mammals' habitats and migration, and specifically the impact of port development around New Zealand is the focus of marine ecologist, Deanna Clement's research.

Deanna, originally from Missouri, is based in Nelson with The Cawthron institute which celebrates its centenary this year. She spoke with Kadambari Raghukumar in this week's episode, on her recent work.

Listen to the full interview:

Deanna and her peers have been studying whale migration paths on the east coast of South Island and port construction noise around New Zealand through passive underwater acoustics.

Listen to the full interview:

The implications of this sort of research are pretty far-reaching - from conservation to tourism to helping open water aquaculture farms avoid accidents involving the animals getting entangled while they migrate or forage.

Listen to the full interview:

This summer her team plans to trial their latest remote sensing tool for studying marine mammals - digital recording tags, to work with Fisheries and Department of Conservation to monitor our endangered Maui and Hector dolphins.

The results of the research by Deanne and her peers on port construction noise is expected to be released by Cawthron Institute in the coming months.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Ten years since Margaret Mahy died in July 2012, her body of writing continues to inspire, and intrigue.

Dr Yuanyuan Liang's niche is analysing the trauma aspect of characters in Mahy's stories. It was a long-held fascination with young adult literature brought Dr Liang from Beijing to Wellington five years ago, aside from one other, big drawcard.

Listen to the full interview with Yuanyuan Liang on this episode of Voices:

Dr Liang earlier this year just finished her PhD on the subject -"Tribulations and Trials: Trauma in Margaret Mahy's Youth Adult Novels" and happens to be the most wide-ranging academic study to acknowledge and analyse the trauma aspect of characters in Mahy's writing.

The quality of trauma is its unspeakability" she says.

Siting other examples of literary studies elsewhere in the world that examine trauma in other young adult literature like Harry Potter or Anne Frank, Liang says looking at this aspect in Mahy's work is a first.

"I sort of just picked it up, it's hard to explain why."

Raised in Beijing, Yuanyuan Liang has always been a fan of literature - both Chinese and English. "But it all started with Oscar Wilde" she says, whose work she became fascinated with as a Masters' student in China.

Liang examines the depth and complexity of Mahy's treatment of her protagonists' trauma - from bereavement to bullying, to sibling rivalry or broken families. Dr Liang writes in her study about Mahy's fantastical stories and imaginative ways in which those key traumas aren't put in the foreground but are back-stories in another time.

Listen to the full conversation on Voices:

She now looks forward to seeing where her study leads others interested in Mahy's work, the complexity of her characters and most of all, the author's deft and delicate handling of the magnitude of trauma.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

What happens when a Romanian and British academic meet in New Zealand? They co-author a book about linguistics of course.

Bucharest-born Dr Andreea Calude and Dr Laurie Bauer released their book The Mysteries of the English Grammar earlier this year, hoping to shed light on riddles beyond just misplaced apostrophes and prepositions, but also on why there's no "right answer" often.

In this episode of Voices, they speak to Kadambari Raghukumar on the book and how moving to New Zealand shaped their lives' work in linguistics.

English is the most described of all languages - there is so much research into its complexities that it's surprising that so much ambiguity still persists - what is good grammar or correct form?

"All language evolves and there is no one right answer" says Laurie.

But what is the difference between extending our language and actually making a mistake?

The book acknowledges the learner's idea of language hell beyond just misplaced apostrophes and prepositions, but also the way language evolves in changing societies.

Listen to the full in this week's episode of Voices

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Cutting his dreads off marked the start of this project for Fiji-born Daren Kamali.

Working with Joana Monolagi, heritage Fiji artist based in Auckand, Daren collected his hair over a period of 25 years, to eventually create an Ulu cavu, a traditional Fijian headress - a wig.

Listen to the full interview on Voices where Daren Kamali, joined by Ole Maiava and Joana Monolagi talk about the ancient practice and the role museums in revitalizing it.

Joana Monolagi kept his hair with her for about 13 months before weaving it together in the traditional way - with Vau and Magi Magi - hibiscus fibre and coconut coir.

As a performing poet and artist, for Daren, a book seemed to also be a natural output when this project began- photographs and poetry written in connection with handmade masks and the sacredness of human hair across pacific cultures.

With Ole Maiava's images, the pair continue to deep-dive nto the research and revitalizing of the Ulumate wig tradition.

The Ulumate may come back to Auckland Museum but for now Daren and Ole dream of taking it back to Fiji first, bringing it all full circle in many ways.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

A Canterbury refugee centre is starting up its own driving programme, taught in the native language of migrants.

It's another step towards breaking down some of the barriers to getting a drivers licence.

It comes as the Government has announced Budget funding of 86.5 million dollars to help 64,000 people get behind the wheel.

In this Voices episode, Katy Gosset finds out how that funding could trickle down and meets some migrants whose driving journey has just begun.

Amanrir Singh Vohra came to New Zealand from India looking for work.

For Egyptian couple, Abdalla Elenani and Safaa Ismail, it was to support a relative injured in the 2019 mosque attacks.

And Syrian refugees Ahmad Hrab and Fatima Alloch came via Lebanon to find education and a better life for their six children.

What has brought them together are these driving theory lessons at the Canterbury Refugee Resettlement and Resource Centre.

Rana Alkhalely has been teaching them the give way rules, switching effortlessly between English and Arabic.

She says some migrants have tried doing the theory elsewhere but struggle unless the classes are in their own language.

The driving course is a long-held dream of Ahmed Tani, a former Somalian refugee who set up the centre in 2004.

Tani understands the barriers refugees face and the ''holes'' in the system.

He belives that helping new arrivals to drive and be independent will allow them to contribute to society.

''That's really the bigger picture and I believe that everyone, if they actually contribute, they will be dignified and they will be proud to contribute to the economy of the country."

The Ministry of Social Development currently runs 57 driver's licence support programmes around the country. Recent Budget funding of $86.5m will extend that.

Meanwhile the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment also funds the Open Road programme which relies on help from volunteers to mentor students.

While it is only available to former refugees, Operations Lead, Stefanie O'Brien, says it can make a big difference to people's lives.

"Its always so rewarding and exciting to see the smile on people's faces and the sense of achievment."

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Fighting for a future and his freedom, led 23-year-old former refugee Ali Mashal to boxing.

He dreams of representing NZ one day in the feather or lightweight class. The past two years have been a long and hard hiatus for him after a serious injury to his hand in a fight in 2020. These days, he's slowly training his way back to full fitness.

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Ali is from the long-persecuted Hazara community of Afghanistan. At a time where even going to school became dangerous, Ali was brought up home-schooled by his father, a teacher in the central province of Maidan Wardak. It's a region listed a high risk, with the Taliban active in most of its districts.

He left his town as a 15 year-old and travelled to India, onto Malaysia and eventually to Indonesia where he spent nearly five years in limbo a refugee camp. That's where he started boxing with a friend who knew a thing or two about Muay Thai and boxing - they became his route to a release.

Listen to Ali's full story on this week's Voices:

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Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Scientist Dr Norman Ragg has spent the past 25 years working with abalone after a passion for paua brought him to New Zealand - but not before collecting both samples and experiences from South London to Colombia, Israel and the States.

Norman arrived in New Zealand exactly 25 years ago on Matariki. In today's Voices podcast he reflects on his work in shellfish physiology over the years and the importance of this taonga species from indigenous points of view.

Paua are considered living fossils and our marine taonga. Essentially a mollusc, but unlike a snail that has a single aperture in the shell, the line of holes on a paua's shell indicate that they've been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

Although abalone are resilient they're still susceptible to the effects of a rapidly changing climate like all other shellfish species.

Norman's best known for developing a heart monitor for abalone to help monitor their stress receptors.

As water temperatures rise and directly affect fisheries and the ecology here in New Zealand, research that scientists like Norman do, gets even more important.

Even slight increases in carbon dioxide levels and temperature, both impacts of climate change and intensive agriculture, can affect how paua perform in their marine environment.

Listen to the full interview here:

Nornams ECG for the paua to monitor how they respond to stressors was developed in 2017 and is still very relevant.

The data it provides can give industry crucial insights on how the shellfish react to the increase in carbon dioxide levels and temperature and adapt their farming practices accordingly.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

"When I first put that mask on, I can almost sense the audience lean forward. There's a childlike wonder that is kind of released in them. They're given that permission to imagine."

It's been a quarter century since Jacob Rajan first wore the masks of Gobi and Zina Krishnan, the characters in his play Krishnan's Dairy.

The play is on its final run around the country and in this Voices episode, Kadambari Raghukumar talks to Jacob Rajan about the entire journey.

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Krishnan's Dairy is the play with which it all began for Jacob Rajan and his creative partner Justin Lewis, brought together by the love of masks 25 years ago to set up Indian Ink, their company.

The play is centred around a south Indian couple who run a dairy, and interwoven within that is the story of the Taj Mahal and its maker - Emperor Shah Jahan.

In the play, Jacob goes between characters of Zina and Gobi - basically one mask off and another one on, as the couple navigates challenges of their new life and their new love after an arranged marriage brings them to New Zealand in 1997.

Listen to the full interview in this episode of Voices

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10 plays since Krishnan's Dairy, and 65 international tours later, Jacob's feeling good about laying this show to rest.

"I want to leave it while I still love it. The play sort of set the groundwork and the DNA of the company. So it will always have the legacy of Krishnan's within all our work".

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Each year Nelson receives about 8-12% of New Zealand yearly quota of refugees. In 2019 when Tanya Nock set out to create Cultural Conversations, an arts and community hub here, it was the stories that this former refugee community wanted to share that was foremost on her mind.

Cultural Conversations invites people to share their stories with local audiences - from former refugees to people who've immigrated to settle in Nelson.

How has having a space like Cultural Conversations shift the way local Nelsonians see their city and its communities- and plant seeds of anti-racism? Listen to the full story in this episode of Voices.

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Based on the kaupapa of empowerment and empathy, the space hosts one-on-one chats between Nelsonians and former refugees, to foster a deeper understanding between the two.

Listen to the whole interview in this Voices episode with Tanya Nock, the founder and creative director of Cultural Conversations.

FOLLOW Voices on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Radio Public and iHeart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

The latest Cultural Conversations series called Courageous Conversations, which apart from being a live event, can also be heard as a podcast.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

12 years ago in Nelson, Dr Kay Sneddon decided to help a group of former refugees from Myanmar feel more settled in Nelson.

The family were the first Kayan people to be settled in Nelson back in 2008 after being given refugee status while in a camp in Northern Thailand - what was then the controversial "Long Neck village"

In this Voices episode, we look at how it all began for the Sukita Project and over the years helped keep the fabric of this Kayan culture intact - through weaving on traditional looms.

Kayan women came into international spotlight after tourists started visiting to the northern Thai camp where the community lived after fleeing conflict in Myanmar.

Long Neck village became controversial for the exploitative tourism it attracted. Some even likened it to an 'ethnic theme parks' as images of the women with stacks of brass rings on their long necks, selling handmade fabric and trinkets for a living became seen around the world.

Zem Ber and her family with her mother Mu Phou (image above) arrived in New Zealand after a long wait, having been denied permission to leave that camp.

Nearly 14 years after they arrived, these days weaving is still something keeps the small Kayan community tight-knit, and an age-old tradition intact.

Listen to their story in this episode of Voices.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Sepak Takraw isn't officially recognized as a sport in New Zealand, but that hasn't stopped Karen players in Auckland. The former refugees have been getting their skills up to a level where they now are off to the World championships in Thailand - coming up in July.

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Myu Oo Sine, like many others from his community, arrived in New Zealand as a refugee.

He was raised in Umphiem, one of the largest refugee camps in Thailand, and that's where his love for the sport began.

Eh Myo, as he's also known, is one of the sports biggest advocates in the country today. Most players in Auckland are of Filipino or Myanmarese background, and he's been instrumental in bringing players together to play a sport that while almost unknown in New Zealand, is played in more than 50 countries worldwide.

In some countries takraw is known as "kick volleyball" for all those flips, leaps and reverse kicks that are synonymous with the South-East Asian sport.

Listen to the full story on this sport, the challenges the players face and it's potential through the eyes of Eh Myo, and hear his remarkable journey from the Thai/Burma border to a new life in Auckland.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

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Violinist Andrew Beer's day job is concertmaster for the Auckland Philharmonia (APO). As the musical leader of the orchestra, he sits just to the left of the conductor.

But every now and then, Andrew gets up from his chair and moves more towards the centre of the stage, as the soloist in a violin concerto. In June, Andrew will premiere a brand-new concerto by major New Zealand composer Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead.

Called Tai Timu, Tai Pari, this piece is special for Andrew, who is a Canadian by birth, a Kiwi by choice and a huge fan of New Zealand contemporary composers.

"I didn't know anything about New Zealand composers before I moved here," says Andrew. Pianist Sarah Watkins was his guide and Andrew says he immediately loved what he heard.

"I really honestly find that New Zealand punches far above its weight for composers. I think if there was a study of the number of gifted composers per population, I think we would probably win. It's amazing how much talent there is here."

In this Voices episode. Andrew Beer talks to producer Justin Gregory about finding a new home, a new passion for local music and the pressures and pleasures of moving across the world to follow a musical career.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

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Over the past few years, NZ has been steadily pushing innovation in the areas of virtual reality, gaming and human interface technologies. We've seen some big international players eye and buy NZ gaming firms like Wellington-based NZXR - recently bought by Niantic, the people behind the wildly successful Pokemon Go app.

A lot of the early Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality work in New Zealand actually took seed at The Human Interface Technology LAB - HIT Lab, a University of Canterbury research institute and an offspring of its US-based parent.

HIT Lab turns 20 this month and in this Voices episode, Kadambari Raghukumar speaks to David Huang, who graduated from the lab in April this year and Dr Adrian Clark, Senior Lecturer in Applied Immersive Game Design at HIT lab.

Hear the full conversation:

HIT Lab has had such a successful track record that over the last 10 years alone, it's attracted about NZ$14 million in research funding.

David recently developed what he claims is one of the world's first smart phone AR app - the pandemic had a big part to play in the impetus for this, particularly developing the app for younger users.

The app is called Oasis AR and it's been downloaded worldwide over 20,000 times and continues to grow steadily in its user numbers.

"The AR and VR market is going to boom in the next three to five years, this is really just a beginning" says David.

Hear the whole interview with David Huang and Adrian Clark:

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

When Simran Kaur and Sonya Gupthan set out to start their finance podcast Girls That Invest, they hadn't quite expected it would become such a hit two years later.

The podcast today is one of the world's most popular finance podcasts on demystifying investment for women.

In April they just hit their million milestone of downloads, after they returned from giving a TEDx talk in the US, all the while continuing to grow their huge social media presence of nearly 150,000 followers on Instagram.

LISTEN TO THEIR FULL STORY on VOICES:

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"Most money-media is usually about men. For women, it's about how to save $10 on your grocery bill."

Only about 20 percent of women actually get past the abundance of financial jargon to invest, anywhere in the world.

As a mission, the podcast has been simplifying the jargon in the finance world, widening their appeal one episode at a time.

A few years ago Simran and Harsharan Kaur, her other friend, started The Indian Feminist- a wildly successful Instagram handle with nearly 300K followers, an online space for social commentary on feminism - quips, facts, sass and more.

It wasn't surprising that that led Simran to pushing that feminism to help other women include and achieve financial freedom.

Tackling cultural attitudes and how they impact financial freedom has also been a hot topic on the Girls That Invest podcast.

"We all grow up with a money story" says Simran talking about her upbringing.

Both Sonya, who's originally from Kerala, and Simran, Punjabi, were raised by immigrant parents - something they say that their money-story was definitely impacted by.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

When Aisling O'Sullivan was a child in Ireland, tracing the journey of stormwater run-off was a source of endless fascination.

In this episode of Voices, she looks back at how her experiences led to her getting involved in ways to help keep NZ waterways clean as an ecological engineer and associate professor at University of Canterbury.

Listen to the full story

Aisling leads CELTS, the Centre for EcoLogical Technical Solution at UoC where her research helps create solutions that are holistic and conducted in partnership with councils, Iwi and industry.

Early in her career, working on former mining sites in Oklahoma opened her eyes to the devastation that mining caused to indigenous land and ways of life. The huge impact of heavy metal toxicity and run-off in waterways and in the land inspired her to find holistic ways to combat this.

In 2019 Aisling and her colleagues Frances Charters and Tom Cochrane worked together on the award-winning and patented invention 'Storminator' that removes heavy metals, like copper or zinc, from roof stormwater in urban areas.

It uses mussel shells - waste products from our green-lipped mussel farming industry mainly in the South Island.

"The mussel industry here produces over 90,000 tonnes of shells every year. Half of them go to landfill at the moment" she says.

Aisling has used shells to treat mine drainage and remove metals in Aotearoa New Zealand since 2006 and she's now working with her PHd students to find solutions to contaminants leaching into waterways,in the farming sector, using the shells.

As New Zealand is races towards its ambitious target for nitrate reduction by 2025 - getting to that goal means using innovative technology and Aisling's work becomes crucial.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Pedro Ilgenfritz went from counting to clowning in his career and has never looked back since. While studying accounting as a 20-year-old in his hometown in Brazil, Florianopolis, Pedro discovered acting.

Listen to Pedro's story on Voices with Kadambari Raghukumar

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In the early 90s, Pedro abandoned the account books for a role in a local theatre company. Since then the only counting he does these days is of his growing collection of theatre masks.

Pedro has collected nearly a hundred theatre masks over the past 15 years - from South America to Bali, to New Zealand.

Pedro recently became what he calls the kaitiaki of about 40 intricately carved wooden masks - a prized personal collection of one of New Zealand's' theatre stalwarts- William Farrimond.

Listen to Pedro's full story on Voices with Kadambari Raghukumar

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Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

How did a stint in the army lead Canterbury scientist Hussam Razzaq to changing lives through research?

He tells his story in this week's episode of Voices.

In 1986, Hussam Razzaq had just arrived back in his hometown Baghdad, armed with a fresh PhD and fresh hopes to contribute to his country.

He had spent 5 years in New Zealand, earning that PhD in Lincoln, Canterbury.

But he got conscripted into the army instead - Iraq at the time, was in the middle of a prolonged war with neighbouring Iran.

Listen to Hussam's story on Voices with Kadambari Raghukumar

Hussam was one of many students who left the country to gain knowledge overseas in the late '70s.

It was a period that many see as a high point in Iraqi modern history - a fast-growing economy while farming and agriculture thrived in the countryside.

"When I left, life was great. Good income, high standard of living."

But as the war took its toll on the once-thriving economy, when Hussam returned in 1986, things were very different.

"They train you how to move, how to use the weapons, how to use simple tactics. But when it comes to real life, it's totally different. Everything you see in the movies happened there", he says of his time posted in the southern region near Misra.

After spending ten years in Baghdad, in 1996 Hussam finally moved back to Lincoln, with his family this time and impressions of a home that was changed forever.

"Visiting friends in the hospital with casualties, I noticed that the burn victims were suffering the most. That experience gave me the idea of healing rather than producing something deadly."

Hussam started working on biomaterials research at Lincoln's Plant and Food - his interest became the application of bioplastics in arrange of industries -pharmaceutical, agriculture and food.

Over the past few years, he's been working on a bioplastic made from cellulose extracted from post-harvest waste from cereal crops. It could potentially be used as wound dressings.

Listen to Hussam's story on Voices with Kadambari Raghukumar

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Oleksandr Kirichuk is a master distiller, sailor and the Honorary Consul of Ukraine in New Zealand.

On most days, he's busy distilling and bottling his vodka, whiskey and rum at his fully solar-run distillery north of Auckland. These days though, he's had his hands full with fundraising for the Stand with Ukraine campaign.

Listen to his full story on this week's Voices:

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Alex, as he's known, grew up in the coastal city of Odesa of USSR - part of Ukraine today. "Odesa is the capital of jokes we say" Alex says proudly. But far from funny was his early career when he was a nuclear power plant engineer at sites like Chernobyl.

By 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up, life as Alex, his wife and his daughter Victoria knew it, had changed forever.

"It was a difficult time" he says reflecting on the ten years he continued to live in Odesa.

Alex and his family eventually arrived as immigrants to New Zealand in 2002.

Nuclear-free NZ didn't offer much by way of immediate career choices for Alex, but luckily his love for sailing and engineering were about to come handy.

Listen to the full interview with Alex on how his life took him from nuclear plant inspection in the former Soviet Union to serving the Ukranian community of New Zealand:

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Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Inter-ethnic prejudice and discrimination were the subjects on the table at a recent online hui attended by a collective of New Zealand creatives and activists.

Organisers and participants of the hui talk to Voices about highlighting and tackling these issues via honest dialogue and reflection.

Listen to the conversation

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On the panel were the likes of Mervin Singham, Chief Executive for the Ministry for Ethnic Communities, Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon and AUT professor, Camille Nakhid.

On a second panel were community advocates Eva Chen, Naima Ali, Nilima Venkat and linguist, Farzana Gounder.

Listen to the full Voices interview with organisers and participants of the hui:

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Nearly 100 people from around Aotearoa attended the hui, during which panellists and participants shared their personal experiences on the 'isms' that feed into intra-ethnic prejudice in New Zealand communities.

Jennifer Khan Janif, one of the organisers and a human rights activist, hopes that the hui helps bring this kind of discrimination out of closed doors, and into honest dialogues around this sort of discrimination and how communities can tackle it.

"It will get people to start reflecting on their own biases.

"I'm very optimistic about bringing change by starting to have this conversation," Jennifer says.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

The breathless promotional videos promise a "celebration of human brilliance" and "a making of a new world", but for chef Esther Olatunbosun, Expo 2020 in Dubai is a place to make great desserts.

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Esther has spent the past six months in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, working at Expo 2020 (like the Olympics, it was delayed by Covid-19 but has kept the year it was meant to have opened in its title).

The 438 hectare site is home to pavilions showcasing 192 countries. New Zealand has invested $61m in is presence at the world expo and Commissioner-General Clayton Kimpton has stressed "we're not playing here" as the UAE was an "incredibly important market to Zealand's economy". The UAE is New Zealand's 10th largest export market.

Being part of a small group of New Zealanders at the Pavillion and one of about 17 young Kiwis at Expo 2020 was a huge opportunity for 24 year-old Olatunbosun, who came to New Zealand from Lagos, Nigeria, 15 years ago. And it's clear she's not messing about either, working long days at Tiaki, the restaurant in the New Zealand pavilion.

"Sometimes for me I tend to forget how amazing the opportunity is, because it was open to the whole country and only three of us were selected. It's baffling... Sometimes you just have to stop and appreciate the moment," Esther says.

Esther, Michael Lopesi and Laura Jane Muller were selected to support Taste New Zealand Chef Sid Sahrawat at Tiaki.

It almost didn't happen for the AUT graduate.

"I just got this message talking about an opportunity at the student hub and I wasn't even meant to be at uni that day... I was a bit bored at home so I thought I might as well go see what this is all about. I went there and was interested enough to just be like 'you know what? Let's sign up and see what happens'. Most things like that never really fall into my lap... Everything I guess worked out".

Listen the full conversation between Esther and Voices' Kadambari Raghukumar in this latest podcast episode:

She's learning lots and her pavlova is earning a bit of a reputation - a recipe she says she "can't take any credit for", having got it from her colleague and co-chef at Tiaki, Laura's mum, Shelly. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Zimbabwe-born saxophonist Thabani Gapara tells Voices why storytelling is so central to his music.

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https://youtu.be/kFZ_maU4tpA

"I'm the beneficiary of a strong lineage of music. And I'm just looking to share the sounds with maybe people who maybe haven't heard them, which is why I feel the need to tell story."

Thabani Gapara was 21 when he moved from Zimbabwe to South Africa to study jazz. It was a move that changed his life forever.

"For me, that was the place to be, for music."

His sound today is the product of the melange of music and musicians he was exposed to in his journey - from Zimbabwe to South Africa and New Zealand, where he moved to about ten years ago.

While he was finishing studying music in South Africa, his parents and brother moved from the UK to New Zealand, where Thabani eventually joined them.

"I wasn't sure why I would move to New Zealand because I had never really experienced any music from New Zealand, and then to come over here and to discover amazing music, and such a high standard of musicianship has been fantastic."

Voices spoke to him about his journey as a musician, finding a place of belonging and the discipline of championing his music - after it's been birthed.

"You know, when you put it out it's like a big exhale, but then you have to raise the child after" he says about promoting, playing and letting people know that you're making things you love and care about.

After a series of lockdowns, he's been out and about playing and promoting his album The Griot's Path these days in Auckland.

"The "Griot" part of it is to deal with, obviously, the storytellers and the singers whose history is passed down in most African traditions through song. "

"The responsibility of song to have story attached to it is something I like".

Listen to this episode of Voices where Thabani Gapara talks to Kadambari Raghukumar about his journey as a musician.

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Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Kadambari Raghukumar meets amateur football players feeling shut out by New Zealand regulations.

Listen to the story

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It's a hot Saturday afternoon in Auckland's Anderson Park.

Waiheke United are playing Mount Albert-Ponsonby today. La Banda Del Pipazo, the fan band, is also here.

They go everywhere Waiheke United goes - even on the ferry, you can be sure to hear them chanting and singing for their team.

While it seems like fun and games, clubs like Waiheke United are tackling a tough situation this football season. "We're sure we can cope, but we need more time because we're an island-based team," says Alan Llunes, about finding new players and trying to fulfil the requirements of the 'foreign player regulation".

Alan's the captain of the team that won the Northern Division in 2021

Listen to the podcast for the full story on how the regulation poses a challenge for teams like Alan's

The regulation has been around for years, mainly applied to about 10 national league teams. But since last year it now applies to almost 30-35 teams across the Northern and Southern leagues in the amateur game in New Zealand.

Essentially, it stipulates that only 5 non-citizens are allowed in the match-day squad - four foreign players and one from Oceania.

So naturally the more diverse the team, often depending on where the club's based - the harder it's hit by the rule - slimmer chances of existing players getting into the precious five on match-day.

Waiheke Island with its cafes, restaurants and vineyards draws thousands of football-crazy South Americans and European immigrants to its shores for the lifestyle and work opportunities. Naturally, many are really just on work visas, have a resident or permanent resident visa or are waiting for one of either.

More than 60% of the island's football team are South American, or European - who've lived and worked on the island for years.

Listen to the full Voices podcast here

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"We earned our spot in the league. Our club is multicultural, that's what football is about, no?" asks Alan…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

"The biggest shock coming here was seeing forage brassica fed to animals. It's for human consumption where I come from, all of a sudden you come here and see a paddock full growing for animals" laughs Emmanuel Chakwizira.

When you come from Zimbabwe to Canterbury and are a crop scientist, culture shock could look a little different.

Emmanuel Chakwizira is a scientist at Lincoln's Plant and Food Research where he works with forging crops.

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He grew up in Harare and comes from a farming family himself. Although he didn't exactly take up the family business, he somewhat chose to walk a similar path after studying agriculture science in Harare.

"There we mainly grow maize, it's a staple food. Legumes and peanuts for crop rotation. "

"Farming in Zimbabwe is very different. One of the main things is scale. Here most crops are grown for fodder so it's intensive, there we grow for human consumption."

Listen to this Voices episode on Emmanuel's story, his experiences as a scientist working with crops in Zimbabwe all the way to Canterbury.

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Summer is a peak time for his work, when the forage brassica and forage rape plants reach their peak growth. His research is centred largely around foraging crops and their uptake of nitrogen.

It's important work especially as regulations around nitrate leaching in New Zealand are tightening up.

Researching the best ways to reduce leaching and still have high yielding agriculture is at the centre of scientists work, like Emmanuel.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

"I'm trying to tackle a problem. It's a way to create a sense of belonging, remove that sense of alienation and use their skills."

Listen to this episode of Voices

Auckland based architecture graduate Myint San Aung, is the winner of the prestigious Resene Student Design Awards in December last year. He spoke to RNZ's Voices, from Munich where he's on tour, learning about European Architecture.

His winning idea though, was solidly rooted in community design- a refugee housing project, which he called Pyit-Taing-Htaung, after a local Burmese toy.

"It's a toy that once you toss it stands back up. To me it represents the people of Myanmar and how they have been with this military junta. And it refers to refugees as well."

In 1988, pro-democracy protests across what was then called Burma were violently crushed by the military who then seized power. San's parents decided to flee to the relative safety of a refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border, where he was born.

San's idea is based on memories of this own experience and his parents raising their family in makeshift homes in the camp.

"I'm trying to tackle a problem. It's a way to create a sense of belonging, remove that sense of alienation and use their skills."

In his proposed idea, residents in the sites using their own skillsets of working with local material, in this case bamboo, and creating a sense of ownership through local traditional or indigenous design, complete with meeting houses, schools, small bazaars and even spaces in between houses to raise animals.

These days, news of Myint San Aung's win has travelled so far that students of architecture in Myanmar have been getting in touch.

"Students of architecture there are inspired by it. For the past year, there's been no university, the coup situation has gone worse. They're interested in more refugee-based projects like this", says San.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

"They're beautiful plants. The flowers are fringed, like a tutu, a ballerina's costume"

Detail is the biggest deal for Japan-born Botanist Yumiko Baba; and one New Zealand native tree has had her fairly detail-obsessed over the passed few years.

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Elaeocarpus Dentatus, known in te reo as Hinau, is what she calls her "baby group" that she has been studying since 2013.

Yumiko is the Associate Curator for Botany at Auckland Museum and has been researching Hinau and its morphology - or specifically, phytomorphology.

Eleocarpus is spread widely across the Asian region and Australasia as well, with varieties differing depending on the region. The more temperate, the climate, the more subtle in appearance, basically.

"In New Zealand, the trees depend more on the breeze for pollination rather than birds and bees, so as a result the flowers are smaller, less colourful" she says about Hinau.

In New Zealand, Hinau has tiny white fringed flowers, and the berries are small and dark purple. Traditionally, Maori have used the berries in cooking and the bark can be used for making dyes. In the Indian sub-continent, the Eleocarpae family of trees is where the sacred seeds of "rudraksh" come from, used as prayer beads.

Listen to Yumiko's story on Voices.

For Yumiko, a love for plants goes back a long way- it's a love that began in Ono, her hometown.

"Ono means literally small field. It's surrounded by rice field, fringed by secondary forest. And as a child, with friends, we were always in that forest running around just. I think that the environment really shaped me."

Her parents have an eye for detail she says, "so maybe they passed it on".

My mother tells me that I always brought back mosses and weeds to plant in her immaculate lawn. She didn't stop me. So that also helped nurture my interests."

At the herbarium a regular day for Yumiko means being sometimes surrounded by specimens over 200 years old, like those collected on Cook's first voyage to New Zealand on the Endeavour, with botanists Banks and Solander. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

"There's a lot of misunderstanding around what it actually is! "

Writer Shriya Bhagwat talking about the ancient Indian manuscript, the Kamasutra, the inspiration for her debut as director and playwright.

She spoke to Voices about her play, the Kamasutra Chronicles, which finally saw the light of day at Auckland's basement theatre last week.

After being in the making for two years setback by one lockdown after another, getting the play up on stage "feels like one deep exhale" says Shriya.

"We've been through trial by fire really - it's a triumph for all of us together I think, kudos to the team for sticking around!"

Before you go thinking that it's a racy, innuendo-heavy play with lots of dramatized sex - really it's a story about an immigrant couple dealing with some fairly universal trials of long-term marriage - loneliness, not as much sex, or the sort they'd like, and a general sense of disenfranchisement.

It's a satire that takes head on the realities of patriarchy and the irony of sex as an awkward subject amongst South Asians.

LISTEN TO THE FULL VOICES INTERVIEW HERE:

Rishabh and Ishita, the couple, are played by actors Devesh Sherman and Gemma Naidu, who take the audience along in their scenes of mundane domestic life and marital friction.

Magically, to the rescue - appear Vatsyayana (Prashant Belwalker) the writer of Kamasutra, and his sassy muse Vasant Sena (Jennifer Onyeiwu) - together they deliver some cleverly-crafted truth bombs drawn from the ancient text to help salvage the relationship.

"I've had reactions from both ends of the spectrum, eyebrows have been raised and jaws have dropped - I don't control my writing" says Shriya.

"As a writer, you just simply write your truth."

LISTEN TO THE FULL VOICES INTERVIEW HERE:

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

2021 was yet another year riddled with Covid-19 lockdowns, endless queues for MIQ spots and families separated by border closures.

As the year draws to an end, we look at what this year has meant for immigrants in Aotearoa.

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Immigration advisor Anu Kaloti was one of the many migrant New Zealanders who stood up for themselves this year.

"The number of petitions, for example, in the last 12 months, I think it's historic. about 15 or 16 petitions specifically to do with immigration issues," she says.

2021 was a year of a lot of mobilisation, campaigns and rallies in between lockdowns.

There were several of them, with migrant workers calling for family reunification with loved ones stuck overseas and protesting exploitation and visa rejections.

"We all know when migrants are exploited or when overstayers are working under the table and being paid well below the legal minimum wage - that brings down working conditions and wages for all of us. It doesn't just impact those people. It just ultimately affects, adversely, all of us."

The was no shortage of Covid challenges for immigrants and migrant workers this year - but 2021 did also bring hope in the form of policy changes, Kaloti says.

In September, the big announcement of a new 2021 Resident Visa brought hope to 165,000 people living in New Zealand on work visas who could now apply for residency.

When the first lot of applications went in on 3 December, Immigration New Zealand's IT system simply couldn't handle the influx, causing even further worry.

Kaloti says she won't be at all surprised if the system is overwhelmed once again when the next phase of applications opens in March 2022.

"Really what was needed was a staggered approach to people making applications.

"We're really happy that the Resident Visa 2021 was announced and so many people will benefit from it. But it could have been a lot more inclusive - not just overstayers, but even people who are on temporary visas."

A protest outside parliament in April 2021

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

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Auckland has the world's fourth highest foreign-born population and a new space at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum aims to reflect that, driven by the need to create a sustained relationship with Auckand's diverse cultures as they lead their own stories -- rather than a curated experience through the museum's interpretation.

At the Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum, the space formerly occupied by the museum store became Te Taunga Community Hub earlier this year.

Akatokamanava Enua Community, Auckland's Cook Islands Mauke community, were the first to be invited to hold a two-month long exhibition of their community taonga in July this year.

Last week, Te Taunga opened its doors to second in line after the Mauke community - the Sudanese diaspora, holding their exhibition Sudan: A Confluence of Cultures.

The process hasn't been without challenges for the community dealing with artists back in Sudan caught in the middle of protests and internet shutdowns.

"It's been a tough time for our country and our people but we feel so honoured to have our stories in a distinguished space like the museum" says Dr Ala, from the community.

For now, the space has a two-year long plan of hosting a series of community led displays, the Tahitian diaspora up next in early 2022.

Listen to the full interview on Voices

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Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

From 10 December through to 7 January 2022, the African Film Festival New Zealand deep dives into cinema from across the continent.

Some of the team behind the festival spoke to Voices this week. Listen to the full interview here:

The African Film Festival New Zealand (AFFNZ) was founded seven years ago by Mali-born New Zealander Boubacar Coulibaly. This is the first time the festival has moved online because of the uncertainty around Covid-19 alert levels.

What normally kicks off with a big drumming session and a celebration, this year will be streamed virtually with the organizers having decided against taking the chance of the festival in theatres in Auckland and Wellington.

For the team behind the festival, this new format presents a whole set of new opportunities.

"Now we can open up to Australasia and other cities in New Zealand too."

Memuna Barnes, the Wellington ambassador for the festival, is originally from Sierra Leone. Memuna works in legal aid, and is known for her book "Survived - The Journey" on her own life story through struggles of civil war in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

"We spent like a couple of months on the movies, sometimes we get almost 1000 movies, and we're all hands on - just watching movies to select."

"I believe that is a beautiful way for us to bring our culture to New Zealand - the good, the bad, the ugly; we shouldn't be ashamed of anything."

"Storytelling is really important for the next generation to come and see what happened in the continent or to the continent at a certain point of time. I'm very encouraged to be able to serve in that regard."

More details will be on the film festival website this week, check out:

https://africanfilmfestivalnz.org.nz/

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Muroki is just 20 and things have happened fast for the young Kenyan-Kiwi musician.

Moving up to Auckland from Raglan a couple of weeks ago seemed a natural progression, he tells Voices.

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It's a Friday afternoon and we're at Junk and Disorderly, an Auckland antique shop where Muroki is filming his first-ever live session for his record label Olive (which is run by NZ pop star Benee).

He was raised in Coromandel where his mother was a caterer at Capoeira Angola events.

The subtle rhythms of Capoeira music influenced Muroki's sound, he says.

"I grew up playing capoeira and I was always really stoked on the music part of it. It somehow found its way into my music,"

When the single 'Wavy' came out last summer, things got busy, Muroki says.

"I've lucked out when it comes to shows. I've hardly missed any shows because of lockdown, the timing's been crazy.

"I feel just unbelievably blessed and everything has just worked out."

Of all lessons the young artist has learned in the past year and a half, he says learning to pace himself on tour was one important one.

"We had a few beers on the first day of tour. I quickly learnt that's never a good idea."

Now in Auckland, Muroki says he's trying not to miss the Raglan surf too much and loves being busy.

"It's been great coming up here. There's been so much going on."

https://youtu.be/0E7su4bx2yw

https://youtu.be/23Y_lqEkYdQ

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

After years of climbing the corporate ladder in Mumbai and Goa, India, Ben Fernandez traded it all in for a career in making music instead. "Everyone thought I was cuckoo" he says.

He spoke to Voices about his journey as a musician.

From starting as a seven-year-old playing at mass in Gloria Church, an iconic 100-year-old neo-Gothic style church in Mumbai's Byculla, to watching and learning from his uncles and parents as they composed and played classical and jazz - "music was a way of life for us. It was around us 24 hours of the day literally" Ben says.

From the 1930s large numbers of Goans moved from Goa to Mumbai in search of work. For many families from the then Portuguese colony, learning western classical music was the norm in the parochial school system.

With an understanding of western instruments and music, Goan-origin musicians in the diaspora in Mumbai became strong proponents of jazz over the years, and the backbone to the city's thriving playback recording industry for film music up until the late 70s.

His biggest influence to date are his upbringing in Mumbai and family - immersed in the world of music. Balthazar Fernandes, Ben's father-in-law has made massive contributions to both Bollywood film music and the Bombay Chamber Orchestra as composer. Ben's parents too were noted classical and jazz musicians in Mumbai, as were his uncles and grandfather.

Little wonder that Ben's album 'The Music Never Stopped', is somewhat an ode to all these people from his family - some who passed during lockdown last year, and new experiences he'd gathered over the years in New Zealand.

"It was a reaction to the lockdown" he says of the compositions.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Two elderly Auckland-based Indo-Fijian ladies, Hajira Khan,78, and Shamsun Naidu, 83, have been having their casual conversations recorded for posterity as they reflect on their early lives in the historic port town of Levuka, Fiji.

"If this generation passes, where will we get these stories from? That's why we decided to do this" says Hajira's daughter, Jennifer Khan, a community creative.

The casual conversation between them aired on Auckland's local Hindi radio station and channel, APNA.

VOICES spoke them about their lives and what recording these oral stories meant for them.

"We sort of grew up listening to these oral traditions. But most of the stories that are told (of the Indo-Fijian community) are from the two bigger islands, very hardly do you hear stories from the first captial, Levuka" says Jennifer.

The two 'elderly superstars' as Jennifer Khan calls them, share fragments of their memories from a childhood spent in Levuka, Fiji's first capital until 1877, in Lomaiviti province.

In 2013, Levuka became Fiji's first and only UNESCO World Heritage site.

They chat about all sorts - from memories of the Masonic lodge that was across the road from Hajira Khan's home - the oldest Masonic Lodge in the south Pacific, to memories of the Queen's coronation in 1953 and their identity as children of mixed Solomon Island, Indian, Afghani and Fijian heritage.

"It was a good life" Aunty Hajira says wistfully.

Aunty Hajira has her henna-coloured hair covered in a green cloth; she takes her tea with no sugar. Aunty Shamsun is a tall lady with immaculate posture and dark, curly hair; she likes her tea with two spoons of sugar.

Sugar - that's where their families' history began.

In the 1800s, colonial ships carrying blackbirded people from around the Pacific and indentured workers from India docked in Levuka before they got sold and assigned to work the sugarcane plantations. Blackbirding, the practice of enslaving by coercion and deception, was prevalent until 1904 around the South Pacific islands while indentured labour was practiced in Fiji till 1916.

One of Aunty Hajira's ancestors on her mother's side was blackbirded from the Solomon Islands, and others on indentured contracts from India. Her father was Fiji-born Afghani. Aunty Shamsun's ancestry is indigenous Fijian on her mother's side, and Indian and Afghani on her father's…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

On 25 October this year, the Sudanese army dissolved the country's transitional civilian government and arrested key leaders.

The coup sparked protests across several cities with hundreds of thousands of people demanding a return of civilian rule.

Listen to the full story here

Power and internet outages have pretty much affected most of the capital, and a crippling cash shortage are all factors creating an altogether desperate time for locals.

Videos from Khartoum show tyres burning, barricades streets, massive crowds of people chanting and the army's rapid response forces deployed everywhere.

In New Zealand, the small Sudanese diaspora has felt helpless when it comes to raising their voice against the coup and the violations that have ensued, with lockdown in Auckland making this time even harder for them.

Reem Abbas came to Auckland in 2013 as a skilled migrant along with her husband and daughters. She's a research fellow at AUT.

For the past two weeks, Dr Abbas has been trying to remain in touch with the events through the day as they've unfolded in Sudan.

"It's just hard to describe how we feel as 'diaspora'. To be honest we haven't had much sleep since 25 October. It's a mixture of hope, determination..."

After two and a half years of a steady move toward full civilian rule, the coup shattered the progress made since the 2019 revolution in Sudan that ended the 30-year-long dictatorship of Omar Al Bashir.

Army general and coup leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said the army stepped in to avoid a civil war while promising to allow elections in 2023 to go ahead.

Abdalla Hamdok, the transitional prime minister of Sudan was detained by the army during the coup and remains under house arrest at present.

"It's heartbreaking to see we are back here again after 2019."

"The will of the people is stronger than anything else and we're seeing it again," said Abdul Rahman Bashir, the acting Vice President of New Zealand's Sudanese Society.

Rahman and Reem were both a key part of organising a rally in 2019 at Auckland's Aotea Square at the height of the protest.

"It's frustrating that we can't do much now we need to follow lockdown rules."…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

A pilot settlement scheme which allows community groups to sponsor refugees has proved so successful, an extended programme will soon be rolled out.

Hisham Al-Zarzour recommends the Community Organisation Refugee Sponsorship (CORS) programme having come to New Zealand under the pilot, in 2018.

Listen to this episode of Voices here

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When Hisham Alzarzour got the call that he had been selected for a pilot resettlement scheme which would see his family settled in New Zealand, he jumped at the chance.

"To be honest, I will say yes if they will tell me any country. I thought first just to say 'Yes, please'," he said.

Hisham and his wife were living in Jordan at the time, having fled Syria after the war broke out.

More than twenty years later, Syria is still war torn.

As a geography teacher, Hisham already knew a little bit about New Zealand but one of the great things about the new scheme is that the community organisation sponsoring his family were able to tell him more while he was packing up his life in Jordan.

"I was talking to the people who will be my neighbors," he said, "I more peaceful or more confident. This is very good, like, to know the kind of the life you will live there."

They also sent photos of the house the family would live in and their soon-to-be new neighbourhood.

"I start to feel I live there, from Jordan. This was very practical and a very smart way to make the person feel more safe, we can say," said Hisham.

Hisham Alzarzour with his family.

The South West Baptist Church in Christchurch sponsored three refugee families. Nick Regnault was part of the team that looked after the Alzarzour family and he agrees that those early phone calls were really practical.

"We got to understand a little bit about what their concerns were coming to New Zealand, and were able to answer those to some degree," said Nick

"On the face of it, it's kind of bringing together two different cultures but underneath all that, we're all human and the needs that a family has in say the Middle East are pretty similar to the needs that I have with my family."

The Alzarzour family arrived in New Zealand in 2018. They spend two weeks in the Mangere Refugee centre before heading to their new home in Christchurch…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Vicci Ho kind of fell into film festival programming but has since arranged the line ups for festivals all around the world, from Toronto to Zurich.

Now she's based in Wellington and a key part of the New Zealand International Film Festival which launches later this month.

https://players.brightcove.net/6093072280001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6277204345001

Trailer: When a City Rises, showing at the 2021 NZIFF

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Vicci Ho was born in Hong Kong but brought up in Australia after her family moved there in the early 1990s.

As a child all she wanted to do was direct movies, but she quickly discovered the reality didn't live up to the dream.

