A fortnight after the floods in Tāmaki Makaurau and as Aotearoa New Zealand braces for Cyclone Gabriel the reality is setting in for many.

Mother of four Kataraina Toka’s Mount Roskill home is yellow-stickered after being damaged by flooding on January 27.

For now, she is living in a two-bedroom hotel room in Onehunga.

“We’re getting there. It’s hard, it sucks you know being cooped up in somewhere so small with four kids. But better than not having a roof over our heads at all I suppose.”

Toka is looking for a new rental home but like many others is struggling.

“If you think it was bad before, it’s worse now. It’s hard, especially when you know you’ve lost all your ID because somebody dropped their phone in the water or we’ve got no car to get around so it’s just making it to where we can.

“But we’re just grateful for the support that we’ve got.”

Displaced whānau
Māori health provider Waipareira Trust has been helping many whānau in West Tāmaki who have been displaced.

Management lead Jole Thomson said one family in particular stood out.

“Their house was one of the first ones to be red stickered — it was destroyed. Kuia, kaumātua, and they’ve got care and custody over their mokopuna who has special needs and house concerns.

“They’re getting kicked out, basically, of their emergency accommodation.”

Other whānau stayed at schools such as Mount Roskill’s Wesley Primary School which was turned into an evacuation centre when the floods hit.

But some tamariki haven’t been able to return to kura.

Wesley School principal Lou Reddy has noticed the absence of some of his students.

High-risk situation
“We’ve got six that we know are in that high-risk situation where they lost their car, lost their home, are in a temporary housing situation and we haven’t been able to get them here.

“The others, there’s 10 that we haven’t been able to get a hold of at all.”

Thomson said that was a common situation, with some whānau no longer having the resources they need.

“We’re working with a number of whānau, helping them pay for things like school uniforms and a lot of that we’re supporting, they don’t want help. I was watching people trying to dry school shoes so the kids could wear them to school.

“But they’d been destroyed, they had been in raw sewage.”

The Ark Project in Mt Roskill, which works to assist vulnerable families, was a massive part of the evacuation effort and organisers estimate it helped more than 5000 people with kai parcels.

Barely anything left
Co-ordinator Peter Leilua said each day they started off with plenty of supplies but by the end there was barely anything left.

The team did not have enough resources to keep providing for whānau, he said.

“That’s our biggest push to the government, Ark needs a lot of that support, because in our community and Wesley, Puketāpapa, Mount Roskill, we got hit the most.

Many families were being placed temporary accommodation some distance from their community.

“It’s not just around the corner. They’re placing them at Greenlane, Onehunga, some are out South or East and that’s just too far for them to travel,” Leilua said.

Damage from the flooding has extended beyond financial and material loss.

Thomson said whānau have had to throw away taonga or family treasures.

“The photo albums, the whānau heirlooms, the korowai that have been handed down for generations just absolutely destroyed and that’s heartbreaking for whānau.

“Ashes, you know whānau not knowing how to manage those sorts of things, the remains of their loved ones,” Thomson said.

While whānau such Kataraina Toka’s continue to try to rebuild, many know they’ve got a long journey ahead.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

“Noa’ia ‘e” is a greeting people hear when you meet anyone from the island of Rotuma in Fiji or when they visit the Whānau Community Hub in Auckland’s Mount Roskill.

This doubles as the Rotuman-Fijian Community Centre.

It is run by Rachel Mario and her team for a whole host of purposes — a range of different programmes and activities.

On any day they could be delivering grocery parcels, health and wellbeing classes, or training community elders (Wednesdays), language and financial literacy classes for children (Saturdays), and leadership training,

You name it and they’re probably doing it.

Mario says the centre hasn’t only been hosting the Rotuman whānau, but it’s also a “home” for other stakeholders such as Asia Pacific Media Network, government agencies, and faith communities.

As chair of the Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group Inc., Mario now wants to throw in her leadership hat for the local board.

Standing for Puketāpapa
So she is standing for the Roskill Community Voice team for Puketāpapa Local Board (Mount Roskill).

She loves doing social work and hopes that she and her team will be elected in the October election — and she vows to keep working hard to be the voice of the wider, diverse community in Mount Roskill.

Apart from running the busy programmes at the centre for her Rotuman community and other whānau, Mario has been advocating about issues of social injustice that her community has been facing for years.

Some of these issues include the housing crisis and alleged discrimination on distribution over resources for the Rotuman Language Week celebrations.

“The biggest challenge, which isn’t fair, is the discrimination against us, the Rotuman community. In the Ministry of Pacific Peoples, they want to run a rival language week up against ours,” she says.

“We started in 2018. In 2019, because they didn’t want to list our language week, they didn’t want to list anything we do regarding our endangered indigenous language.

In response to a question from Tagata Pasifika about the allegations of discrimination faced by Mario’s group, the Minister of the Pacific Peoples Aupito William Sio denied this, saying he was disappointed to hear about it.

Successful programme
However, in spite of the challenges, the Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group successfully ran the language programme in May.

Other issues include the cultural identity of children born from intercultural marriages. However, the Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group has embraced all children who have Rotuman blood.

TeRito Peyroux, a member of Rotuman Congregation at Kingsland Methodist Church, says that for those who could not speak Rotuman, “we are who we are, it’s much bigger than our language fluency.”

“It is about our sense of belonging and the people that are nurturing and supporting and being with us. For me, that means that having the privilege of celebrating language and culture in this foreign land makes me very humble,” she says.

Tupou Tee Kamoe, who is also one of the executive members of the Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group, cites a quote from Green MP Teanau Tuiono that he had made in his maiden speech in Parliament which she has adapted for bicultural Rotumans:

“People often ask me, ‘am I half Rotuman, half Pacific’, and I say ‘na bro, I am not half anything, I am whole, if anything I am double — if I was a beer I would be double brown, if I was a flavour at the dairy, I would be twice as nice at only half the price.”

Laurens Ikinia is a postgraduate communication studies student at Auckland University of Technology and is a frequent contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz