My Account
For three years, Taabeta Tebau and her husband Amuera worked two jobs, seven days a week so their children could leave Kiribati and join them in New Zealand. They were living at Riverhead at the time, but have since shifted to Puhoi where they are respected members of the Kiribati community. Taabeta is a Kiribati United Church deacon and a Pasifika Migrant Services Trust director, and both positions involve considerable time and effort spent on helping members of her community settle into the Kiwi way of life, as she explained to Jannette Thompson ….
The people who come to New Zealand from Kiribati may as well be coming from Mars. The island way of life is so different from what they come to in NZ where they have to fill out forms for just about everything, the food and language are different, and there isn’t the same family and cultural network to support them. There are 33 islands that make up Kiribati and on many of the outer islands, in particular, people still live a very simple subsistence lifestyle. They eat what they can grow or catch in the sea, and life revolves around the church and the family, in that order.
I was born in Nauru, the eldest of seven children. My father worked in the phosphate mine and I was 11 before I even saw Kiribati. Schooling was limited in Nauru, so Mum and Dad sent me to a boarding school in Kiribati. But they knew it would be hard for me because I was used to an almost European lifestyle. I didn’t realise it at the time, but because they were worried about how I would cope, Dad resigned from his job and they moved back to Kiribati to support me. I am blessed to have such loving parents. Settling into life in Kiribati was very hard. It was a big shock to find that the school I attended had no power, food was cooked on an open fire and there was only an outside toilet. It took me months to adjust and I was quite sick.
After school, I became a nutritionist with the Peace Corp. This involved working with communities throughout the islands, teaching them how to grow the different vegetables they needed for a balanced diet. It was very enjoyable work. In my spare time I played a lot of sport and dreamed of being a flight attendant. But the Government had other plans. In 1989, it decided it was going to build a factory and myself and another lady were sent to NZ to learn to be machinists. We spent three years here training, before returning as supervisors. But the seed had been planted – I wanted to return to NZ. And why wouldn’t I? Here I was on the minimum wage of $7.50 an hour, but back in Kiribati, as a supervisor, I was paid $1.10 an hour.
I packed up and went back to Nauru, and worked in a supermarket. And, like all Kiribati people living overseas, once a month I would send money home to my parents through Western Union to help with the education of my younger sisters. Life is hard in Kiribati – the capital is over-populated and there aren’t enough jobs. People depend on their families overseas to help. Added to this now are the impacts of climate change and sea level rise. The country is virtually disappearing under the sea. There used to be an islet where we would go for picnics – now it doesn’t even exist. It is very scary at high tide because the sea is undermining the roads and flooding is becoming widespread. It’s why so many people are trying to leave. Every April, people from Kiribati can apply for residency in NZ under the Pacific Access Category (PAC) scheme. Thousands put their names in the ballot, but the quota is only 75 families a year. We’ve been asking unsuccessfully for that figure to be raised to 1000. Those who come to NZ have six months to find job. If they don’t, they are sent back to Kiribati. It is always very sad for me when this happens because I know that often these people have sold everything they own to pay for their flights. They go home and are even worse off than before. That’s one of the things I work very hard on … getting them a job offer. Members of the Presbyterian Church in Warkworth have been very supportive in this regard. Employers like Hamish Alexander at Southern Paprika have also done a great job in helping us. I was very grateful when Hamish agreed to my request to pay his employees’ bonds and permanent resident visas, and allowed them to pay the costs off in small weekly instalments from their wages.
While still working in Nauru, I returned to Kiribati on holiday and that’s where I met my husband Amuera. It was actually an arranged marriage. He approached my family initially and then we had a meeting. I wasn’t very happy with him at first. It’s hard to meet a man and be told you have to love him. But my uncle, who is a good judge of character, agreed to meet Amuera the next day and give me his opinion. I was in the bedroom listening to them talk and then I heard my uncle say, ‘Yes, you can have her’. He then came to me and said, ‘If you don’t listen to me and marry this man, then you will be passing up very good luck’. My uncle was so right. Amuera is a very kind man, who is a wonderful husband and father.
We decided that NZ was going to be the best place to raise our children – Amuera had four when I married him, but this grew to eight children altogether – so we left them with my parents and made the move. We got jobs picking fruit and vegetables on farms at Massey, working from 7am to 3.30pm, and then in the evenings and on weekends we cleaned offices. Sometimes we wouldn’t get home until 2am. It took three years, but eventually we saved enough to bring all our children to NZ one by one. We lived on tinned corned beef and fish, and once a week we would buy a big box of chicken carcasses for $5. We were pretty naïve at first, but as time went by we got the confidence to start looking for better jobs. Amuera moved to a café job in St Lukes where he was paid $380 a week. On that wage we paid $180 in rent for a three-bedroomed house in Riverhead, raised eight kids and continued to send money home to family in Kiribati. Sometimes I wonder how we did it, particularly when we were often the first place that a lot of Kiribati people came to when they arrived in NZ! Somehow we always found them some food and a place to sleep. That is just the Kiribati way.
We moved to Puhoi when I got a job at Puhoi Cheese nearly 11 years ago. The owners liked the way we worked and there are now a number of my family working there including Amuera who is a cheese maker. Warkworth has the largest Kiribati population in Auckland and I am so grateful for the way the schools have embraced our culture. Language is still probably the biggest hurdle our people face when they arrive, especially the teenagers because, unfortunately, they make fun of each other when they try to speak English. There is a lot more that can be done to help and I am totally committed to seeing my people given better opportunities. I’d like to see a preschool set up for Kiriabti children run by Kiribati teaches and we already have funding to run a driver training course. We recently participated in the Pasifika Festival in Auckland and it made me so proud to see our youth on the stage alongside all the other Pacific cultures.
Last year, my parents came to live with us in Puhoi. When I received the email telling me they had been granted permanent residency, I couldn’t believe it. I ran around the house carrying my laptop and crying. I rang them up and said, ‘Guess what? You are going to be Kiwis.’ Sometimes my kids tell me I should slow down and spend more time with them, but that’s not the way I was raised. Mum and Dad always put the needs of others before themselves, and that’s the example I’ve followed. Besides, that’s the Kiribati way.