"I set foot on one film set and I was so stressed I never went back," she said.

After completing a degree in film theory and history she returned to Hong Kong and fell into festival programming.

"I did not think that was something someone could do," said Ho, "A friend was just like, Can you help out? And then next thing I know she said; 'So here's the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, can you just take over because I have to move to Taiwan?' and I was like; 'OK'."

Midnight is a Korean thriller showing in the 2021 New Zealand International Film Festival

Film festival programming has taken her around the world but it's a job that's hard to describe. Ho said people are often amazed she gets paid to sit around and watch movies.

"I have to try and explain to them I watch maybe four or five hundred movies sometimes a year. Then they're like; 'Oh, OK, so it's not just eating popcorn and watching like Star Wars'."

Programming films from Hong Kong this year, has also felt more important than ever for Ho.

"I truly don't know how much people know about how bad it's gotten," she said, "I'm not sure people knew about the crackdown on trade unions, student unions. Censorship in film has been brought in."

"It's important to support the arts and the filmmakers while they are able to make films. We truly don't know how much longer this will be allowed."

When a City Rises is a documentary about the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong

Ho said a recent trailer she watched ended by saying the film would not be shown in Hong Kong…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

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New Zealand's refugee intake resumes this year after a hiatus since March 2020. The plan is to accept 250 new refugees by June 2021.

That's one-sixth of our yearly quota of 1500. What happens to the remainder of the yearly quota - will it get carried forward to 2022's intake?

Minister for Ethnic Communities Priyanca Radhakrishnan says "it won't".

Speaking of the immigrants and former refugee families and partners who have been separated through the Covid-19 lockdowns, Radhakrishnan said "family reunification is a priority".

Green Party ethnic communities spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman said: "The Green party has fought hard for humanitarian categories of people included in the phased opening of the border - so we were happy that the quota was going to open in some way.

"But the refugee crises is only worsening - what we'd like to see is the refugee resettlement centre in Mangere kitted out in a way that it can be used as a quarantine facility. That would be ideal as a way in which we can reopen the borders,"

National Party ethnic communities spokesperson Melissa Lee, speaking further to the concerns around refugee resettlement and support programmes for 2021, said: "my concerns are that are they equipped to emerge out of the 6 weeks and able to live in New Zealand in a more comfortable way - many aren't able to get jobs - where's the support- we're actually not providing for them."

In response, Radhakrishan said that under the government's wider employment plan there was a plan around working through the employment barriers faced by new migrants, former refugees and more broadly, ethnic communities.

"That was put on pause due to Covid - we will be picking that up this year."

With tertiary institutes feeling the pinch now that new international students have stopped arriving, is the planned return of 1000 students who were stuck overseas sufficient to ease the struggle of the export education sector, an industry that brings in nearly $4.8 billion yearly?…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

For Devdeep Singh, the government's announcement of a new fast-track residency visa came just in time.

"I was almost gone to Canada" said the 27-year-old, who has been in New Zealand since 2016 on a temporary basis.

But others - even some with skills New Zealand desperately needs - have been excluded from the policy reset and for them, it is another bitter blow.

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"There was no opportunity, no hope for us. And all of a sudden we got hope overnight" said Singh, who has been working in New Zealand after studying IT in Christchurch on a scholarship.

"I work with a company in Christchurch and we support people with intellectual physical disabilities, Huntington's disease, and even kids."

He is one of the beneficiaries of a new one-off '2021 residency visa' that allows migrants on most temporary work-related visas to win New Zealand residency.

It is estimated as many as 165,000 migrants can now be fast-tracked, becoming residents by the end of 2022.

That's about 68 percent of temporary migrants currently in the country. For them, the announcement by Immigration New Zealand on 30 September came as a welcome release from uncertainty.

Yet while migrants like Singh can now finally drop roots in New Zealand, thousands of others feel left out, despite meeting several of the criteria. In many cases, they have been caught in study, on the wrong kind of visa.

"The biggest problem at the moment is that those people who've been here five to ten years through no fault of their own, are trying to comply with the system, the immigration requirements, but as a result, now they find themselves not eligible" said Anu Kaloti, Auckland-based migrants rights campaigner and immigration advisor.

One essential healthcare worker, who prefers to keep his name confidential, has been caught in an endless rut of full-time and part-time work and study. But residency still eludes him because right now he's on a study visa, not a work visa.

"I first came here in 2015, studied level 7 courses in health. And then on the basis of that education, I worked for four years in essential healthcare.

"I applied for residency in 2018. But for nearly 22 months, it wasn't decided by Immigration New Zealand. So I decided to withdraw my application."…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

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Listener discretion advised - this story has references to suicide.

After more than two decades raking in awards as a community journalist and sports editor, most recently with Hawkes Bay Today, Anendra Singh's journalism career came to an end last year with redundancies across the media industry being announced.

Starting out his career with the Fiji times in Suva, Anendra came to New Zealand in the 1980s. Over the years Anendra gathered insights into several incidences of harassment and bullying in workplaces in provincial New Zealand, and writing a book was the obvious next step. This year he wrote his debut novel Workplace Bullying: The Beat Up.

The book follows the stories of a few magazine reporters as they go through experiences of harassment and bullying by colleagues and managers.

"I based all my interviews on on real cases," said Singh, "I've spoken to journalists and people in the media industry who have encountered these experiences. I've changed the identities, I've changed the location. I've changed to a certain degree the industry, but stayed in the media field."

"All the cases in my book have happened. Immigrants become vulnerable because one of the biggest issues is that you are coming into an environment from overseas where you have no support or network. (For some) your immigrant status depends on the report of your employees."

And Singh said it is worse in the provinces.

According to 2019 Stats NZ figures, one in five workers are affected by workplace bullying and harassment each year. That's about 11% of Kiwi workers or 300,000 people.

Asians and Maori report a 13% rate of discrimination or bullying, while Pacific and European ethnic groups both had rates of 11%. Across all ethnic groups, women reported higher rates than men. The rate for Maori women was twice that of Maori men (8%)

"One of the one of the most revealing things for me was when I went out on my book launch earlier this year," said Singh, "I saw people who were just a wreck. I mean, it's written all over their faces. They are consulting doctors and psychologists and such to get their lives back on track because they don't know how to deal with it."

Allan Halse, two-time nominee for New Zealander of the year, runs Culture Safe NZ, an organisation advocating for anti-bullying in workplaces…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Last year as New Zealand went into lockdown in March, Fatema Mohamed Sugule was only just beginning to slowly adjust to her new life in Auckland. During this year's lockdown she feels more ready to start a process that could restore a long-lost link. Hear her full story here:

Leaving Somalia with her aunt in 2010, Fatema spent four years in Yemen and subsequently Malaysia as a refugee while conflict and drought had Somalia in its grips.

Her mother had to stay back in Mogadishu, while her sister and father were killed in the conflict.

Over eight years on from leaving Somalia, Fatema was accepted in New Zealand's refugee quota and arrived in Auckland in November 2019.

She spoke to Voices in this episode from last year, about her time settling in and the role Red Cross volunteers played in her everyday life.

This week Fatema spoke to Voices without an interpreter. She's keen to get her English up to speed and be as independent as possible.

"Language is key here" she says.

And she's now also on another important mission.

Hear her full interview here:

Over the years she lost contact with her mother who'd stayed back in Mogadishu. After a year now of living in Auckland Fatema feels she's ready to start the process of tracing her mother.

"If she's alive, inshallah I'll get her. "

Through Red Cross, there's a big possibility Fatema will be able to contact her long-lost mother. Red Cross's Restoring Family links helps restore contact between refugees separated from loved ones during conflict and war.

Through their tracing message system messages can be sent to people who live in areas with no means of communication.

In 2011 for example, the year after Fatema left, about 254 people were located through requests from family members and more 16,700 Red Cross Messages were sent out.

From August until the end of that year, nearly 38,000 phone calls were made to relatives in Somalia living overseas.

Of those calls more than 4,700 were made by minors.

"Not only cases like Fatema's but people who've been looking for loved ones who were separated as far back as World War 2 approach Red Cross for help.

"When it happens, it's like a miracle" says Hamish Low of the Restoring Family Links programme by Red Cross.

Hear more on the programme and Fatema's story.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Video of the Deputy Head of Taliban's Cultural Commission saying women would not be allowed to play cricket or other sports where they are exposed has sent alarm bells ringing.

Listen to Voices on women's rights in Afghanistan

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Zahra Hussaini is a community advocate, based in Christchurch, who finds this latest development very concerning.

"It's heart-breaking for me to see that," she said. "I believe sports play an integral part in women's, or any human's, well-being, whether it's physical or mental."

" have a very negative impact on women. It's disempowering. I can not imagine what those women are feeling."

Ahmadullah Wasiq, Deputy Head of Taliban's Cultural Commission, told Australia's SBS network that Islam and the Islamic Emirate do not allow women to play cricket or the kinds of sports where they get exposed.

"Even if we face challenges and problems, we have fought for our religion so that Islam is followed," he said.

Cricket Australia responded saying it would cancel an up-coming men's test if the women were banned, but the Afghan Cricket Board says there was a misunderstanding and women would be allowed to play as long as they abide by Islamic dress code.

At this stage, New Zealand Cricket isn't taking a position on the possible ban, but White Fern Katey Martin expressed her hopes that the Afghanistan women's team would continue to take part in International Cricket competitions.

Katey Martin

Many female athletes are not waiting to see what sort of restrictions will be imposed. The national youth football teams evacuated to Pakistan last week.

Amina Hassanpour was already concerned about the changes she was seeing before she was evacuated from Afghanistan and brought to New Zealand.

"The women have not allowed to go to a school even. The women are not allowed to go to bazaar for shopping without a Mahram. We have lost most of our achievements for women," she said.

The Taliban regime has not yet suggested girls will be banned from school, but it has announced some changes to how women will be able to access tertiary education.

Zahra Hussaini isn't sure what to think about it all…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Last month as the Taliban took over control of Afghanistan district by district, Nowrozali and his family have been on the move, desperately been trying to get out the country.

Listen to Nowrozali's full story in this weeks Voices podcast:

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Nowrozali, 29, spent over six months working as an interpreter for New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) in the region of Bamiyan.

He managed to get a visa to New Zealand a day before the emergency evacuation flights operated out of Kabul by NZDF were ceased. He missed getting out on one of the mercy flights.

While he feels thankful for the visa, the uncertainty of when the next evacuation by New Zealand may take place makes each day fraught with fear and despair for him and his siblings who are in hiding.

"We feel left behind and in limbo. We're just hiding and living in fear. I hope there's a plan soon."

Along with other support staff to the NZDF, Nowrozali had been applying to come to New Zealand for many months now. He was finally issued a visa on 26 August, the day of the explosion outside the airport in Kabul.

"For us minorities, we feel there's no future. Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic country. We have Pasthuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks Hazara..that's why we need an inclusive government."

Born in 1992 in Bamiyan, Nowrozali is Hazara.

"In 1996 people from my village were tortured and beheaded by the Taliban. That's why people are just trying to get out using whatever means they can now."

Someone who managed to get out in the first emergency evacuation the NZDF conducted, is Amina Hassanpoor. Amina was employed in an eco-tourism project in Bamiyan that was funded by New Zealand.

A week ago she landed in Auckland with her two children and husband.

Listen to her as she spoke to RNZ from her MIQ hotel close to Auckland airport.

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"We're so thankful to New Zealand government for giving us this visa. Physically I am here, but mentally I'm with my parents."

Amina had to leave her parents behind since they didn't meet the criteria for the refugee visas Amina and her family were issued.

"It's so hard to explain the situation for Hazaras and women now" she says as she breaks down over the phone.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Empty streets almost devoid of traffic except for Taliban vehicles, paint an eerie picture of how Kabul has changed dramatically in recent weeks.

It's the kind of quiet that is concerning rather than comforting -- and it's prompting calls from New Zealand's Afghan community that the criteria of eligibility be widened to include more Afghans on the list to arrive in New Zealand.

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Mahsheed Mahjor holds a Masters in Women, Peace and Security and is based in Christchurch. She migrated here in October last year under the refugee family reunification criteria.

She's been getting regular updates from her brothers who remained in Kabul. Mahsheed says that while some of the images coming from Kabul show a peaceful situation the reality is quite different.

"It really depends on who you are, your identity. In terms of identity, the profession that you had, the kind of activities that you were doing there in the past 20 years."

So far there have been about 370 evacuees that have arrived in New Zealand and there's a further 300 or more that remain that are eligible to arrive.

While a second phase being planned, there's been no confirmation around the widening of the criteria of eligibility for more evacuees.

Mahsheed says "I feel like that is that has been a cry from the community that are making this requests and pleading to the government to expand that because these are extraordinary circumstances."

Zahra Hussaini has been a community advocate for few years and is based in Christchurch. For her, this scenario is all too reminiscent of the time 20 years ago when her family fled the Taliban.

Zahra and her family joined her brother here 17 years ago, who was one of the asylum seekers aboard the Norwegian cargo ship Tampa that was rescued in 2001.

"I honestly didn't really feel the lockdown at all, because we've been just so swamped with messages, texts, emails from everywhere. Around us, from Afghanistan, overseas."

"I know that the Taliban has promised that they're not going to be torturing anybody, but are they going to live by their promises? This is my question."

"Judging from what they've been like, are they going to change all of a sudden after 20 years? I'm assuming that they're trying to attract international support" says Zahra. …

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Amidst profound deprivation, Alan Chew's illiterate parents raised him to become a leader in innovation and helping those in need.

Listen to Alan Chew's full story

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Chew says his success is largely thanks to his family's focus on education, which saw him move from Malaysia to New Zealand to further his studies.

Getting involved in helping with New Zealand's response to the global Covid-19 pandemic is the ultimate 'thank you' to his adopted home.

Alan's father Chew King Loon was born in Guangdong Province (formerly Canton) in southern China when famine was rife.

Chew King Loon was packed off to Hong Kong to work as a goatherd, Alan says.

"Being the oldest in the family, he had to leave the family around age 12 or 13 to see if he could earn enough money to help support the family back home. My father left the family not knowing if he would ever be back again."

Chew King Loon was illiterate but went to extreme lengths to better himself. He began to teach himself how to write by watching lessons through a classroom window during his breaks at work.

"He never had a proper education, but I think he's quite a clever guy because as a result of just that education he managed to be able to read and write in Chinese to a large degree."

Chew King Loon then made his way to Singapore by ship. He had to work for a long time at low wages to pay off debt, and when it was paid, he made his way to Kuala Lumpur and put roots down.

Alan's mother Ng Suet Moy lived next door and the two married. They raised their three children on squatter land - an abandoned coconut plantation in the village of Kampong Dollah, near Kuala Lumpur.

Even though Alan was raised in abject poverty and deprivation, he says growing up in his Malaysian village was the happiest time of his life.

"I didn't mind and I didn't know any better. We were living in a house built off building materials my father had brought back from other jobs. I can't remember anything new in the house, everything was second-hand, but that was absolutely no problem for me…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Hayellom Tesfay starting training when he was 18. At 22, he's one of the rising stars of kickboxing from Kings Academy.

LISTEN to Hayellom's full inteview on the Voices podcast:

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Born in Ethiopia and raised in Auckland's Mount Roskill, Hayellom is aware about the stigma held by some in his community, around a career in a sport like kickboxing.

But over the past couple of years he's been seeing more parents express interest in their children taking up the sport, "it's a sign something's getting through" he says.

His entire family nowadays comes along to watch his fights, his two little sisters included.

"Luckily for me, my mum has been really supportive, I know it's not always easy for many parents out there to accept."

""Before I started training I was literally doing nothing."

"Growing up, I had a small circle. Some of the boys I train with here, we all grew up together and to see us here training, it's beautiful."

Listen to the full interview with Hayellom on Voices podcast.

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Hayellom's most recent win in August was at Born to Fight, against Suran Juanmiry in defence of his K1 WKBF title.

"This fight game you know, is not easy - you always need someone to push you."

At Kings Academy, Hayellom trains practically everyday and remains inspired by his sparring peers here - the likes of Arshia Ebadi and Scott Aitken.

"I'm hoping within the next few years the fight community becomes even bigger with more Ethiopian fighters.

At the end of the day we're all representing New Zealand."

"I keep my tunnel vision and keep doing what I'm doing. What's meant for you, will come."

Hear the full story behind Kings Academy's director, Vahid Unesi in the previous Voices podcast.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Vahid Unesi looks proudly around his inner-city Auckland gym and breathes in the smell of linament.

"We have almost 50 different nationalities here in the gym."

And that's no exaggeration at Kings Academy, a fight club owned by Iran-born Vahid.

"Martial arts is like a multicultural language I would say - we all speak the same language here."

Vahid runs this Auckland city gym that's packed out everyday with fighters training in all sorts of disciplines, from Brazilian jujitsu to kickboxing and muay Thai.

It's through his own struggle to adjust to New Zealand in his early years of arriving here, that Vahid was spurred on to find a sense of community and belonging through martial art when he started to train with Steve Oliver's MMA gym.

Iran has a history of Olympic success when it comes to martial arts - taekwondo, jujitsu and karate. Unsurprisingly, Vahid's love for martial arts started young. He was seven years old when he started training taekwondo.

"As a child, I had a dream to go to the Olympics but that never happened. Unfortunately, I left the country.

"If I can train these young people and they win some medals, I will be happier," he laughs.

As someone who came to New Zealand from overseas, Vahid is a stickler for drive and discipline, something he's keen to pass on to younger versions of himself in the gym today.

"My advice to them is you came here for a better life - believe in yourself and work towards your goal."

Over the past three years, Kings Academy has been prolific in putting out a host of rising star kickboxers with origins from around the world - Ethiopia-born Hayellom Tesfay to Persian fighter Arshia Ebadi.

"We train like a family here. We ask our that people leave their egos at the door - if you do that you are welcome to be part of our community."

On 14 August, Kings Academy fighters brought home several wins at Ultimate Rage and in next week's Voices episode, we talk to some of the winners.

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A group of young activists produced an interactive walk-through exhibit telling the history of Palestine for an exhibition at Auckland's Corban Estate.

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A team of volunteers from NZ for Humanity, Preserved Identity and Palestinian Youth Aotearoa came together to present a detailed chronology of Palestinian history, art and culture.

The 100-metre walk-through exhibit explored the history of Palestine starting from 1799 up to the present day.

Fatimah Ali and Mustafa Ali, a Fiji-Indian brother-and-sister duo, saw the concept from inception to finish.

For Fatimah, a criminal lawyer, it was the international law section of the display that drew her to be involved.

"From a legal perspective and human rights point of view, we wanted to highlight all the breaches and violations that took place and continue to take place in Palestine."

"After the recent escalations in Palestine, the forced expulsions of people in Palestinian families and the Israeli bombardments on Gaza, we thought we needed to do something to educate the public and invite them to a conversation they wouldn't usually have."

The display was dotted with a large number of historical photos from Palestinian Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities living in the region for centuries, dating back to pre-British rule.

"We had several thorough phases of cross-referencing, cross-checking and fact verification. I think I had some OCD moments there" she laughs.

"We wanted to present factual information and not opinions."

A highlight of the exhibit was a set of antique traditional 'thobes' - Palestinian womens' robes - from Tuma Hazou's personal collection.

Tuma, a resident of New Zealand, is a former BBC Arabic journalist who is Palestinian and spent decades in Jordan and Palestine reporting on the region.

Fatimah hopes that the interactive timeline will be digitised and be presented in cities across New Zealand in the months to come.

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"I can honestly say to this day, joining the US Marines was the best decision I ever made" says Sky, as he empties the bucket of soapy water he's just cleaned an Auckland cafe's windows with.

"That's how I survived."

Being born and raised in the Hill District neighbourhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Sky's remembers his childhood being fraught crime and brutal violence that affected not just his neighbourhood but his family as well.

"If it weren't for joining the Marines, I would have gone down a very different path of drugs, gangs, violence."

He joined the US Marines in 1981 and never looked back.

He arrived in Auckland in February 1991 and 30 years on in New Zealand, Sky still believes this is one of the best countries to live in.

"I came from a real hood-y part of Pittsburgh. As a marine I've been to some hell-hole kinda places. There just isn't any comparison to anything here."

Listen to the full Voices interview with Sky, as he talks about life in the Hill District in the 70s and how he arrived in Auckland and successfully went from washing car windows to making a living washing shop windows.

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Navtej Randhawa runs Radio Spice, a Punjabi radio station, along with running his family business - a grocery store that's been here at Hunters Corner for several years - acutely understaffed these days.

"This are is unique - this is a cluster of specialized businesses selling ethnic wares of all sorts, not just people in Auckland but people from around New Zealand come here to shop. The contribution would be in millions."

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"You need Hindi or Punjabi speakers. What are you going to do, work long hours. You see a lot of fatigued people - psychologically it's starting to affect a lot of people - to me that's distressing."

"A lot of them, don't see an end to this."

Normally Neelam Ahuja's sari store has about seven to eight ladies working behind the counters. These days she somehow seems to manage with just three on weekdays.

"It's a very hard task for us. You can the mess everywhere in the shop because of the lack of people."

Since students have virtually stopped arriving in the country from India, people seeking part-time work has also stopped.

"We need someone from Fiji or Hindi who understands the language. They can understand what we are selling here."

Before border closedown last year it was definitely Neelam says.

The local grocers, print shop, eateries and jewellers are all pretty hard hit too.

At Sparkles Jewellers, the owner Gurmeet Singh, also called Happy, is struggling too.

"We prefer that workers speak Hindi, Urdu or Punjabi. We have old customers who can't speak English. We can't find anyone."

The counter has one lady somehow attending to several customers.

Happy makes and repairs jewellery in his workshop as well.

Indian jewellery is made of 22 karat gold while most jewellery made here in New Zealand is of 9 karat gold - a very different skill set.

"It's a hard job - you can't just learn in it a few months, I spent years learning, my son took 3 years. Trying to teach someone here is hard.

He has tried to apply for visas for jewellers from India to be employed but so far all applications have been rejected.

For him and his son, working till 1a.m these days is normal these days.

"What can we do, we have to work sometimes 80 to 90 hours. Since Covid, people are spending money here. There's a lot of work but no workers."

Hear the full interview here: …

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Going between painting, installation and sculpture, Korea-born artist Seung Yul Oh talks to Kadambari Raghukumar about his practice.

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Seung Yul Oh is known for his public art, larger than life-sculptures and installations that are at once quirky, hyperreal or minimalist. Invariably they all seem to attract people to participate with them.

His latest work is a series of paintings at Starkwhite on Auckland's K Road.

An Elam graduate, Seung Yul's practice is interdisciplinary but painting isn't something he says he does often.

"I'm a painter but don't do many painting or sculpture shows."

"Painting happens about three or four times a year..it's scary because once I start, I can't stop."

Back in 2013, Periphery, his work of towering yellow and white pellet-shaped inflatables that audiences pushed their way through was selected by influential Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa for Art Basel Hong Kong.

Following this, Oh was named as one of the rising stars of the Asian art market by The Guardian.

"I love the physicality of sculpture..it's different, but painting for me is a refining moment."

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A new report, Youth19, is the latest in the Youth2000 survey series which asks more than 7000 students about everything from family life to sexual activity.

It highlights health and wellbeing findings for Asian students in Aotearoa - their strengths, challenges, and experiences are mapped out in this.

Nikki Singh, who is Fiji-Indian, and Lovely Dizon, Filipina, both in their early 20s, were involved in the research and co-authored parts of this report.

In many ways, their experience of growing up in New Zealand is echoed in the report findings - from lack of safe spaces, to "achievement pressure", poverty, mental health, and discrimination.

"It was validating to know those experiences growing up, weren't yours only."

"It isn't all doom and gloom," Singh said about the many positive findings in the report.

"There are several positive findings as well."

Disaggregating data for the overall Asian group into East Asian and South Asian helps with a better understanding of relationships between ethnicity and health, and to extract information for targeted interventions - be that in schools, healthcare providers, and at policy level.

"Getting away from that overly broad 'Asian' label opens up opportunities for targeted interventions," said Dr Peiris-John, co-director of the Centre for Asian and Ethnic Minority Health Research and Evaluation (CAHRE) at the University of Auckland, and lead author of the report.

Listen to the full interview on the the findings of the report told through the experiences of Nikki Singh, Lovely Dizon.

Some of the data in the report shows that South Asian students, from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, and Bangladesh, experience higher rates of poverty, with 15 percent having parents who always worried about money for food. Students from East Asian countries, from China in the west and north to Japan in the east and Indonesia in the south, are less likely to report concerns around poverty.

East Asian students have higher mental health needs than South Asian students, with about a third experiencing significant depressive symptoms. East Asian students were also less likely to access health care (73 percent) and had higher unmet health care needs (21 percent).

This podcast episode contains references to self-harm and suicide.

Where to get help:…

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As a child, when Umar Zakaria saw the double-bassist play in an army band in New Zealand, he almost immediately knew that was the instrument he wanted to take up.

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While studying jazz at high school, Zakaria was listening to a lot of Dizzy Gillespie's music.

Zakaria recalls coming across a story about how Dizzie asked his pianist, Panamanian Danilo Pérez, something to the effect of "when are you going to deal with the music of where you're from?"

It was a quest that jazz musicians at the time like Yusuf Lateef were all beginning to explore by going on journeys to Africa to discover their own musical roots.

Inspired by jazz greats like these, Zakaria delved into his own Malay roots and the melange of influences it comprises - Arabic, Indian, indigenous Malay, Portuguese.

Over the past decade or so, Zakaria's interpretations of the ornamentations of Malay music in his jazz compositions has seen a solid response.

It's an ongoing journey of discovery which he calls Fearless Music, and along the way, being named Best Jazz Artist in 2018 by Recorded Music New Zealand, are encouraging junctures for Zakaria.

Right now he's in the thick of his PhD at Victoria University these days, which is based on Malay contemporary musicians.

Listen to Zakaria's full interview on this week's Voices with Kadambari Raghukumar - where he talks about his love for Wellington, Malaysian genres of music, and straddling his New Zealand, Singapore, and Malay identities through music.

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Jose Tombe, 36, worked with vulnerable youth in his hometown of Cali, Colombia.

Jose thrived in his work despite knowing that activism and social work is a dangerous vocation in Colombia.

Social workers, who in Colombia are called social leaders, are being killed or disappearing in alarming numbers by the various guerilla groups operating nationwide.

In 2019, Jose was helping with government-administered education projects in neighbourhoods where youth were likely to be targeted as recruits in drug chains by cartels and guerilla groups.

It's a widespread issue - not just limited to the jungles, he explains. The production and supply chains extend all across into cities often relying on youth to keep things running.

The targets are youth with little education or no opportunities who will join trafficking gangs for a couple of hundred dollars a month.

"I was trying to show them that through education a better life is possible," Jose says.

One evening while walking his dog, two armed men on a motorbike stopped Jose at gunpoint demanding he help them recruit the youth he was working with. A direct death threat was issued if he refused - which he did flat-out.

Fearing for his life, Jose decided to quit his work and kept moving between neighbourhoods and towns over the next few months. This was based on advice he received in order not be be seen or identified in the area.

In January 2020, Jose finally bit the bullet and took a flight to New Zealand, arriving in Auckland on a visitor's visa. He applied for asylum a month later while in Wellington.

Listen to Jose Tombe's whole interview in this episode of Voices.

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The Polynesian Panther Party was founded on 16 June 1971 in Auckland by Will 'Ilolahia, Fred Schmidt, Nooroa Teavae, Paul Dapp, Eddie Williams and Vaughan Sanft.

They were later joined by Tigilau Ness, Lupematasila Misatauveve Melani Anae and Alec Toleafoa.

The group was inspired by the civil rights movement in the US and the Black Panthers there who formed during a period of police brutality against African Americans.

The group's primary aim was peaceful protest and aid for Pasifika families who faced racial stigma and policies that deemed them "illegal immigrants".

At a time where the notorious 'dawn raids' were conducted on immigrant Pasifika families - the Panthers banded together in support of the families across Auckland.

As part of the golden jubilee commemoration, the Panthers recently concluded a tour of schools and Pasifika communities sharing the story of the group with the next generation.

Tigilau Ness's Niuen parents came to Auckland in the '50s and he was raised in Auckland, in Newton. In this podcast, he speaks to Voices about his involvement in the movement.

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For the past four years, Rizwangul NurMuhammed (Riz) has been seeking justice and answers.

In 2017, Riz's brother, Maiwulana, was arrested on charges of separatism - charges Riz denies - and detained ever since in Xinjiang.

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On Friday last week, Amnesty International released a crucial report highlighting the cases of 50 Uighur detainees, and witness testimonies gathered from 2017 to April this year. The report features Riz's brother as one of those cases.

The report highlights harrowing accounts on China's mass internment, torture and persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang being conducted under a guise of fighting terrorism.

Riz is one of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs whose family members have been arbitrarily arrested and sent to re-education and internment camps by Chinese authorities.

Riz's younger brother, a university graduate, was running a small internet business when he was picked up.

"His youth has been taken away from him. I think my brother's only fault is that he is Uighur."

It's been a long and hard journey for Riz, who only decided to speak out publicly about her brother last year in June for the first time.

"I could have gone to the media earlier but I chose to give the New Zealand government and Chinese Embassy space to respond.

"But I still have no update ... nothing."

In May this year, Parliament unanimously called for action to prevent severe human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims - the motion stopped short of calling those abuses genocide.

Many in the community feel New Zealand's stance on the situation or language used around it hasn't been strong enough.

Unlike America, Canada and Britain, we have stopped short of saying what's happening to the Uighurs is genocide.

All across Xinjiang, the report states that Uighurs have been surveilled, forcibly indoctrinated and detained by Chinese authorities without sufficient evidence pointing toward international recognisable offences. China says it is acting to stop terrorism.

But the report says many Muslims in the region have felt threatened to the extent of giving up their Islamic prayers, Uighur language, and staying in touch with in family overseas…

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Artist Claudia Kogachi talks to Kadambari Raghukumar about what it's been like exploring her personal family relationships and dynamics through creative work.

It's mid-morning and Claudia Kogachi is busy wielding her carpet gun in her home studio in Eden Terrace. In her overalls, she's switching between painting and carpeting, while a deadline looms for a show coming up.

She's working on a series of painted portraits of her and her mother called "There's no I in Team" - the show opens this week in the Dowse Museum at Lower Hutt. She's racing to complete the works and also finishing up some smaller rug works this morning.

Bold, blue and blobby, the There's no I in Team series is her take on her relationship with her mother. These new works explore the complex dynamic between mothers and daughters depicted through sports and activities they shared while in Hawaii, through slightly awkward and cartoonish figures.

It follows an earlier series that showed them competing in different sports.

"We're doing really well now. We're on the same team" she laughs.

"She's my biggest supporter now."

Listen to Claudia Kogachi

Claudia is Japanese-Kiwi with a couple of generations on her mum's side being raised in Hawaii. "They went there to work in pineapple fields from Japan. It's the only place they call home and for me it's a really special place."

Claudia went to university in Hawaii and considers herself lucky to go between New Zealand and Hawaii each year. She clearly holds close her relationship with Hawaii and her relatives there and an online catch-up with her baachan, Japanese for grandmother, seems due every day.

Her baachan features heavily in her art. "She's one of my best friends. Since I can't be there with her, it seems only fitting that I include her in my art."

Some of Claudia's rugs - bold, chunky and about 2 metres long by a metre and a half wide - depict her grandmother in different domestic scenes - lighting a barbecue, rummaging through her fridge with hair-rollers and pyjamas, while some feature Claudia herself, in imaginary alternative careers - landscape-gardening and the like.

At Visions Gallery in downtown Auckland, her rug series has almost sold entirely.

Making the rugs though came about through sheer necessity and lockdown resourcefulness. Carpeting guns and yarns were available online and she needed to create a line of works for a show that had been slated for July 2020. Rugs provided the answer. …

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"We're going to have to address this in a far more systemic way," says Dr Carolyn Providence about professional isolation and racism that international doctors face after being recruited to fill positions in provincial and rural New Zealand.

New Zealand's health system relies heavily on international recruits to fill positions - nearly 40-50 percent of the country's doctors are overseas-trained.

Carolyn is originally from the Caribbean and her husband is German. Together with their young son, they emigrated from the UK to take up positions in provincial New Zealand as GP and a specialist 10 years ago.

They were recruited as part of filling the shortage of specialists and doctors in New Zealand.

"Settling into provincial New Zealand was very unsettling. It wasn't the sort of place we had been led to believe. There is a great resistance to change. I want to point out that this is not culture shock," she says. "This is more than this."

"I was always worried about the health inequities and difference in healthcare given to people of different ethnicities. As I started to raise my voice I found myself incredibly marginalised.

"As I got more vocal I always felt that things were getting more difficult for me. I would have ideas but would find myself sidelined."

Carolyn says there were lots of assumptions made about why people came with certain conditions. Poverty was spoken of in derogatory terms and certain aspects of culture - Māori and Pacific culture - "were openly denigrated behind the scenes".

"I'm a woman of colour and I felt more than a passing solidarity."

She says there is no support-system or forum for recruits from overseas to voice concerns and discuss things without fear of prejudice.

"My experiences are not unique. They've been repeated with other medical professionals.

She and her husband felt compelled to leave for Auckland, she says.

Carolyn says she was unable to provide the care she deemed was necessary to her patients because of the marginalisation she saw and felt. She faced what is called "moral injury" she says, when doctors feel distressed and unable to provide the care they would like.

"Coming to Auckland was great - it restored our faith. We recognised there was more than a monoculture…

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In November 2019, Behrouz Boochani arrived at Auckland, New Zealand as a free man. He came to speak at the WORD - Christchurch's literature festival.

The Kurdish Iranian refugee, writer and journalist spent six years incarcerated by Australia on Manus Island's detention centre between 2013 and 2017, when it closed down.

From his detention, he wrote his multi-awarding book No Friend but the Mountains, all through a series of WhatsApp messages smuggled out on PDF files.

Asked by the Guardian as he set foot in New Zealand in 2019, about what freedom feels like, he responded - "I don't know, I think I should I have a smoke first."

"This is the first time I have thought about this - that I survived."

He stayed on seeking asylum and eventually was given refugee status by New Zealand in July 2020.

For the past year or so in New Zealand, Boochani chose to lay low from the media and he tells me this is one of his first interviews since July 2020 when he was given refugee status.

"I wanted to stay isolated and not feed the media... it was close to election time."

"It was sad and challenging for me to suddenly become a 'subject'," he says.

He's visiting from Christchurch for the Auckland Writers Festival to talk about his book - No Friend but the Mountains, which was translated from Farsi to English by Omid Tofighian.

It's been one long journey for Boochani since he escaped Iran after his career as a political journalist came to a dramatic end in May 2013.

As a political journalist, Boochani was the co-founder of a magazine in Iran that promoted Kurdish, culture, politics and content. He was watched closely for his advocacy for Kurdish rights and resistance.

In May 2013, some of his colleagues in Iran were arrested after his office was raided by the Iranian regime. Boochani decided it was time to escape the country for this safety.

He fled and arrived in Indonesia from where his harrowing journey on a boat to Australia began, along with a group of asylum-seekers.

No Friend but the Mountains traverses his escape on a boat to his torturous years on Manus Island spent with other asylum seekers who fled their countries on boats.

At the Writers Festival, the theatre is packed out with people wanting to hear his story and views on the detention of refugees in Australia…

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Mariam Bahar has been fasting during Ramadan each year since she was 9 years old while growing up in Sri Lanka.

I meet Mariam at 5am just as she's finishing her sahur or sehri - a pre-dawn meal before starting the day's fast. She's in her workout gear and will start her morning workout shortly after prayers at 5.34am today. She trains Crossfit competitively and is also a personal trainer for women.

During Ramadan, although her workout is a milder version of what she normally does, she keeps it going.

"It's a time to reflect on Ramadan, so other things become secondary.

"Right now it's about listening to your body ... keeping moving. It's not about achieving some personal best or anything.

"I'm blessed to follow the things I choose to. When I first started Crossfit, I wore a normal hijab.Then I thought if I want to get good at this then I need to do what other people do ... and you look around and they don't dress like you. I found sports hijabs, these things exist!

"The only expectation I had from my family is to be the best Muslim I can be. And my take on it is this - wearing the hijab, practicing, praying, fasting."

Mariam is a school teacher. Her wooden box that she uses for her jumps during workout has a logo carved by her students.There's a silhouette of a hijabi woman, a delicate wreath above her and a barbell below.

"I love that my students see me like this. I am actually girly although I lift pretty heavy. I love my makeup, clothes and shoes!

"What I want to model for all girls is you don't have to compromise your identity to follow what you want in life."

On the other end of town in Mangere, Ola Shahin, who's Palestinian, has just arrived at Walter Massey Park to coach her 4 to 8 year olds who are aspiring footballers. Aside from coaching, she also plays with Manukau United women's team.

I ask her about playing matches and training during fasting. "Trainings were at 6.30pm so it was after breaking your fast ... but the biggest thing was making sure you don't overeat!

"From an outsider's point of view, I can see why it seems difficult - but it's a mind-game, changing your perspective. Your body also changes. You don't end up needing as much food as you think."

It was at the second match during Ramadan two weeks ago that Ola injured her knee and for now is sticking to coaching…

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There should be three children in this picture but two of them are stuck in India. New Zealand's border closed just one day before toddlers, Nimrat and Tarman Kaur, were due to join their parents in Christchurch.

Parvinder Kaur is pictured here with her baby daughter, Parvaan, in Christchurch where she lives with her husband, Maninder Singh and their sister and brother in law, Gagandeep Kaur and Pritpal Singh.

The two couples share more than a home: both families have a child living with the same grandparents in Rajasthan.

In both cases the families came to New Zealand hoping to work and establish themselves before sending for their children. Both Gagandeep and Parvinder are partway through the process of gaining their residency.

A year ago they decided they were ready to welcome back their daughters. Visas were arranged for both children and the grandparents who would stay with them while they transitioned back to living with their parents.

"We were very happy that tomorrow morning our daughter will be in the plane and the day after they will be here," Parvinder Kaur said.

They booked a flight for 20 March, 2020 but Covid-19 was about to change their carefully-laid plans.

Just one day before the long awaited flight, the New Zealand government closed its border to non-citizens and residents.

"Everything was planned and packed up and at the time when we called our parents they were just sitting in the car to go to the airport. We said 'Don't go'."

It was a huge blow for the couples and their children and Gagandeep has since seen a change in her daughter's behaviour when they've talked via videocall.

"She doesn't trust us anymore, me and my husband. She just thinks that we're going to lie."

Gagandeep didn't know when she would see her daughter again.

"It is very hard to smile. It is hard. You have a lot of pain in your heart."

She continued to work a split shift each day as a restaurant manager, trying to appear positive for the customers.

"I have to smile to people I'm very happy. Well, I'm not happy.''

Yet she says if she shows her feelings on her face, it will be reflected in the restaurant reviews.

"They will simply review, 'Oh she was very upset, she was tired,' I'm not tired. I'm not upset. I'm just frustrated."…

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They used to call Bhutan the "Happiest Country in the World," says Shreejana, a 23-year-old living in Christchurch. There was plenty of land, cattle, and crops growing everywhere. Her family were farmers before she was born.

"But there is a dark history there," she says.

In the early 1990's, the Lotsampa people in Bhutan were killed and tortured by militia groups supporting the Bhutanese King.

Shreejana's parents told her that one morning, armed men came into their village, kicking civilians out of their houses, looting, and forcefully taking them into custody if they refused to leave everything behind. This would later be called "ethnic cleansing" by the UN.

The family fled across the border to Nepal and eventually became stateless refugees. It was in this camp that Shreejana was born.

One of her first memories is playing by a stream on the edge of the camp. When her aunt caught her playing there, she took her immediately home to tell her mum, who then got very angry. Shreejana's mum yelled at her about how dangerous it was, insisting she was never to play there again.

"The very next day," Shreejana recalls, "a girl my age was found dead near the spot that my aunty had caught me. The girl's clothes were torn, she was half undressed, and her body was laying by the stream. "

As the years passed, this kind of thing happened again and again. Neighbours would go missing, family friends found dead, and a man she knew well was found with all his limbs removed.

But there were also many happy and joyful moments as a child growing up in the huge refugee camp.

By 2007, the UN started relocating the Lothsampa people to other countries. Shreejana was really scared during the interviews her family had with the UNHCR in Nepal.

At one of them, she remembers "a man with dark black skin and shining straight teeth. He was so friendly to me and my sister, making funny faces at us, smiling warmly to make us feel less nervous. He gave me this warm and safe feeling in my tummy."

Months later, Shreejana, then aged 11, finally arrived by a bus from the Auckland Airport at Mangere Refugee Centre. Everyone was terribly frightened, she said.

"Everything was new to me. I leaned my head against the bus window and watched this weird world pass me by. It was like a different planet."…

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Dr Bobby Hung, who is also known as Berst, first started painting graffiti as a teenager and was given a garden wall by his mother, to keep him from tagging on the streets. That was in the late 90s in Auckland.

Starting this month until 2 August, The Most Dedicated - An Aotearoa Graffiti Story 2021 - is an immersive exhibition that Berst is part of, showcasing 20 years of Aotearoa's graffiti through the lens of one of the most prolific creative collectives out of Auckland, TMD.

The show is made of artworks, audio-visual displays, interactive elements in a recreation of a nostalgic setting from the crew's past, as well as a section dedicated to post-graffiti artwork.

Beside being one prolific graffiti artist, he's also an educator at Unitec where he teaches Art and Design.

Getting into art was a natural path that opened up to the Berst, whose teenage years in Auckland were spent discovering the graffiti across the train routes.

Berst arrived in Auckland from Hong Kong with his family at the age of three and was raised in the Auckland suburb of Epsom.

"Although there was no typical cultural pressure to keep studying, I went on a 14 year tertiary journey to finish my PhD last year."

Berst's doctorate is on the legitimization of street art.

In the early 2000s trains didn't ply on Sundays. "Walking along the tracks was basically like one public gallery," he said.

"When I got exposed to graffiti and started walking the train tracks, as a teenager what I saw just blew my mind.

"I saw the most amazing artworks, and I was perplexed - how did these people do these things in the night with no lights?"

Berst joined the TMD collective some time around 2008.

The crew was founded in 1997 by artists Phat One and Addict out of West Auckland. Their mission was to steer youth away from painting illegally and show them alternatives and the potential for careers in art.

Over the years TMD became a crew of about 20 graffiti artists - Phat One, Rams, Askew One, Lady Diva, Misery, Sofles and Rimoni, to name just a few.

TMD without a doubt has been pivotal in the lives of many young graffiti artists from its very inception. Berst was one of them.

The exhibition held at Dowse Art Museum is the first of its sort for the crew in a public arts institution. …

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Since 4 November last year, conflict and fighting between between the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigray regional government ruling party, Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) has forced nearly 27,000 refugees out of the region of Tigray in the north-west.

Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been intent on unifying the country by minimizing regional autonomy and Tigray has long resisted - a point of simmering tension for a few years now.

Between the many parties and factors involved in the conflict - the TPLF who held regional elections last year despite national postponement due to the pandemic, the national defence forces' military response to the November attack by the TPLF on federal army camps and Eritrean forces who entered the region, the complexity around the issue is deeply concerning to diaspora.

About 1600 Ethiopians live in New Zealand and a small percentage of them are Tigrayan.

Temesgen Hadera, chairperson of the Tigray Community in New Zealand, was raised and lived in Mekelle - the regional capital of Tigray. He arrived in Auckland in 2012 as a circus arts professional.

Temesgen helped organize the Wellington rally on 25 March, where community gathered to demand an end to the violence and the exit of Eritrean troops from the region.

"New Zealand's government must stand for humanity, it must break its silence."

Intermittent electricity and internet shutdowns across the hilly region of his homeland, has meant Temesgen has had no communication with his family.

"The situation is so bad..it's hard to have the courage to talk about it."

Last month the UN's Special Adviser of the Prevention of Genocide said there had been reports of "extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, looting and impeded humanitarian access" in Ethiopia.

Some worry that this conflict could cause deep rifts between Eritreans and Ethiopians living here, as well as within the wider Ethiopia community that comprises people from various regions of the country.

Kassahun Mulatu from Ethiopia has been living in Auckland since 2010. Referring to the small Ethiopian community living here Kassahun said "we're all one people and have coexisted for a long time. Whoever is accountable for the human rights violations in the (Tigray) region must be held accountable."

He's of the opinion that Ethiopia's sovereignty shouldn't be undermined while dealing with this issue. "We all must stand against any misinformation that may be spread - we're all against inhuman actions."

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This Pride month, after a bit of a hiatus from performing, Drag Queen Black Mamba took to the stage once more.

While Black Mamba is undoubtedly flamboyant - Ives Rose, her official name and avatar, is surprisingly quite the opposite - almost demure.

Ives spent his early years growing up in Burundi, Rwanda and eventually in a Tanzanian refugee camp before arriving in New Zealand under the refugee family reunification programme.

While he rose to the challenge of settling into Kiwi school life as a teen and learning English from scratch, he even became school prefect - but it was concealing his sexual identity that was by far the biggest challenge - and oft times deeply confusing.

"Throughout high school I never came out."

Coming out as gay has been one long and challenge-ridden journey for him, Ives says, referring to religious beliefs and assumptions of gender roles that present massive obstacles and stigma that gay men face.

"Being gay as a refugee, you're a minority within a minority. For many African youth it would be so hard to come out.

"I don't know many here who are from Africa and gay", as opposed to being of African origin from the UK or Europe, Ives explains.

"We are here, but in fear of being ourselves. There are a whole load of assumptions and gender roles are so explicit in our culture."

Ives was raised Muslim but he isn't one himself. At first it was only his first name that he changed. but soon after, it was one of his favourite aunt's name that he decided to take on as his surname.

"In any case, in our family we didn't all share the same surname so I thought it was befitting to change it.

"Another challenge I faced was - I am a drummer - and Burundian drumming is typically male oriented. In the beginning some of them didn't want anything to do with me. I also taught some cultural dances and some parents used to worry I'd try to recruit their children to 'gay-ism'."

Ives went on to contest Mr Africa New Zealand in 2014. "I used it as a chance to talk of homophobia and racism."

And he won the title.

Ives today is a qualified and practising social worker with youth, assisting many from the rainbow youth community.

"I've seen not only children of migrant families but even Pākehā, disowned because they are gay. We have to step in and advocate for them in those cases…

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When Ajaz Patel immigrated to New Zealand at the age of 10, he greeted his Kiwi cousins at Auckland airport dressed in a suit and top hat.

Over a 20 year period of hard graft and perseverance, Ajaz went from top hat to Black Cap, making a successful debut for the New Zealand national team at the age of thirty.

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It was a dream first outing, bowling the New Zealand team to a four-run victory against Pakistan in Abu Dhabi.

Ajaz says his trait for hard work comes from his family.

"I've grown up watching everyone in my family work really hard. My cricketing journey has been a hard slog, I'm always working to improve my game."

He's managed to overcome many obstacles, the first one was the cost of getting into cricket for a newly arrived family.

"Growing up for me was getting my hands on second-hand equipment and what-ever I could get, even the cost of club fees were a big thing."

Ajaz Patel also encountered racism on the field, in the form of abuse, or 'sledging' as it's known in cricket.

"I've experienced it in the past...it's unacceptable, it's never accepted. Sport has no place for it and society has no place for it."

All through the adversity and challenges, his Muslim faith provided him with a firm foundation.

"It is massive for me, I work hard and leave the rest up to God. It helps me rationalise a lot of things, I've seen in my journey that things happen for a reason. If it's negative, I look and ask, what is the positive in this for me?"

Many may have given up their dream to represent their country as they approached their late 20s but Ajaz explains his motivations.

"I think first and foremost I'm Indian, and cricket is such a big part of Indian culture. The money was never the reason, for me it was always about making sure that I was striving to be the best cricketer I could be. I guess the end goal is to become not only the best in New Zealand but the best in the world."

Ajaz has had a tough few months coming back from injury but some delight in his family life. He will be a first-time father in the next month and he's got his targets for 2021 sharply focused…

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Wesley market on Tuesday buzzes with a cross-section of Sandringham's communities and the produce being sold reflects that equally. Olive Minani arrives at the market at 6.30am each week to set up her stall to sell her organic produce.

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Aside from the small green eggplant, yacón and bortelli beans, Olive is known for her bundles of leafy greens that are traditionally popular with Asians and Africans as well - stuff that one can't really buy in supermarkets in New Zealand.

Olive's 3 acre farm near Whenuapai is where all this haul comes from.

"We try to grow good food here without any chemicals."

It's an abundance that came only after years of getting by with bare minimum.

Olive and her family of six arrived in New Zealand in 2009 from a refugee camp in Tanzania - where she, her husband and first-born lived for 15 years.

In 1993 as the Burundian civil war began, thousands along with Olive's family were compelled to leave their villages to seek refuge in Tanzania.

Olive, her husband and their first child left behind their farm and farming life that sustained them and their extended family for generations.

Coming to New Zealand, the absence of their farming life and particularly their traditional vegetables was something that was quickly felt by the family.

In 2014 Olive managed to lease out a few acres in Whenuapai in north west Auckland, and started growing her vegetables.

Today this is a thriving, productive farm tended to entirely by Olive and her family.

"In Africa, we never used any fertiliser or spray - I see they use this here on farms a lot. It makes the plants grow fast, but it isn't healthy.

"I use only manure and make my own compost."

Olive is adamant about continuing to grow manually and organically - it's the only way she's ever known.

"Here it's very hard to grow things - the land is hard," she says wielding her hoe like a pro.

"Last year especially was hard...no water."

"Back in Africa we planted directly and with only water from heaven, nothing else. Here, it's hard."

Around the farm, land is being sold for housing development and it's only a matter of time before Olive's farm could be on the market too.

"We don't know how long we will be here for... if we get a piece of land to continue that will be good... but it needs to happen soon as possible."

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Yan lets out a nervous laugh as he begins to recount a childhood memory - not one of playing games or going hunting but rather of real guns and his forced recruitment into the Tatmadaw, the Burmese army, as a child soldier in the late 1990s.

From the age of seven until he was 11, Yan's troop and fellow boy soldiers became his family - wherever they went, he went.

"All we see is hatred. Everyone hated us. I don't know...I just do what I got told" says Yan, speaking about moving in the jungles and across villages in their region.

"I didn't go there, I ended up there" Yan says about being made to join military school.

When his parents separated Yan left home at the age of seven, wandering about in search of work.

He ended up doing dishes at an eatery in a town outside of Yangon.

Here he was picked up by a so-called 'recruiter', like thousands of children across Burma in the 90s - either lured or threatened into signing up to fight.

Burma's massive military had major problems with morale and desertion.

So it would pay well for recruits to meet its quotas, even if new conscripts were mere kids who'd been tricked, stolen, even beaten and drugged.

In 2002 Human Rights Watch reported that Burma had the highest number of child soldiers in the world.

Most fought for the government army, but the opposition forces fighting against them were also guilty of using children.

After a series of narrow escapes, ambushes and captures, Yan and a friend he made in a rebel camp where he was held, made a run for it and arrived at the Thai-Burma border.

In February 2003, with the help of the UNHCR, he and his friend arrived in New Zealand as minor refugees. Yan was 13-years-old.

After arriving at Auckland's Refugee Settlement Centre, Yan was then relocated to Nelson where he was taken in by a guardian family and began a new life.

"I haven't spoken to my mum in Myanmar for almost 17 years. I called her once, to tell her I'm in New Zealand.

"My daughter will never know everything I've seen. I just try to forget everything and start a new life. I like spearfishing so I do that a lot - it makes me happy and I feel free in the ocean."

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Since 1 February Myanmar has been in the grip of a coup staged by the army commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing.

After November's general election in which Aung San Su Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) saw a landslide victory, the military has claimed fraud and took over this February, while the election commission said there was no evidence to support these claims.

The UK, EU and Australia are among those to have condemned the military takeover, while New Zealand has suspended political and military ties with Myanmar except for humanitarian aid to people on the ground. New Zealand's suspension of ties was one of the first major international responses to the army's takeover in Myanmar.

The coup was staged as a new session of parliament was set to open and Aung San Suu Kyi is currently under house arrest.

Since the army's seizure of power, tens of thousands of people have joined street protests. Early 14 February saw armoured tanks moved into cities - a full show of the military's power, while homes of government workers who joined the civil disobedience campaign have been surrounded by security forces as well.

In New Zealand, the Burmese community has been organizing solidarity marches and protests in Auckland and Wellington demanding an end to military rule, a return to democracy and the release of their elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Ei Mon Thinn Kyu arrived in Auckland two years ago. She comes from a family that's all too familiar with uprisings - her father, who lives in Myanmar was a political prisoner for 16 years following the uprising of 1988 in Yangon.

"People need to know that we're not just fighting for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi but for true democracy."

Ei Mon has been at the front of organising both Auckland and Wellington gatherings, along with an ex-military medical officer who came to Auckland as a student on a scholarship five years ago, who choses to be called Thin.

"As an ex-military person, the first day I heard about this I felt embarrassed and upset," he said. "My brother back home has been part of the uprising and it's worrying. We all need stamina for the fight - it's not a short term one - it's long term."

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When Ghella Abergeldie won the contract to build a new waste water pipe for Auckland, they expected it would be just another day in the office. But then the global pandemic struck.

Ghella Abergeldie JV won the contract to build Auckland's Central Interceptor. A $1.2 billion wastewater pipe, the biggest in the country.

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According to the Watercare website, the Ghella Abergeldie joint venture has more than 150 years of experience with tunneling and wastewater projects.

Jonathan Bordogna (left) and Stefano Vittor try to explain what it's been like living in New Zealand while the coronavirus rampages through Italy.

Stefano Vittor, the project's Construction Manager, said when you have worked on sites during northern European winters, New Zealand is a pretty easy environment by comparison.

But no one could have prepared for the global Covid-19 pandemic. In terms of this project, it has meant some staff have been separated from their families.

Stefano is from Gorizia in the north of Italy, on the Slovenian border.

Stefano's wife was due to come out at the beginning of 2020 but was delayed and then the borders closed. They have spent the last several months going through the process of applying for exemptions.

Stefano is planning a trip home for Christmas, but by the time he sees his wife they will have been apart for a year. It has meant they spent their 24th wedding anniversary apart.

"We organised in a way that I was taking my dinner very late and she was taking her lunch," said Stefano, "She had a bottle of champagne and I had my bottle of champagne."

Stefano missed his 24th wedding anniversary to oversee the construction, including this 30m deep pit.

And while Jonathan Bordogna, the project's Administration and Finance Manager, has his wife and two daughters here in New Zealand. He still has family and friends back in Italy.

"I was born in New York, but my Dad is from Bergamo so that was the (place of the) original onset of Covid in Italy," he said, "Back in Bergamo, when the virus was very rampant, two brothers, up in age, were basically set aside because the ventilators had to go to someone else. Not good stories."

Jonathan's parents have retired to the coast, a town on the tip of Tuscany. His mother has underlying health conditions, "so she has been locked, basically, in the house for the last six months."…

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As a Peace Corp volunteer in Malawi, Tim Vandervoet developed a passion for using agriculture and science as a tool for social change - reducing insecticide use through more biological control of pests being one way.

Vandervoet was raised in Arizona where the family business involved the import of agricultural produce from Mexico into the US.

Although slightly removed from his direct area of interest, it was still an important influence from the periphery that steered him to agricultural science and entomology.

The expansive cottonfields of the Southwest in Arizona were where he began as a scientist, working on maximising biological control of whitefly.

After landing a job at Hawkes Bay's Plant and Food Research Vandervoet focus has now shifted to helping develop more effective biocontrol of the codling moth here.

Each year New Zealand exports apple worth nearly 800 million dollars to European and Asian market - both markets with stringent residue regulations and pest-free standards.

Achieving both these in order to maintain access to these crucial markets means a need for to explore newer and more effective ideas - ideas that help ensure high quality fruit with that ultra-low pesticide residues and pest-free status.

A tactic that has been refined in Hawkes Bay is the air-dropping of sterile codling moths imported from Canada.

These are drone-dropped by the thousands over demarcated orchards and disrupt mating behaviour of the moths and suppress the population.

Covid-19 has disrupted this tactic - with no flights coming in, the import of these moths from Canada has been brought to a standstill for the moment.

So it's back to simple methods. Aside from phermone-laden traps for codling moth, Vandervoet uses simple cardboard traps for the larvae strapped around the tree-trunks, offering several more data points for studying the pest population in orchards and developing more effective biocontrol strategies around this.

"Lowering toxicity, reducing the use of insecticide is obviously good for growers, the environment land and consumers" says Vandervoet

"I'd take an NZ apple over a US apple any day" Tim laughs - "New Zealand has a very good reputation for very low residue fruit".

"What we don't want is to get on a treadmill" says Tim referring to the pattern where one pest dies through once form of insecticide control but it's replaced by another, creating a never-ending insecticide dependence…

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New Zealand's latest Guinness World Record holders know the sweet taste of success thanks to a massive lamington, weighing more than 2700 kilograms, topped with 200 kilograms of jam, 200 kilograms of coconut and literally buckets of chocolate sauce.

Listen to this episode about the World's biggest lamington

2020 has been a rollercoaster of a year for Farhan and Zeenat Sattar, co-owners of Creative Edge Food Company, a bespoke wholesale bakery that supplies goods to cafes around the country.

Zeenat Sattar (left) with Creative Edge head chef and Farhan Sattar (right)

At the beginning of the year, Farhan Sattar set himself a goal.

"He goes, I want creative to be known internationally," said Zeenat, "I'm like, okay. We didn't know how that would happen."

"But yeah, it happened." adds Farhan.

It all happened after they were approached by Suzanne Cannell, founder of Cook's Night Off.

"She was just looking for someone to bake some slabs and I'm like, this is pretty exciting," said Zeenat.

Others donated ingredients and the team at Creative Edge donated their time and expertise.

"We just got more and more involved with it," said Zeenat, "And then my dad, who's a naval architect got involved in designing the lamington, how we would lay the layers on so they wouldn't collapse."

They had other incentives to get involved too, like beating the previous record holders.

"Our lamingtons are quite popular, we sell a lot of them and, you know, what better way to celebrate (that) and beat the Aussies," she said.

"That was definitely one of the selling points," added Farhan, "I got my New Zealand citizenship last year. So now I'm a kiwi. So it was time to be the Aussies."

Farhan is originally from Bradford in the north of England, while Zeenat was born in India but moved to New Zealand when she was 12. After getting married, they lived in England for several years, but Zeenat wanted their children to be raised here.

Both have quite scientific educations, Farhan has a bachelor's in human genetics, while Zeenat studied computer science and pharmacology and has her masters in health research.

They both believe this has helped with their current line of work.

"People say baking is an art," said Farhan, "Cooking is an art. Baking is a science. It's like a chemistry experiment, you've got to follow the steps. If you don't follow steps. It won't come right."…

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In 2006 when Thomas and Mahrukh Stazyk bought the 24 hectare property overlooking the Kaipara Harbour, it was disused and bare pasture land.

14 years later, today, the property is covered in thriving young native bush and bird song is everywhere.

How did this couple manage to regenerate this mini-forest and why?

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Mahrukh, originally Parsee from India, and Tom, American, were both accountants and chose to settle in New Zealand in 2003 after their career had them living all over the world.

Cue Haven as the property is called - Cultivating understanding and enlightenment for short - is about bring people together to create something in nature. The trees are protected in perpetuity with a QEII Open Spaces Trust covenant, planted for posterity.

Since 2008 more than 170,000 trees have been planted here with the help of nearly 4000 volunteers and pro bono support of all manner. Four kilometers of walking tracks too have been painstakingly made throughout the property.

From engineers to ecologists, patrons and donors, local hapu to migrant community groups - Mahrukh says none of this would have ever materialized without their help.

In 2017, the land was given to a trust thereby effectively becoming the community's.

On 11 Dec, last week - a massive professionally built viewing platform was blessed and unveiled - Te Rite o Taranaki - named after the maunga behind the property, Taranaki which is significant to the local hapu, Ngati Rongo of Ngati Whatua.

The land has two historic pa sites, says Mahrukh as she explains the original layout through copies of some archival Crown purchase-documents.

The unveiling of the platform now sets the tone for the couple's efforts to prepare Cue Haven to be open to the public throughout the year - which means adding in facilities and building a proper car park.

For now, volunteers continue to pour in, Colombian, Taiwanese, Indian community groups often come to conduct memorial tree plantings or help maintain the tracks and vegetation. Te Reo classes get held once a week and corporate groups regularly come together to help with more planting.

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Jaswinder Singh, Jass for short, has been growing apples and pears for the past 15 years as well as running a labour supply company in Hawkes Bay.

He's been struggling to make sure all his clients have their fruit trees thinned and vegetable and stone fruit picked on time, with his limited team of workers.

"We tend to have shortages here in Hawkes Bay, but this is the worst shortage I have ever seen in my time here as a grower."

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Covid-19 lockdowns and border restrictions have seen groups of workers from Samoa and Vanuatu staying on past ther end of the last picking season. Jaswinder is a popular man, known to go all out to make sure his workers are looked after.

Most recently, he was in the news for having helped one of his seasonal workers, a pregnant woman from Vanuatu with all the necessary arrangements through her pregnancy while NZ was in lockdown. Unable to work or fly back home, she depended on her RSE employer - Jass's company, Teamworks - to help. Jass, the community along with other RSE workers rallied together help her during the time. The worker's baby was named after Jass's company's pastoral care manager - Maurane Vertut.

About 14,000 RSE workers come to New Zealand each year. Growers and contractors like Jass are making do with some of the 6000 workers who stayed back since the last picking season.

On a hot day in Hawkes Bay, the shines shines strong and relentlessly. The asparagus are ready to pick and there is no time to waste. What would normally be done by at least 15 people, picking is underway with 7 people. Picking under overhead sun isn't what they'd normally do. "They'd finish by 10 or 11 a.m in the mornings" says Jass.

There doesn't appear to be much of a choice at the moment.

At the pear orchard and the vineyards, the warming temperature and recent rains are making everything burst in growth, which means a lot of thinning - an essential task to make sure fruit are plentiful and large. Simultaneously, stone fruit and now becoming ready to pick. So with limited labour Jass has been sending his boys to pick and prune in batches across different blocks and orchards. …

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At 26, Arielle Keil is the first trans contestant and first Filipina to win the Ms Intercontinental New Zealand title and next year hopes to be competing on the global stage.

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Arielle was born in Davao, Philippines, and came to New Zealand when she was four.

"I'd always been feminine. I knew from a young age I wasn't going to be a rugby-playing heterosexual male."

"I was bullied a lot. At one point I had to change schools because it got so bad."

It wasn't until she found K Road's queer spaces in when she turned 20, that Arielle began to feel more unapologetically herself.

Finding a safe space and being herself also allowed to perform drag, and now, at last, fulfil a long-held dream of competing in a pageant.

It's been all a bit like a modern queer fairytale for Arielle.

For Filipinos, beauty pageants are a big deal, and it's as much of a thing as rugby is to kiwis Arielle says.

Arielle was bent on contesting in a pageant pretty much been since 2012, when Canadian Ms Universe contestant Jenna Talakova who is trans, won a legal battle allowing gender-reassigned contestants to participate in contests. Arielle was 18 at the time.

Accepting a queer child was something foreign to her conservative Catholic parents and her family struggled to accept her.

Eventually, back in 2017, Arielle was told to choose - stop transitioning or leave home. She was just 23 years-old and it was nearly too much for her.

Dealing with the impact of this on her mental health has been a challenging journey fraught with attempts of suicide.

In January this year Arielle finally underwent gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, a six-hour-long procedure.

Arielle says her parents have got back in contact with her since her win, something she finds unreal still.

"I still have moments when I pinch myself sometimes."

She says about her win at the pageant that "I hope that my success so far show young queer people that you can be successful. "

The world may see you as an outcast and life may feed to you to the wolves, but you can come back leading the pack."

"I guess the moral of the story is if I can do it, anyone can.

At the end of the day I just so happen to be transgender and in being trans, I'm representing a whole community of people."

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Luise Kreisel and Jule Riggers made New Zealand home in 2020, but they could be some of the last international au pairs to do so for some time.

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Twenty-five year old Jule Riggers has been with her host family for just over a year.

"Highlights are definitely the beaches and the ocean," Jule said of her time here in New Zealand, "I love the water. I got my diving certificate here. Everything's so close together, like you have snow and beach just an hour away basically. That's great."

But she said it was difficult being here when the pandemic first hit.

"The first time we went into lockdown, I didn't know it was that serious and then it all came down and I was like 'Oh no, I need to go home. I'm so far away.' But you can't go home. So that was kind of weird." she said.

Jule's received a short extension on her visa. But she wants to be home in Germany for Christmas.

"As much as I like it here and I really, really like my family, we got really attached to each other and they're like my second family now. But I miss my family too. It's just time."

Luise Kreisel was in New Zealand looking after a four-year-old and a two-year-old as the Covid19 pandemic took over the world.

"I was spending much more time with my host family than I did before," she said. "I can't catch up with friends. I just can't travel as much anymore."

And being stuck at home with the two children during lockdown came with its own challenges.

"Because my boy, he's going to school, so he has to do school work at home. And my little girl, she's not doing school. So she's playing around. It's a little bit tricky to entertain them both at the same time."

Luise did a camper trip with friends between the two lockdowns, something her friends back home in Germany could only dream of.

"Jealousy is a hard word, but I think they are a little bit more jealous of me than I am of them. They were all stuck at home and had summer."

But she says all her friends are travelling now and relaxed about the virus.

"I think they're actually doing quite well," she said, "I have a lot of friends in Spain and Italy at the moment. And they still all work and go to school.They have to wear masks and everything, but not as much as here."…

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On a Saturday afternoon in Newtown, the barberhops are busy. Here at Cultural Cuts, run by Mohummed and Raed Aldani, two former Syrian refugees, a steady stream of groomed and weekend-ready clients exit onto the pavement where more waiting clients hang around, laughing, smoking and getting some of that changeable Wellington weather.

The business of trimming beards and working on those zero fades seems to be a bit of a trend here these days, or so Lazarus, of Iraqi origin and a bit of a Newtown regular, says.

"You can't go wrong with a Middle-Eastern barber - the skill is there. I mean just look at our beards" Lazarus laughs.

"Lately a lot of celebrities and known figures are growing beards, it's as if our cultural lifestyle has gone into the social lifestyle. A lot Middle-Easterners are opening up barbershops lately. I guess it's a trend for former refugees coming here."

Mohummed, 25, and Raed, 23, have come a long way from escaping the conflict in Syria. Arriving in 2014 along with family to New Zealand at 18 and 16 years respectively, providing for their mum and their five sisters became a driving force to their success.

Their story is as much about small-business success as it is proof of their sheer ambition to make it work in their new country, despite arriving as former refugees with next to no money, no English and no educational qualifications. It's also testimony to the opportunity that an incredibly mixed neighbourhood like Newtown brings.

Lazarus makes music and is a friend of the brothers who run this barber shop. But he's not here for a haircut today.

"I have a lot of family that are barbers ... so I often go around to the different barbers just to bring a vibe."

And it definitely is a Newtown vibe.

Hours get spent here at the barbershop catching up, joking, people watching, and generally, yes bringing a vibe.

This barbershop particularly seems a hub of sorts for Arabic speakers from the neighbourhood and in fact attracts a cross-section of Newtown's diverse demographic - men from all over the world really - Somalia, Vietnam, Tonga and beyond.

"I love cutting African hair, because it's thick, shiny and fades look so good" Raed says smiling while focusing on his his long-time Somali client's buzz-cut…

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New Zealand's baseball season usually starts about mid-October, but after a winter of Covid-19 disruptions there's a lot of uncertainty about how it will roll out.

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While the local clubs are getting underway, the Australian Baseball League (ABL) which the Auckland Tuatara team have been competing in for the last three years, has been pushed back until January.

Taiwanese New Zealander Cola Yeh is one of the Tuatara coaches. He's been playing baseball since he was about 11 years old. In Taiwan baseball is a bit like rugby here in New Zealand. It's the number one sport.

Listen to Cola Yeh

Yeh is a submarine pitcher. He represented Taiwan in the Little League World Series and then played for the Dodgers in the Minor Leagues before playing stints with the Nagoya Chunichi Dragons and the CPBL league in Taiwan.

After retiring from life as a player, he got into coaching and ended up on an exchange programme to Auckland University, which led to him coaching the Auckland Tuatara team and the national Diamondblacks squad.

But in 2020 that all changed. When he was coaching in Taiwan, his family would visit during the school holidays. But with the current travel restrictions Yeh feels it's important to stay here.

"The reason I made the decision to come back," he said, "(is) because my kid is into the intermediate age. So as the father, I probably need to come back."

Yeh is happy to be in New Zealand, but is proud of Taiwan's success against Covid19. "Taiwan, I think, is the only professional league in the world that's actually opened up for all the fans'" he said during our interview in late September. Which, he said, has economic benefits as well as the social ones.

"Last weekend, they have one game with around 12,000 fans. They're selling the gear, they're buying the food, (paying for) transportation. If professional sports is still running, it can help the economy grow."

New Zealand could be set to reap some rewards due to our success against the virus too. "Because of covid-19 we changed to two different divisions. One division will be played around Australia and another division will be hosted in Auckland," said Yeh.

But the pandemic does mean games which would normally have started in November, have now been pushed right back to January 2021. And forty home games means a lot more baseball every week…

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For Ian Hoffmann, Ira Munn and Maya Henderson watching the election campaign unfold in their home country, the US, has been a bag of mixed feelings.

Hoffman, a union organiser originally from New York, arrived in Auckland just before the first lockdown in February, and was involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016. This election he's been keeping a close eye from afar while casting his vote from Auckland.

"My partner and I feel incredibly lucky to be living in New Zealand, but there's a bit of guilt there too. Coming out of a political background in Nevada where I was a regional political director for a labour union, there's that feeling that we could be making a difference if we were in the States right now. But there's also anxiety with the elections so close."

Maya Henderson arrived in February too while Ira Munn has lived here for the past five years.

Henderson works with environmental and social responsibility programmes, while Munn is an entrepreneur and formerly taught US and world history; and economics at a high school in the US.

"When in 2015 we left, people asked why are you going to NZ, why we were leaving the United States. The following year in 2016, the internet broke. The Immigration NZ website literally shut down with the influx of people in US trying to access it and trying to find out where to go after the November 2016 elections!" Munn laughs.

"I personally don't see a big difference in the two main political parties. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are left and right wing of the same bird."

Hoffman and his partner posted their votes from Auckland recently.

"We were actually able to track it in California and we know it was posted.

"There's been a serious effort on voter suppression, and in certain states it's incredibly difficult to vote. You've seen lines as long as 10 hours in Georgia.

"This is decades of trying to introduce things like Voter ID and other laws to make it difficult to vote. The Republicans have learnt that if you can suppress voter turnout, they do well.

"We're at least feeling good about our votes in California."

Maya Henderson doesn't feel she's missing out on the action back in the States pre-elections but admits to "a bit of survivor's remorse"…

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Helping teach children this ancient language with roots in Mesopotamia are a group of passionately protective custodians - both young and old, in Wellington.

After a long hiatus of Covid-19 lockdowns, Assyrian language classes are finally up and running again this month.

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"It's a great conversation-starter" says 24-year-old Humasa David about Assyrian language and communities, which many confuse with Syrian. Humasa teaches children Assyrian in the same school and church that she was raised as part of, in Wellington.

Assyrians historically lived across regions of Iraq, Iran, Syria and parts of Turkey as a minority Christian community. Here in New Zealand the community are about 5000 strong and tightly knit - most of whom arrived as refugees from the 1980s onwards escaping persecution in Iraq.

For Wellington which is home to about 1500 Assyrians, there's a surprising number of Assyrian language enthusiasts and cultural custodians - both young and old.

"We were never allowed to speak English as home, only Assyrian" says Humasa about growing up in New Zealand - it seems a recurring comment from many younger Assyrians living here.

Father Toma left Iraq in 2007 and lived in Syria for years before arriving in New Zealand 2015. Today he leads the Assyrian Church of the East in Wellington and teaches older students the language on Friday evenings, while Humasa teaches the younger ones.

In another Wellington suburb, Strathmore, breakfast after Sunday mass is being served in the back. This church is led by 74-year-old Father Aprem Pithyou - originally from the ancient city of Nineveh in northern Iraq.

The soft-spoken priest arrived in New Zealand in 1989 after serving in the army during the Iraq-Iran war. "Iraq was a rich country with several international companies in the past - many Assyrians used to be employed in these foreign companies before leaving, so we knew English, Arabic, Kurdish and Assyrian."

After becoming a priest in New Zealand, his church in Wellington began teaching Assyrian to the children in the for over two decades now. Father Aprem's work with his community was recognized with a Queen Service Medal in 2013. …

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Martin Lee has been practicing the martial art of Kendo for over 20 years. The traditional Japanese style of fencing with a two-handed bamboo sword was derived from the fighting practices of the Samurai who adopted Kendo as a way of cultivating discipline and building character.

For 51-year-old Martin it all started when he discovered the club at Victoria University in Wellington in his mid-20s while looking for a martial art that resonated with his own Asian heritage. Since then, the second-generation Chinese New Zealander has spent years in Japan, graded at 6th Dan and runs his own club - Rembuden Kendo, in Wellington.

This October Rembuden Kendo successfully organized the 21st consecutive national competition in Wellington.

The two-day event saw Kiwi enthusiasts come together and battle it out with their bamboo swords and the intriguing traditional Japanese gear. From the impressive head-gear called 'men', to the robes they wear, this is Japanese tradition that has remained unchanged for centuries.

Points in Kendo are for blows delivered by the shinai, the bamboo sword, on the opponent's sides, top of the head, wrists, trunk and for a thrust to the throat.

The name of the point struck must be called out simultaneously by the attacker with his or her blow and is verified by judges. All this while the right foot moves forward.

It's loud, intense and sometimes there are fierce outbursts. For Martin, Kendo is not about winning - but about humility and self-control.

"What you don't see behind the intensity and loudness is the spirit with which it's fought."

Martin usually competes in the veteran division but it's really more to keep up the spirit of competition and improve. Over the years, he's seen the range of participants and students' demographics change as immigration into New Zealand has changed.

"We have Korean, Japanese, a whole range of students now and many more women too these days. It's about role models."

One such role model is 48-year-old Haruko Tsuzuki who started training in Kendo as a young girl in Japan. "Of course training in Japan is different and much tougher, but I'm happy I found this club." Haruko has represented women's Kendo at international tournaments as part of Rembuden Club."

At the tournament, she came away with the first place in the women's Dan division. "It's more than winning, hopefully I can show younger students correct form and beautiful Kendo."…

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Ramen. Few things beat this steaming bowl of soupy, noodle-y goodness on a cold night. A close contender to Sushi for Japan's national dish, it turns out Kiwis too have a soft spot for this iconic bowl of soul. After the lockdown, it seems that Aucklanders just can't get enough of the comfort food.

For Auckland-based Yuki and her father Nobuyuki Yamaguchi, all roads have always lead to ramen.

Making ramen is something that the Yamaguchi family has done in Japan since the 1970s.

"In 2005 I brought my father to New Zealand. We had a nice meal at a restaurant and he said, Yuki why don't you start something like what we have in Japan."

That was 13 years ago. There's been no looking back for Yuki who grew up watching her father dish out bowls of ramen night after night in their hometown at the bottom of Mt Fuji.

Ramen Takara for the past 13 years has consistently remained a highly-rated ramen house. Warm wood décor, Japanese is being spoken by all staff, and the air is heavy with the smell of miso and mirin. Yuki's in the back making her own ramen noodles as usual, gingerly operating some heavy duty Japanese ramen machines.

It's said that ramen came to Japan via Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century, mainly to Yokohama's China town, which became pretty much ramen central.The city even has a Ramen museum today- more like a massive food-court dedicated to the iconic dish.

Yokohama is also where Nobuyuki-san, now 70, cut his teeth as a chef.

It's a Wednesday night and Yuki's ramen house is full. The energy in the kitchen is high and bowls come out fast and steaming. "Working with young people he says keeps me young" laughs Nobuyuki-san.

"Our miso-ramen is my father's recipe. Most of what I make, I've learnt from my father. I keep it traditional, but will add a twist."

While Yuki adapts slightly to a Kiwi tastes, in many ways she's remains a traditionalist. In Japan nearly 80% of Ramen shops are small business like Yuki's. And that's owed largely to a tradition of owners helping employees start their own ramen restaurants, a bit like a "branch shop" system known as noren wake. And Yuki has similar plans in Auckland.

If I can help them set up their own ramen shops, that will be my next step"

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The woman writing New Zealand's first Asian cabaret is planning a new and possibly confronting look for the genre.

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Amanda Grace Leo who starred in the Proudly Asian Theatre production of Roots is now writing NZ's first Asian cabaret.

Amanda Grace Leo likes to sit in Biskit, a sunny central Auckland cafe, to write and create. It's not far from home and the banana loaf is delicious.

Leo said her cabaret will be Asian by virtue of her body being in it.

The 28-year-old is an actor, singer, facepainter and now, thanks to a Creative New Zealand grant, she is having a go at writing a cabaret.

"I believe that the body is political, I love that phrase, and so it is an Asian cabaret by virtue of my body being in it," said Leo.

"I haven't seen a cabaret in Aotearoa that's completely Asian, so actually, when I say Asian Cabaret, all I really mean is it's full of Asians."

Leo is Chinese, Peranakan and Singaporean, but she has always called Tamaki Makaurau (Auckland) home.

She was born in New Zealand but returned to Singapore when she was nine years old and stayed for nearly a decade.

"I lost my Kiwi identity and it was really hard, really, really difficult," said Leo, "The bright trampoline days of my childhood just seemed so far away.

"There was always this longing for Aotearoa and Tamaki Makaurau specifically because I grew up here," she said.

Leo intends for the cabaret - which is called Motherland - to look at those issues of cultural identity and longing.

After moving to Singapore when she was nine, Leo missed "The bright trampoline days" of life in Aotearoa.

"I am interested in how this cabaret can be confronting and how we can use the mode of cabaret and personal anecdote and all these kinds of things to allow intimate moments," she said.

"So I would love for people to come and, no matter their background, to have moments where they're like 'I relate to that'. Because essentially the theme is about our relationship to our mothers and grandmothers or mother figures. And it's also about our relationship to the whenua."

Leo is writing the text and she has three composers working on a book of ten songs…

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For Boubacar Coulibaly these are days that bring back several memories.

In 1989 when he immigrated to New Zealand to be with his Kiwi wife Jenny, his country was under the authoritarian government of Moussa Traoré. General Traoré was eventually overthrown by public protest and the military in 1991. On 15 September, Moussa Traoré passed away in Bamako.

Meanwhile, there's was a military coup in August and a transitional government is being formed currently after President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita was ousted by soldiers and public protests demanded his resignation on 15 August.

For Auckland-based Coulibaly, these days bring memories of his time in Mali as a student protester calling for democracy during General Traoré's regime in the 80s, alongside reflections on the significance of the recent military coup - the second in Mali, in the past decade.

Recent BBC reports say the signs of a coup were already brewing with Mali seeing several protests this year and public dissatisfaction with corruption and the state of security in the country.

Coulibaly has been on the phone every day since August trying to stay on top of the developments, speaking to his siblings and extended family who live in and around the capital Bamako.

"Every time I go back to Mali I get really proud...I know how much progress and education has happened and how much progress the country has made."

While his family aren't directly affected by the situation, he says the main issue however, corruption, is something that deeply impacts everyone.

Coulibaly remembers protesting in the 80s, losing years of study after university and high school classes were suspended by General Traoré as a result. "In Mali, the students were always the first to protest. Malians are very free people in their minds. They don't accept ruling class to behave in any way."

As a Francophone country traditionally Mali saw people emigrate in larger numbers to Europe rather than to Commonwealth countries like New Zealand.

Over the years the Malian community here has grown as children are born, grow up, and have their own, but according to Statistics NZ those born in Mali number about 9.

As a result, Coulibaly takes it on himself to be a cultural ambassador of sorts. From hosting visiting Malian musicians to being the Bambara translator for visiting diplomats…

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"For Mum there was no other option. She would have died in pain or lonely. This was the perfect ending, I can't say it any other way."

About a year ago, Dutch immigrant to New Zealand, Marleen Bastiaansen, helped her 99-year-old mother end her life in her rest home in Netherlands where euthanasia is an option for those with terminal illnesses.

Along with her three siblings, Marleen said goodbye to Jule Lucas Heinink as she closed her eyes to the sounds of her favourite Chopin piece, Nocturne.

Marleen lives just north of Auckland, in Pūhoi, and has been in New Zealand since the '80s. Assisted dying is something she wishes all people had the option of.

"I want to share my story because when people see how if it's done right, with utmost care and respect for life, it's only a blessing.

"The process was so thorough, and with dignity and respect to life. For me of course, it was a very double feeling, it's hard to say goodbye to your mum, but that was what she wanted."

Marleen was with her mother from the day she decided to discuss her wish with her doctor, to her final day. She says two years before it happened, her mother had already started bringing up the subject. She spoke of it more often as her cancer began to get worse, as the physical discomfort and pain increased and as her condition deteriorated.

"In Holland, is openly discussed, it's not talked about it in a bad way; it's out in the media, everywhere. Everything is discussed openly, and in a clear and calm way with rationale."

Raised Catholic, "that was quite an unusual stance she took" Marleen said, but not altogether surprising for a woman who had always been a forward-thinker and independent thinker.

"I said, Mum, what do you think about your religion? She said the god she believed in wouldn't think it was a sin. She believed there was a god but also felt there were a lot of man-made regulations. She felt that that was not standing in the way."

The day the decision was made and the formal verbal request was conveyed by Jule directly to the doctor, her children were present as witnesses. An elaborate round of protocol-based questions followed, with a lot of stress being placed on Jule's mental clarity, lack of depression and acceptance of all family members…

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Each Wednesday and Sunday, the Takanini Sikh Gurdwara sees hundreds of cars driving into its gates to pick up free food bags. Volunteers line up, open the boots and load up bottles of milk, bags of fresh veg and fruit and even icecream on some days. It's one large, seemless and contactless operation.

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What started in Level 4 lockdown in March as an act of charity synonymous with the Sikh faith, has carried on and now includes mobilizing members of the wider community.

Behind this mammoth effort are two teams of volunteers from beyond just the Sikh community - from Samoan to Cook Island Maori who join others to form a massive packing line to help fill food bags worth around $20 to $30 each.

Distributing free food to the needy is fundamental to the Sikh religion. Daljit Singh, spokesperson of the NZ Supreme Sikh Society says this is for everyone - you can't turn anyone away based on their race, beliefs or religion."

The New Zealand Supreme Sikh Society is made of different Gurdwaras or temples, across the country. During crisis and times of need, resources are immediately pooled together for humanitarian help across New Zealand or even globally.

The scale of the operation here during the recent alert level 3, simply boggles. Apples being trucked in from Hastings, vegetables from Te Puke and Pukekohe, and other items are being bought through cash donations or simply dropped off in bulk and unopened cartons.

Each food bag comprises food for a family of four for a period of two to three days. Each day of food distribution anything between 1500 and 2200 bags are given out, effectively feeding nearly 10,000 people.

Through a Whatsapp group, Daljit organizes this twice a week and within a day usually all food needs are met by people responding on the group with what they're willing to contribute with.

"We receive about 14 tonnes of food each time we put a call out."

"Covid-19 lockdowns have affected many people badly in South Auckland he says, from jobs losses to financial losses. What we've seen is that Covid-10 really united people, especially here in South Auckland. We now work closely with many maraes, churches, different community groups."

"Not just for myself, but I tell my volunteers to spend a whole day helping needy people and just see how you feel. I can't express it in words."…

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Lovedeep Sharma is pretty cheerful for someone with a large needle stuck in his arm.

It's 6pm on a Monday and he's at the Manukau centre of New Zealand Blood Service as part of a group of Indian blood donors across New Zealand. For them, charity and serving the community is a way of life. The nearly 60-member group is called Shah Satnamji Green S Welfare Force and take up all sorts of community welfare activity around New Zealand. With its origins in India, the socio-religious group undertakes activities to serve community across the world - from disaster relief to tree planting to donating food parcels, blood and plasma.

Dressed in their distinct khaki tracksuits, it's hard to not notice the group. "We're on a mission for humanity and the uniform represents our hard work," Lovedeep says.

Giving blood is an essential service during lockdown and this is the group's first donation during alert level 3 this time around. They previously made donations during the first lockdown that began in March this year after being notified of several cancellations of blood donations.

Simar Preet helps coordinate the group and she's here with her husband who's a plasma donor, and her two-year-old daughter who she hopes will become a donor as an adult. Simar was raised in India and watched her parents attend blood donation camps in Chandigarh, a town in the north. "It's an opportunity to save lives - it's so basic, and crucial."

"During the first lockdown there was a shortage because people were a bit scared of donating but we put a call out and had a good response from our group," she says.

Over the years they've made 250 donations, which has the impact of saving nearly 700 lives across New Zealand.

Sharma has been donating blood for about two years now as part of the welfare group and they're on a mission. Lockdown or not, these folk show up no matter what. Most members donate blood once every three months while many donate plasma every few weeks. "My dad received blood and it saved his life - ever since then I've been donating," Sharma says.

Every day in New Zealand a person somewhere needs blood every 18 minutes. That's about 80 people each day across the country…

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In 1944, Karangahape Road in Auckland became home to a unique hospital that opened after the war - a doll's hospital. It was set up by a local couple, the Lawsons, who did most of the restorations.

Many years later after the original owners took ill, the business passed through a few hands, almost closed, and eventually somehow merged with Wrightway Studios about two and a half decades ago.

Ross Stewart manages the large studio these days in Auckland's Glen Innes .

"I never knew myself how important Auckland Doll's Hospital was to people in Auckland" Ross says. "The other day we had a 70-year-old come in with his teddy bear..he wanted it fixed because he took it on the train when he want back to boarding school after the holidays."

From China, to Poland, Korea and Chile, the team here is a real mix of nationalities who restore some of Auckland's oldest antiques, toys and dolls, and they've been working right through the lockdown Level 3.

Sentimental and fragile things that come through door here to be salvaged, demand fidgety and detailed hand-work - a skill that's actually hard to find these days in an increasingly throwaway culture - pretty different from the era a lot of these toys were made in. It hasn't always been easy finding talent within Auckland with this kind or restorative skill.

"That's why we have a United Nations approach here, where different people from all over the world come in..they all bring their own flavour" says Ross about the really mixed work team.

Carolina Arriaza, from Chile, manages most of the doll repairs here. She studied how to make dental implants, which turned out to be quite a useful thing to know now she's working with ceramics, or glass eyes or the faded rubber of vintage dolls. Being brought up in an art and craft-loving family in Chile helped too, with a grandmother and mother who Carolina watched painting, sewing and knitting right through childhood.

Restoring isn't about making an object appear new again, but returning it to its state of authentic and worn look. "Colour matching is quite technical" she says, "it's like aging". Her work station is choc-a-bloc with dolls and teddy bears spanning every vintage. From bisque, to post-war era dolls, to retro 70s dolls. Some even have notes attached from the families seeking to restore them, about how precious they are. …

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We talk to some of the widows of the Christchurch mosque attacks of 2019. The sentencing of the gunman is due to start in Christchurch next week. Widows of Shuhada's writer and producer, Lana Hart, catches up with some of the widows as the sentencing date draws near.

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The gunman of the Christchurch mosque attacks will finally be held to account in his sentencing hearing beginning in Christchurch on 24 August -- nearly a year and a half after the massacre that killed 51 and injured dozens more.

Dr Hamimah Tuyan is coming back to Christchurch from Singapore for the sentencing of the man who killed her husband, Zekeriya, while he and 50 other Muslims knelt in prayer on 15 March 2019.

Tuyan will read out her victim impact statement, pleading with the judge that "he deserves to be there (in prison) for a long, long time till his last breath, because he doesn't deserve to be given a second chance to be part of the wider society who's been loving, who's been compassionate."

The murderer will be in the courtroom too.

"Will I be angry at him?" asks Tuyan. "I don't think I will. Because I think I'm past that. I just keep thinking about how his mom would feel- I'm a mum too.

I feel sorry, in a way, for him and people who support him. What is it that they have not had or found in them, that they have to resort to this sort of ideology or this sort of action or support this man? ... I pity him."

Muhubo Ali Jama, who lost her husband Shiekh Musa in the attacks, says "He already did the damage he's done. And we can't do anything about it."

Even now, Jama says that she can't watch the news when they mention the massacre. "Every time they talk about it in the news, I worry... it makes me anxious again."

New Zealand's national futsal team's goalkeeper, Atta Ellayan, also died in the tragedy. His widow, Farah Talal, now lives in Jordan with her family and their young daughter, Aya. Talal and her family will be watching the sentencing via video link and her recorded victim impact statement will be played in the courtroom.

While it was difficult to write and then record the statement, she says, she thinks it will be worth the effort. "We all I think need a closure from all of us - the New Zealanders too. Whether it was affected families or everyone because it affected us all in one way or another."

…

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Each Wednesday, the Everybody Eats food van pulls into the driveway of the Onehunga eatery, loaded with rescued food, collected and distributed by rescue organizations operating around Auckland. Jamie Johnston, head chef at Everybody Eats, combs through the boxes of unsold surplus from supermarkets, the label mishaps, or vegetables straight from the grower. "It's about being open to using things in a different way," he says. "We often never know what we're going to receive. It's fun, keeps your brain buzzing and really active."

Everybody Eats is a pay-as-you-feel pop-up concept founded by Nick Loosely, based on the ethos of minimal food wastage and shared tables, to reduce both food poverty and social isolation.

It's a cause dear to Jamie's heart. Growing up in a large adoptive family in Kent, England, he remembers eating basic meals cooked by his brothers while his parents managed their business each day. "Food was just fuel to keep you going," he says. "I didn't understand back then and I didn't have a love for food."

After culinary school, Jamie worked as a chef in restaurants and began to form his attitudes towards the efficient use of food.

"In the restaurant world there is so much waste, volume and waste. We have to actually want to change that."

"People don't understand how much further food can go," agrees Archana Kurup. Originally from Chennai in South India, Archana was hired to help Jamie and came on board just after lockdown ended. "In New Zealand food is expensive. I think lockdown also taught a lot of people that; to make a better, well-planned meal."

Archana runs an in-home dining business and knows first-hand the importance of efficient use of produce. Working at Everybody Eats is now an extension of her personal ethos that she runs her home business with. Archana works closely with volunteers each morning who help put together some 300-odd meals that go out through some of the charity partnerships the restaurant has. "The cause - it's something that everyone comes on board with very easily" she says. "As professionals in all of our careers we want to achieve something great. But it's also really cool to get to the stage in your career where you can give back with the skills you have…

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On 14 June 2020, Queen Street resounded with the sound of over 2000 people who came together calling for an end to racism. This second Black Lives Matter rally in Auckland saw a sea of people gathered at Aotea Square in the afternoon in solidarity with victims of police brutality in the US, and in solidarity with black, indigenous, Māori, Pasifika and people of colour living in New Zealand. Behind the gathering was a group of young Auckland based activists - Favour Ukah, Nele Kalolo and Lourdes Vano who call their group FTP - For the People.

Drawing from their experiences of racism combined with the guidance of mentors - activists and academics both, they managed to pull off what was their biggest rally ever, mostly over Zoom calls and Facebook messenger. Amongst the people they sought support and guidance from were the likes of Will Ilolahia of the Black Panthers, Makanaka Tuwe and Dr Camille Nakhid, Associate Professor at AUT's School of Social Sciences.

"You couldn't say no to them if you saw how they worked together and played to each other's strengths. I saw the diversity in their opinions and not just tokenism, but in equity" says Camille.

The girls were invited to speak to Camille's class at AUT last week. The course is in Civic Engagement, and they spoke to a full lecture room about their personal experiences with racism in New Zealand, and their involvement with youth activism. "They know the mahi" says Camille. "Having them in that class, and my class is predominantly women - they need to see women reflected back at them, they see that the sisterhood is strong" she .says.

"One of things about activism is that you will have cognitive dissonance where your values will conflict. It helps having mentors who you know have paved the way for you to get into such spaces" says Nele.

One of the more common questions the girls have been asked both before and after the rally was why police brutality and George Floyd's death in the United States, has any bearing on New Zealand society. Speaking of racism in New Zealand, Favour says "a lot of people are trying to deny it doesn't exist here. I think if the foundations are the same, the soil is the same, the fruit will be the same. It may look different but it tastes similar. We have to talk about here" Favour Ukah says. "One of our main goals is to localise these problems and shed light on the fact that Māori and Pasifika are highly racially profiled," Lourdes adds. …

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People who say there's no racism in New Zealand aren't listening to the communities saying they're being hurt, Filipino comedian James Roque says.

Roque is the face of the Human Rights Commission's new campaign - Racism is No Joke, launched in response to Covid-19-related racism.

Roque said there had been a huge spike in racism aimed at Asian New Zealanders since the outbreak, including online jokes, memes and comments.

The Racism is No Joke campaign is a series of videos and a community focused Facebook and Wechat group to share resources about racism with members of Asian communities, and to offer a forum for sharing experiences.

The campaign was set up after the Human Rights Commission and Office of Ethnic Communities heard from communities about increases in verbal and online abuse.

Between 1 September 2019 and 31 January 2020, HRC received 23 complaints relating to racism; an average of 4.6 per month. From 1 February 2020 to 30 June 2020 they registered 72 such complaints, an average of 14.4 per month - a three-fold increase.

Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon said the campaign addressed online racism, that often manifested itself in anti-Asian memes and jokes.

"When people put their feet in other people's shoes and the victims' shoes, they will think 'wow, that could be me', and hopefully they will curb behaviour and also they could be an anti-racist as well, so hopefully we can actually change behaviours through this campaign."

Roque said the target audience was people who didn't realise their jokes and actions were contributing towards oppressing people.

He said when he first started comedy he'd also make jokes about his ethnicity.

"The types of jokes I would make about my ethnicity were very self-deprecating. they were funny and they were good jokes, they were well-written jokes, but at the expense of my own identity as an Asian New Zealander. They would get laughs, but I think eventually over time I realised I didn't need to do that in order to get the laughs," Roque said.

"It was about five or six years ago that I realised, oh no, I can use this to make points that would be tough to swallow in real life for some people."

Roque said he under-estimated his migrant parents growing up and it wasn't until his 20s that he reconnected with his roots. …

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The idea for Tuma Hazou's book Dances with Death, was born on a Christmas dinner a few years ago while poring over old photographs with his sons. Among them was a picture of him with 16mm Bolex, injured and with a blood-stained forehead.

His brother insisted on taking the image when he came home after narrowly dodging death while filming during an air-strike in 1967 Jordan-Israel war.

With a bit of persuasion from his wife and children, Tuma began recounting and documenting all the incidents in his long journalism career where he had similar near-misses during the war and hostilities in Jordan, Palestine and Israel. There were several.

Tuma was born into a Syriac Christian Arab family in Jerusalem in 1938. His family, along with thousands of others, became refugees after the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

Tuma became one the youngest journalists with BBC Arabic at the age of 22 and spent most of his career covering the Israel-Palestine conflict.

His first book "Dances with Death" was launched this month in Auckland, and is a vivid and detailed description of what he witnessed and experienced, not only as a journalist but also as a Palestinian.

Today, 85-year-old Tuma lives in Auckland with his Kiwi wife Virginia, who he met in Jordan in 1968. Virginia at the time was working for King Hussein as a nanny for his twin daughters.

"He was a handsome man. Whenever we toured the country in Jordan, people would look at him and ask if he was the Tuma Hazou - they all had radios and had heard him," Virginia said.

It will be 50 years next March since the pair met and they have shared a lifetime across two different continents and very different worlds.

Tuma is relieved to have finally finished and launched the book after a long lockdown.

"I hope it serves a purpose - I hope it will shed some light."

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It was through discovering Islam that Veronika Edali found herself on a journey that eventually led her and husband Volkan to set up their business designing and selling "modest active wear" - a line of swim leggings, tunics, hoodies and of course, colourful, breathable sports hijabs.

Veronika arrived in New Zealand as a 15-year-old international student from a small town in Russia, Koppeysk. Converting to Islam at the age of 18 was a result of her curiosity, research and digging into the faith - and meeting Volkan in highschool, originally from Turkey and Muslim himself.

Flooded with questions from Veronika, Volkan's own knowledge of this faith increased through their relationship. "As a teenager, there was only so much I knew about religion" he says. "We had lots of deep conversations. One day when she decided to convert, I was like - OK cool, if that's what you want to do..I wasn't expecting it."

At the time she was contemplating taking up Islam, Veronika lost her father back home in Russia. "I was looking for answers, I always had a lot of questions. And I found the answers I was looking for in Islam. It's been eight years and I haven't looked back."

The next turning point in her journey with the faith was three years later, when she decided to wear hijab in 2015.

"I asked myself, what are you waiting for? And so I took the next step.

"I was already dressing modestly but when I wore hijab, everything just got a little harder. I loved swimming, boogie-boarding. Going for a run, you get sweaty and hot in this turban that I wear..it's a lot of fabric and pins. I was getting very uncomfortable. I'm sure so many women are not able to live their lives fully, enjoy the beach, the outdoors. And we live in New Zealand!"

A transformative South Island road trip and a shared fitness programme later, the pair decided to take control over their time and health, and started putting together own start-up business - making fitness friendly, functional and modest active wear, including a hijab that stays on through even the most rigorous workout.

"I thought if I was struggling, I'm sure hundreds and thousands of other women were too, so let's go from there."

Veronika was a full time photographer and Volkan trained and worked as an aeronautical engineer before they both decided to start the active wear label. They plunged right in and took up handing their new venture full time.

"We've worked so hard to get here..blood, sweat and tears have all come in handy" says Veronika. …

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Akiko Crowther is New Zealand's only Grandmaster in Japanese calligraphy - it's a title bestowed in Japan and earned through years of dedication to this very meditative practice.

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For the past 100 days and through the Covid-19 lockdown Akiko-san has been writing endless rows of sutras each morning as part of both her calligraphy and Buddhist practice.

Sutras are Buddhist religious texts. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean traditions, copying and reciting them through memory is considered an act of deep discipline and devotion. Akiko-san has been praying through this daily ritual, for an end to Coronavirus pandemic.

Today, her otherwise rather Zen exterior today gives way to excitement. Akiko has just been selected for the Ambassador's Commendation Awards for her contribution to promoting Japanese culture in New Zealand.

How did a journey that began in 1956 bring Akiko San from Japan to Nelson?

She began learning calligraphy at the age of five in Tottori, a small south-western town of Japan where her father was a country vet. As she grew up, Akiko only pursued it as a hobby and wasn't particularly excited by the idea of a profession in calligraphy. She was after all, surrounded by master calligraphers in her family.

It was only after meeting Tim Crowther, an artist himself, that she embarked on a journey to start teaching calligraphy - something that she'd put on the backburner for many years. The pair discovered a bond founded on a love for art - a bond that took them from being married in Santorini, to living in Vienna and then Prague where they set up their first calligraphy school and gallery in the early 1990s.

Yorshire-born Tim, had long held a dream of living in New Zealand and managed to convince Akiko to move - she agreed only on the condition that if she didn't like it, she'd be on the first flight back to Japan.

And so, in the middle of a sub-zero Eastern European winter they decided to up and leave and landed in New Zealand on a warm summers day - that was 15 years ago. They've lived in Nelson ever since and together they run the Yuyu Gallery in Nelson and have held numerous shows and workshops across the country over the years…

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Rose isn't exactly your typical truck-driver - she's small and petite but packs a punch wrangling her Class 4 freight truck. Not quite what she expected to end up doing when she left the refugee camp she lived in for 20 years in Nepal.

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Rose, whose first name is Bishnu Pradhan, is from the minority Nepali-speaking community of Bhutan. The ethnically Nepali people are called Lhotsampas, or 'southerners'. For a woman of this community, Rose seems to exemplify what it means to break all moulds despite arriving in New Zealand from refugee camps in Southern-eastern Nepal.

In the early 1990s several thousand people from her community fled to Nepal, facing persecution and oppression in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Many were rendered landless or deemed illegal immigrants in Bhutan despite generations of their family having been born raised in Bhutan.

New Zealand began taking in refugees from this Nepali Bhutanese community from 2008 onwards.

"We lived in the camps for about 20 years. Between that time I had an arranged marriage, I was 16. My son was born when I was 17."

Today, while most refugees from the 7 former camps in Nepal have been settled in third countries, a few thousand continue to live in camps in south-eastern Nepal. Rose's family were lucky to find a way out. The family and Rose with her husband and their two young children arrived in the Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre in 2010.

Shortly after, Rose divorced her husband to whom she was married to as a teenager.

Rose decided she had no time to waste. She enrolled in adult school and had to learn English from scratch - one of her biggest challenges.

"I was married at 16 and it was so hard..at a young age you had to do everything. It was my study time, not my marriage time. I never got a chance to do anything...when I think of my life 15 years ago, I feel sad. I don't want to think of those times. I want my children to do what I couldn't do. I told my friends in Nepal now, I live in heaven" she says.

Today, Rose is surrounded by family in Nelson. Her mum's house sits on a hill overlooking the town, and sees a steady stream of siblings, nephews and nieces coming and going. And there's always tea boiling away on the stove. …

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"It's the world's game. It's called the beautiful game because it can bring countries and bring people together."

Hone Fowler is a man on a mission - to make football accessible to all and create elite pathways in the sport that encourage and tap into Aotearoa's diverse sporting talent.

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A footballer himself, Hone's the founder and chairperson of Manukau United Football Club. They like to be known as one of Aotearoa's most ethnically diverse sports clubs and are solidly founded on the ideas of equity and social cohesion through sport.

Hone early in his sporting career had his share of disappointment, disillusioned with the glass ceilings present in professional sport. He speaks of barriers to entry into the world of professional sport that are based on demographics, socio-economics and ethnicity. Hone's no alien to this and it's these barriers that spurred him on to actively seek and implement solutions. Manukau United is one of them.

"It comes in response to frustration but also injustice. There is sense of inequity that exists in our society as New Zealand. I first became aware of it when I heard how my grandparents were beaten in school for speaking their language (Te Reo Māori).

"I'm the first footballer in my family. We didn't have the political or social capital, and it's the same with people who are new to Aotearoa, they don't have social capital to propel them into a sports career. I thought that was unfair. Coming from South Auckland which is a diverse neighbourhood, these communities are missing out on feeling a sense of belonging in the game, but also the game is missing out. There's a lot of talent. You shouldn't have to feel excluded for the colour of your skin or the language you speak.

"Racism in football exists, it's a real concern. We're trying to shine a light on that, bring that into the agenda, because we can do things in a better way where more people feel included and have a sense of ownership of the game."

A sense of social justice has long run in Hone's family. Roger Fowler, his father, is a well-known and prolific activist…

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The Covid-19 pandemic claimed Waikato's much-loved and prominent refugee leader last month. Ismail Diriye Gamadid passed away in Mogadishu, Somalia on 25 May after a three-week struggle with Covid-19. He was on a humanitarian visit to flood victims in an area also affected severely by Covid-19.

At the time of his death, he was serving as Minister for Agriculture in the region of his birth - Puntland, an autonomous province in Somalia.

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At the Hamilton Gardens on a sunny day in June, nearly 100 people have gathered to remember and commemorate the life and legacy of Ismail, fondly known as a 'gift to Hamilton'.

It's an emotional farewell to this popular Somali leader. Ismail arrived in New Zealand as a refugee from Somalia in the mid-1990s. For 20 years he served his community as President of Waikato Muslim Association and Waikato Refugee Forum.

There's a cross-section of people at the gathering. Politicians, community social workers, government representatives from the Ministry of Social Development and people across the Muslim, refugee, immigrant and many African communities from Waikato, Auckland and even Canterbury.

Ismail was clearly loved by everyone whose lives he touched.

Dr Mustafa Farouk originally from Nigeria, leads FIANZ, the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand. He and Ismail shared a close friendship over the years.

" was definitely larger than life. Ismail loved to tell stories - he always had a proverb, a story for everything. Some stories that only an African person could appreciate. You'd never be bored if Ismail was around. When you travelled with him he always came prepared. You knew there'll always be a lot of coffee, food and you'd always be entertained," Farouk says.

"But most of all, he cared for people. No matter who you were, Ismail was always there for you. He also had a strong command over Somali language and history."

Ismail's love for Somalia drew him back there a year and a half ago to serve in the regional government of Puntland, in the northeast of the country. …

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Melana Khabazi's passion for dance has seen her travel the world and helped her find her place in it - Aotearoa.

"I think dance is amazing and an outstanding way of expressing yourself. The plan wasn't to go and stay here, the plan was to study, and go back to Russia, but obviously that didn't happen."

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Ten years ago, Melana Khabazi and her sister Marika moved here as teenagers to study. Melana was just 16-years-old.

The youngest of three girls, Melana was born in Georgia in 1993, two years after the country broke away from the Soviet Union.

"Our parents never told us much about what happened but from what I know it was a tough time. It's almost an unspoken something that we didn't really talk about," says 26-year-old Melana.

Her mother is a lawyer, and her father used to be a dancer and a choreographer in Georgian National Dance.

"Georgian dance is quite powerful and strong, basically a folk dance that is quite famous and popular," she says.

Compulsory military service saw her father Guram move from Georgia to Ulan-Ude, a city in Russia's Siberia, and where he met Melana's mother, Olga.

"My mum left everything and she moved to another country with my father which is quite amazing because obviously it's a whole different culture, different people, different language. She was on her own. She has to adjust and live there, but I know that it was quite tough times," she adds.

But in 1995, when Melana was two-years-old the family returned to her mother's home in Ulan-Ude, in Eastern Siberia. It's where the deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal is.

"Ulan-Ude is part of Siberia. If you want to do the Trans-Siberian railway, you will go through my town," says Melana.

It was a melting pot of nationalities in Ulan-Ude, and Melana was no stranger to being around people from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities.

"Growing up it was a norm for me - so many different people, so many different cultures..' it was interesting and I accepted it all," says Melana.

The joy she got from expressing herself through music and movement began when she started school.

"Me and my sister we went to a gymnasium, which is not a normal school, it's basically like an arts school, so you learn dance, you learn music and you learn theatre," she adds…

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"When I started growing, it was crazy how my neighbours started reacting. I started to make a lot of friends with them. I had passersby saying thank you for growing these sunflowers!" I had 30 sunflowers extending their heads over the fence at one time."

"It's all about extending your love - not just to your family, but beyond - your neighbours, friends, extending your love to all living organisms."

That in a nutshell pretty much sums up Charles Buenconsejo's attitude in life - both in his garden and outside.

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Charles and his wife Grace - who he says is his 'first garden', moved to New Zealand four years ago. Settling in was far from easy for the couple. Struggling to find work while making do with low-cost, cramped accomodation shared with neighbours who ranged from ex-prisoners to prostitutes, gang members, addicts and struggling migrants all in the mix, was an anthropological insight, as Charles calls it. It was a rough landing into New Zealand that was a result of a Google search that pointed them to the cheapest accomodation in Auckland - which in hindsight Charles describes to have felt more like a 'correctional institution". It was a picture they hadn't quite seen in the brochures they were given in Manila about migrating to New Zealand.

It was after while when they slowly started saving some money and made some contacts that they eventually moved to a home in a suburb in west Auckland. A home with a backyard. But a shadow of cultural dislocation and depression followed Charles. Unable to find work, trapped at home while the building sites next door drove him further into his isolation and sense of displacement. He found himself caught in a vortex of Youtube algorithms that peddled fear of a "dystopian future". Working as a self-employed artist and photographer, each day became a hustle to find work.

Charles came upon Stone Soup, a community run magazine by Aaron Mclean - an ardent advocate of connecting community through food, a passionate gardener and a photographer himself. The two became friends quickly. Aaron spoke of the ideas of 'changing the algorithm' and learning how to 'engineer paradise' simply by getting out and getting one's hands dirty by planting…

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Lockdown and Ramadan make for a very unusual combination. The month of Ramadan is distinctly marked by gatherings - for prayers, the cooking and sharing of meals at the end of a long day of fasting. Beginning 23 April this year for most Muslims in New Zealand observing the fast in lockdown has been more challenging than otherwise. But this month is also about reflection and generosity - two things that remain unchanged despite lockdown.

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Tariq Habibyar was born in Afghanistan during the war. Arriving as a refugee in New Zealand and having built a life for himself and his family here, he set his mind on helping uplift the lives of children and families back in Herat, his birthplace.

This past month he's been determinedly running an online fundraiser for children in Herat, a hotspot of Covid-19 in Afghanistan. He intends to send the money raised here to help feed kids and families struggling during the lockdown, most of whom survive on daily wages. Habibyar aims to send - through his network of trusted volunteers - food packages comprising basics like rice, lentils and oil.

"I'm just trying to bridge my two homes, New Zealand and Afghanistan," he said.

Habibyar is a career counsellor at Massey University and an ardent advocate for educating youth back in Afghanistan. Over the years he's been involved in several projects to help raise funds for school children there. "We don't just want them to survive, we want them to thrive," he said.

It's a belief that Mariam Almasri shares. Almasri, originally from West Bank, Palestine, is passionate and unwavering in her sense of purpose. She comes across as someone who has a mind for business while driven steadily by empathy.

Importing produce and products from Palestinian farmers, craftsmen and women's cooperatives, her social enterprise 'Preserved Identity' has been donating a percentage of the proceeds to help uplift families in Gaza, provide Ramadan food packages and fund uniforms for kids. …

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'Girmit Day' is marked on 14 May each year by the Fiji Indian community in New Zealand as a day to reflect on their shared past - the British colonial indenture system in Fiji. It's also a day that celebrates the birth of the community's identity and their uniqueness as a diaspora.

The years between 1879 and 1916 saw over 60,500 people transported on ships to work on plantations in Fiji. On board these ships were men and women from India lured by promises of a better life - one which they were told by recruiters, lay at the end of a short journey. Many were recruited from so far inland in India that they'd never seen an ocean. Most were poor farmers who left drought and hardship hoping to return home to their villages in India after a while.

The first of these ships, The Leonidas, docked in Fiji on 14 May 1879 - the short journey the emigrants were told about turned out to be a long and arduous journey across continents.

Over the following years ships specifically fitted out to carry large numbers of human cargo plied the route regularly. Labourers were taken to the Indian ports of Calcutta and Madras from where ships left. The Indians that went to Fiji were among the several thousands who travelled from British India to work on plantations in the Caribbean, islands in the Indian Ocean, Guyana, South Africa and Malaysia amongst other colonies over a period of about 100 years, starting from 1833 when slavery in the British empire was abolished. The indenture tenure system was to make up for the loss of labour caused by the 1833 abolition.

The Indian workers under contract came to be known as Girmitiya - a Hindi take on the the word 'agreement'. The workers were bond to a five year agreement, the Girmit, which was extendable. On finishing five years, they were permitted to return to India at their own expense, or serve ten years and return at the expense of the British colonial government. Some people returned at their end of the indenture but most stayed back as they either couldn't afford the journey back or lost virtually all ties to their homes and families in India and stayed on.

Life on the plantations was cruel - mistreatment was rife and living conditions were harsh. First-hand accounts both oral and written, as well as songs called 'bidesiya' in Fiji Hindi composed in those years lament the loss of their homeland, displacement, deceit and the harshness of life as workers on the plantations…

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Like most musicians and artists across the world, Wellington-based tabla player Chetan Ramlu had a string of gigs cancelled with the onset of lockdown level 4. Not before long he started looking at how he can keep himself musically engaged and productive - and so he got started with Lockdown Gharana.

"All we can really do is make the most out of this situation and I'm hoping this project will do that" says Chetan.

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Lockdown Gharana had its genesis in the sheer need to make music through the lockdown. A collaboration between south Asian classical and traditional musicians and singers across the world, the project produces and releases a song almost each week on their Facebook page. Each song is recorded collaboratively online through mobile phones by artists across four to five different countries - from Pakistan to Canada to India.

A few weeks before lockdown, Chetan had his friend Sangeet Mishra, a noted Sarangi player, visiting from Mumbai. The Sarangi is a centuries-old bowed and fretless stringed instrument from north India, known for its melancholic sound. It's also said that the Sarangi is one of the rare instruments capable of replicating the subtlest nuances that only human vocal chords are capable of. Sangeet is of the "Banaras Gharana" and the 8th generation of his family that plays the instrument professionally.

In north Indian classical music a factor that distinguishes musicians from one another is the "gharana" - the school, lineage or apprenticeship they come from, which are cities all across the country. Each gharana has a particular and unique nuance to the form of classical Hindustani music they teach.

Earlier in March this year, Sangeet and Chetan played at a sold-out show at the NZ Festival with the ensemble Shades of Shakti. They were then to tour the country with a series of smaller shows. As the coronavirus crisis compelled New Zealand to go into a four week lockdown, most of those gigs ended up cancelled and Sangeet was flown back to Mumbai on one of the last flights before borders closed. What was going to be a successful summer tour in NZ was sadly cut short abruptly for this touring musician and his Kiwi counterpart, Chetan. …

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David Jebanayagam met Naing Minh Aung in February this year for the start of Naing's community orientation activities, but for now their only interaction is a few phone calls each day.

"As a volunteer, I'm learning how to effectively support a community member, a former refugee, from my home" says David Jebanayagam, a refugee support volunteer with New Zealand Red Cross.

Each year, the New Zealand Red Cross helps settle hundreds of former refugees in new homes across the country.

During this lockdown the Red Cross is actively supporting 358 families - about 1300 people all together through their long-running volunteer programme.

New Zealand Red Cross is a primary provider of resettlement support for refugees in New Zealand - from assisting with language, creating employment pathways, providing trauma recovery support, and assisting with restoring family links and member identification in cases of separation.

After spending six weeks in the care of Immigration NZ at Auckland's Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre, refugees are all then resettled in new communities across Palmerston North, Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, Invercargill, Nelson, Hamilton and Christchurch.

The coronavirus lockdown has brought things to a halt for many refugees who were expecting to move to their new homes in our eight resettlement cities.

Rachel O'Connor, GM, Migration, NZ Red Cross, says there are approximately 150 families in Mangere who couldn't be settled before lockdown and are being cared for and supported by NZ Immigration. She says once lockdown level changes they may then leave there and be settled in communities. That's when Red Cross begins to work with them through the volunteer programme.

With them each step of the way are volunteers helping with language, orientation, activities like grocery shopping, understanding ATMs, accessing WINZ support, registering at their local GP - things that are all very significant for every new arrival into the community.

Most volunteers are placed with families and individuals for a six month period. They usually meet with their newly resettled family almost every other day in the first few weeks. The first two to four weeks of a placement are generally the busiest as they go about helping with settling in tasks. After the first six weeks, volunteers typically spend time with their family or individual on a weekly basis…

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"On Wednesday when we went under lockdown and the emergency alert came through on our phones, suddenly my mind was taken back. The emergency alert sounded like the whistle the killers were blowing when they came hunting for the people.

"It was a heavy night and I couldn't sleep. I started closing the doors and windows. Sometimes you think these things are gone, but little things can trigger that time, that period of the genocide," recalls Judith Mukakayange.

Judith, 46, has lived in Auckland for a little over two decades yet memories of when her country was ravaged by genocide remain fresh in her mind.

April 7 marks 26 years to the day when the Rwanda genocide began, a massacre in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsi were killed by Hutu extremists. Many moderate Hutus lost their lives too, the exact number has not been to established till today.

On the night of April 6 1994 a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, and his Burundian counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira was was shot down above Kigali. All on board were killed. Hutu extremists blamed the surface-to-air missile attack on Tutsi rebels who denied it and in turn blamed the Hutus.

The incident opened the floodgates to 100 days of slaughter during which an estimated 70% of the Tutsi population was killed.

Ethnic tension and power struggles between the two tribes had simmered over many decades prior to the shooting of the plane. Historically Hutus were the majority, Tutsis formed a smaller portion and made up a ruling monarchy previously while the Twa were an even smaller minority.

Animosity between Tutsi and Hutu was exacerbated by colonial Belgians who arrived in 1916. Their divisive policies fostered discrimination and favouritism, laying the foundations for ethnic divide.

By the 1950s, when anti-colonialism and pan-Africanism spread and the independence process was underway, the ethnic divide between Hutu and Tutsi had already had taken deep hold in Rwanda. By 1961, Hutu and Tutsi were well and truly pitted against each other with each grappling for power in the newly-declared republic.

Juvenal Habyarimana was Rwanda's second president, his government actively backed by France.

His assassination opened the doors to a hundred-day massacre across the hilly and densely populated country…

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For a woman whose entire life revolves around serving the community, the Covid-19 lockdown is a challenging time compelling her to make hard calls that affect several people in the community - often the ones in most need.

Ranjna Patel is a 3rd generation Kiwi Indian Aucklander and a Queens Service Medal recipient. She's a true community woman with her finger consistently on the pulse, loved by and inspirational to many in the community. She's been responsible for the genesis and running of three community institutions around in South Auckland. The Swaminarayan temple in Papatoetoe, East Tamaki Health clinics, and Gandhi Nivas, the family harm prevention center.

The lockdown imposed by the government affects each of these spaces in a unique way, somehow highlighting their need in society even further.

"These are all people-based, delivering to people in need..so it's a very hard time for us in our heads" says Ranjna.

Gandhi Nivas was founded in 2015 by Ranjana and works with trained counsellors to offer an emergency space and counselling for men who commit family harm or are about to, instead of the women and children leaving home. They are referred to the centre by the police within 24 hours of the incident. By using holistic early intervention methods, counselling and culturally nuanced approaches, Gandhi Nivas has seen huge success rates since they've opened their doors.

The lockdown period could see surge in family harm incidences, with the police preparing to respond to such an increase. At such a time services like Gandhi Nivas seem even more important. It was a huge dilemma Ranjna was in, just a day prior to lockdown. Ranjna had to take the call to shut the doors to keep her staff, the providers of the centre's service, safe and healthy. She's had to resign to the reality of the lockdown.

While this community institution of hers is shut during the lockdown, East Tamaki Health founded by Ranjna and her husband Dr Kantilal Patel, has been working on overdrive. What started in 1977 with one solo GP clinic, Ranjna and her husband today help provide vital medical services to the community in South Auckland. One of the things Ranjana identified early in her career was the need for a diverse cultural workforce that understands the community…

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Sister Irenaeus Murphy says that turning one-hundred is "just another birthday".

As she talks, she has a twinkle in her eye and a kind smile. She is very humble and doesn't like fuss, especially if it's over her. "I've always been quiet" she says in her very present Irish accent.

The youngest of nine, Sister Irenaeus was born Ellen Murphy, on 25 February, 1920, in the small village of Taghmon, southern Ireland. When commenting on how she has kept her accent considering she's lived in New Zealand for eighty years, she instantly replied "why wouldn't I?" in a fantastic lilt followed by an infectious laugh.

Growing up on a small farm, convent life wasn't even a consideration until her sister Finbarr left for New Zealand in 1938 to become a Mercy Sister. "I think it was a whisper from above that I decided to follow her. And I think the main thing then was I missed her so much... we were very close, just a year between us."

18 months later in the thick of World War II, the young 19-year-old said farewell to Ireland and boarded a ship bound for Aotearoa. "It took nearly two months to come. I think because of the war they had to take extra precautions."

One of the 'extra precautions' meant limited time above board, and no lights at night to avoid submarine sightings. This would not have helped with the sea sickness experienced by Ellen and the two young nuns who joined her.

She arrived in New Zealand on January 31 1940 and entered St Mary's Convent in Ponsonby, Auckland.

Back then the main occupations on offer for nuns was being either a teacher or a nurse. Irenaeus was told she was to be a primary school teacher and with the luck of the Irish it suited her perfectly. "Little ones always gave you a laugh... someone had compared them to electrified fleas, children were always on the move and jumping."

She taught in the Far North at Pawarenga and Kaitaia for over 23 years. A source said she is something of a legend up that way. She also taught in Ponsonby, Otahuhu, Avondale, Manurewa, Henderson and Northcote until her retirement in 2005.

Over the past century, the Church and the convent have undergone many changes mainly due to the Second Vatican Council which Pope John XXIII created in 1962 in an effort to modernise the church."There were certainly big changes in the convent. The biggest one was changing our dress after so many years. Everyone knew when we were in a habit, who we were... it was very strange."…

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A year ago it was at an 'iftar', the Muslim evening communal meal, that Petra Zaleski a Vicar, met Naomi Johnson of the Progressive Jewish denomination. The church service and iftar was organized by Petra's church as a gesture of solidarity with Auckland's Muslim community in the wake of the attacks on March 15 2019 in Christchurch.

Exactly a year later Petra, Naomi and Jenny Janif from the Muslim community decided to come together again, but this time it was on a bus.

The interfaith event, Multiple Blessings, took place on a sunny Sunday in Auckland and was organized by these women of the three Abrahamic faiths to mark International Women's Day and the anniversary of the Christchurch shooting.

"I was floored by the response in our church last year...just to see Muslim whanau and our church members come together to mourn the tragedy that had occurred in Christchurch. When Naomi called me few months ago about the interfaith event I was very quick to say yes, it was an opportunity I couldn't resist" Petra says.

Before the bus sets off Naomi encourages the women to sit next to someone they don't know. "Otherwise the point of today is defeated" she says.

The peals of laughter and chatter that shortly follows, revolves a lot around scarves, food, politics and cultural customs. It's a pleasant cacophony that rings through the bus. But for this group of women the bus trip isn't just a joy ride. It's about coming together as change-makers and advocates for peace and understanding - an understanding that is arrived at through breaking stereotypes and increasing awareness.

A Japanese lady sits next to a new convert to Judaism. I see the Tongan Christian lady sitting next to the South African Muslim of Malay origin. The Uighur former refugee sits next to a Christian lady from Auckland; the latter says she's more Buddhist in her practice than anything else. Meanwhile I find a seat next to Petra.

Petra seems an unlikely Vicar with her large retro glasses, winged eyeliner and tattoos across her forearms and chest. As a teen she was raised Catholic by Polish and English parents. Looking at things critically seems to come naturally to her, thanks to her mother's journalistic background…

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Naima Ali was at Polyfest in Auckland when she first heard a lone gunman had attacked two mosques in Christchurch, on March 15 last year. She went to her car and locked the doors. But within 24 hours she had joined a group of volunteers on their way south to help families of the victims. What she saw and heard over the next fortnight has further spurred her work with high school students.

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28 year-old Naima Ali struggles to talk about her experiences in Christchurch. But what she went through has had a profound impact on her job as a refugee student coordinator at Mt Roskill Grammar, she works with children from refugee and ethnic minority backgrounds supporting, counselling and mentoring several of them.

On the night of March 15 last year, she was part of a gathering of community members, leaders and non-governmental representatives who decided to go to Christchurch to help support the victims' families. Supported by the Ministry of Social Development, the group was deployed the very next day and ended up working across homes, hospitals and community meeting places providing cultural and emotional support to families.

Ann Dysart, Manager Community Relationships at the Ministry of Social Development's Community Investment Services, helped coordinate the volunteers.

"What I saw happening was community would come to them.They spoke the languages and you know in times of trauma English can desert you. They would talk to them, understand the issue, help them connect with other agencies, act as interpreters where they needed to... they were very much is demand."

In Christchurch in the days that followed the mosque attacks Naima worked closely with 59 year-old Ahmed Tani, another former refugee from Somalia. Ahmed runs the Canterbury Refugee Resettlement Resource Centre and is Chair of the New Zealand National Refugee Association. He's seen first-hand the violence of civil war in his home country and has since 1999 been involved in helping settle and support refugees in Canterbury.

Naima came from Somalia to New Zealand as an eight year-old and while their individual experiences as refugees are different, their paths intersected as volunteers in Christchurch. And he was impressed with what he saw…

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Produced for RNZ by Saraid de Silva and Julie Zhu | Made possible by the RNZ/NZ On Air Innovation Fund

In this episode Voices, hosts Saraid de Silva and Julie Zhu of the podcast series Conversations With My Immigrant Parents, turn the mics on themselves and talk with their own immigrant mums.

Co-hosts and producers Saraid de Silva and Julie Zhu travelled Aotearoa met families from 11 different countries in this series.

Note: The second half of this episode has an English dub of Jenny's dialogue, translated by Julie Zhu and read by Jing su-Cornall.

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To hear the full length episode and other episodes, check out Conversations with My Immigrant Parents . This is a series where immigrant whānau have conversations they normally wouldn't, crossing barriers of language, generation, and expectation.

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Being the only Mangarevan speaker in Aotearoa, doesn't seem to bother Ena Manuireva.

This may be because he's a man with a mission - to keep his language, and culture, from going extinct.

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Mangareva is the central and largest island of the Gambier islands in Ma'ohi Nui/French Polynesia. It's just over 1600km southeast of Tahiti, and is best known for its black pearls.

The more romantic translation of its name is, floating island/mountain, but it can also be translated to island of Reva - which is the name of a poisonous fruit.

With a fluctuating population of 1000, only a fifth - around 200 people - speak fluent Mangarevan. The eldest speaker being 86 years old and the youngest 46 years.

Younger generations have few opportunities to learn it, or be inspired to learn it. It was removed from the local school curriculum in 2014, funding is lacking, and it's not being spoken in many homes.

Ena says the position Mangarevan finds itself in, is due to the influence of a more "dominant culture".

"It's a total immersion of French. Especially for the kids. I was there to do my MPHIL , and I was asking the kids 'how do you identify yourself? Mangarevan, French or Other?' because there are seven different regional languages in French Polynesia, with all the dialects, they all said to me 'we are French'."

While sparking interest in the 'kids' is a must, Ena says the older generations have a part to play.

"When people retire , they don't do anything. They water the garden. They would have better lives, if they were able to teach. They should be telling the stories, teaching the kids in Mangarevan. You know, you can't water your garden for 12 hours, every day."

Mangareva is not alone when it comes to needing urgent help, if their failing culture and endangered language is to survive.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), more than a third of the world's 7000 languages are currently classified as endangered, and over half could be extinct by 2100. With only 200-odd speakers, Mangarevan is considered "severely endangered". …

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The 21st-century dating scene is a fast-paced environment that's equally as flaky as it is fun.

Apps like Tinder and Bumble have been a game-changer for anyone looking for love - but does technology help or hinder people when it comes to intercultural dating?

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"I haven't dated any Indian girls so far," says Harpreet Singh.

Harpreet, who is now in his thirties, moved to New Zealand eight years ago to study and is now a working professional in Wellington.

When Harpreet arrived here, he was in a long-distance relationship with a girl in India. In the end, he called it quits.

His parents had never met his girlfriend and because he was leaving New Delhi, he was unsure whether the girl was a good fit.

Ten years ago, the dating scene in India was different and Harpreet says hook-ups weren't a thing like they are today.

Indian girls were keen to get married and preferred to be intimate only if there was the chance of marriage at the end of it, he says. That's a lot of pressure for a young guy.

Here in New Zealand, Harpreet has a relaxed approach to meeting new people.

All of his dates so far have been with Pākehā girls.

"Maybe the Indian girls don't like me, so that's why they don't swipe right."

Harpreet uses Tinder and says in his experience, girls here prefer white guys.

As soon as he tells girls that he's from India some ghost him, he says.

But that hasn't deterred Harpreet, who says he's not prepared to lie about his background just to get a date.

Harpreet is outdoorsy and adventurous with an interest in snowboarding, surfing and hiking.

He'd like to meet someone open-minded, career-driven and independent who pursues their own passions.

"I'm really bad at trying to understand another person, so for me it takes time."

Sara, 29, comes from Chandigarh about four hours out of New Delhi.

"I think everybody I know is using Tinder unless they're married," she laughs.

"I mean it's easy to date, but it's hard to be in a relationship these days..."

Sara has been single for two-and-a-half years, and her longest relationship lasted two years.

She's looking for someone who's ambitious and has their life sorted on the career front.

She prefers someone who is tall, with a subtle personality - she's not into nightlife and partying…

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Paris Baker's love of bowls came from an act of love.

At first, 15 year-old Paris hitched a ride to the bowling club with her dad, Dave Makasini, just because the bowling club was near a mall.

When Dave had a stroke, Paris started to play games with him, as a way of helping him recover. It turned out she was a bowls star in the making.

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In this episode of Voices, RNZ Pacific sports reporter Talei Anderson tells the story of how Paris took her talent to the world champs and won.

Read Talei's full story here.

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From humble beginnings, grower-turned-green grocer Jack Lum has spent half a century cultivating a thriving business through hard work and quality produce.

Jack Lum turns 77 this year and his business - Jack Lum Fruit and Vegetables in Remuera, Auckland - turns 50. Yet his work ethic, just like his passion for produce, hasn't waned, even as other small businesses close up shop as they come under pressure from the corporate big boys.

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Jack and his wife Carrie opened their Remuera business in May 1970 and their current shop - in a converted bank - in 1988. But just across the road is a New World and Jack says supermarkets are killing off businesses like his. He remembers when there were four green grocer shops in the Remuera village; today, his is the last one standing and one of only a handful left in Auckland.

"It's all sort of hairdressers, beauty stores and banks and real estate agents. Because the fish shop's gone and the butcher's gone," Carrie says.

"I think I'm one of the two or three really genuine ones left, because when the supermarket opens they've got to get their business somewhere, so it's mainly smaller shops," Jack adds.

"If it wasn't for the Asian supermarkets I reckon the supermarket's pricing would be a lot dearer. The Asian markets are keeping them honest, because you know around the country there's no small fruit shops left. They've killed off the whole lot, and they'd love to kill us as well".

Jack's father Lum Young Hoy came to New Zealand from China in 1927.

"They're from, in those days it was called Canton but it's got so many different villages. Ours was called Zhongshan which is just across the border from Macau," says Jack.

"We were growers, that's all they seem to know when they come over from China".

During the Japanese invasion of China, which began in 1937, around 200 Chinese wives and their children took refuge in New Zealand.

Jack's mother Lee Way Hing came here by boat as part of the War Refugee Scheme in 1939, escaping the political upheaval just before the Communist Revolution. Jack was her second son of four boys who were all born in Auckland…

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Ron Falconer's story is so unlikely, immigration officials didn't take it seriously at first.

Now, Ron's honesty is standing between him and a life in New Zealand.

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Like any modern-day romance, elderly couple Fiona Lundy, a Kiwi, and Ron Falconer, a Scotsman, met online and fell in love.

In 2014, Fiona suggested Ron come to Aotearoa to visit her for three months during the wet season in French Polynesia where he had lived for many years.

When Ron arrived in New Zealand that first time, in December 2014, he wanted to be honest.

"I had a really strange story about being sent off a deserted island which I never took seriously as it was a harmless situation but I had been removed from an island... well actually two islands," admits Ron.

So, he ticked the YES box on the immigration questionnaire that asked if he'd ever been deported.

He was stopped by an immigration official and told them the story.

Essentially, it goes back thirty years, to when Ron was working as a caretaker on Millennium Atoll. It's a pristine uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Back then, it was known as Caroline Island, the Kiribati government renamed it in 2000.

"I was there for 4 years with my French wife and two young children," explained Ron, "But the guy who had the lease lost it or rather it ran out and a businessman got interested in the fishing and all the things he could gain from the island. He wanted me off the island 'cause he wanted to kill the turtles and fish and collect what he could. He wanted to rape the island basically. He wanted me out of there."

Ron said the businessman used his Kiribati connections to get him booted off the island. Ron received a letter asking him to leave, so he did. He took his family and sailed away.

More than twenty years later at New Zealand's immigration counter, Ron told officials he'd written a book about his experiences called 'Together Alone'. The official checked his story out.

"She said hey yeah you did it and it's a good story and you got good reviews," recalls Ron.

"I mean I was protecting the island but I was essentially deported. So when I got to NZ and wrote deported, I thought I'd be honest."

And with that, Ron was allowed in. He left and returned a second time to marry Fiona.

Still no trouble getting into the country…

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A driving school in Auckland offering subsidies on lessons for refugees is appealing to the public for help.

Due to growing demand, the Migrant Action Trust manager, Amie Maga, said they need more donations and volunteer staff and driving mentors for The Puketāpapa Community Driving School.

Amie said they need at least $7,000 to buy another dual control practise car plus a driving simulator to help nervous learner drivers.

"This is very helpful for someone with zero driving experience and going in a driving simulator will give confidence (and) hopefully after some sessions it will help them drive on the real road."

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The Puketāpapa Community Driving School has been going for two years already in an Auckland suburb known for its diversity of cultures and communities.

"It's the Maori name for Mt Roskill," said Amie. "We are one of the more ethnically diverse communities but happy to support all people and help them try to get a job."

"We help the whole family by getting one driver."

The project, which is a community-owned social enterprise, offers subsidised lessons to a refugee learner for every fully paid driving lesson.

The school takes into account cultural and religious considerations and a translator can be arranged if needed.

"So, several organisations get together to make it more migrant friendly and more culturally appropriate as many of the women prefer woman mentors and instructors as many of them are Muslim women."

Islam Khalelo, has been in Aotearoa New Zealand for four years now as a former refugee from Syria.

"It's very good and helpful and I feel lucky because I heard from others before...it is expensive to have to pay in full."

Islam reckons she has an elephant foot and her husband often tells her to slow down. Unlike driving in Syria, Islam said people in New Zealand follow the road rules.

Islam's driving instructor and mentor is Susan Matencio.

"I started as a volunteer 2017 when we launched this and then after a year, they told me would you like to consider being a driving instructor?

"And they said the skill is there and I have had a lot of good feedback from students and you have a lot of patience…

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