1 Captions by Julie Taylor. Edited by Tracey Dawson. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017 (RELAXING MUSIC) Lower Hutt is New Zealand's seventh biggest city, with a population of about 100,000 people. Even though about a third of Lower Hutt workers commute to Wellington each day, this place isn't like a capital city, it's like a big small town, with working-class roots and a character all of its own. I was born in Colombia. My mother and I fled to Ecuador in fear of our lives when I was just 12, and we came here as refugees when I was 18. Lower Hutt has been a welcoming place for us to make our new home. It's a diverse and accepting place with almost a quarter of all our neighbours born overseas. In this episode of Neighbourhood, we'll enjoy some Venezuelan hospitality. Yeah, these are recipes that I was born with, pretty much. Like, every single Venezuelan will know how to cook this. Like, you know that Mexicans, they have their tortillas? Well, as Venezuelans, we have arepas. A Lower Hutt local shares the stories behind her music. This instrument is called guzheng. It sounds like flowing water, so it's like a stream, and that's one of the reasons why I chose guzheng, because I thought it would sound really nice. We'll explore issues of gender in a local art exhibition. You can essentially feel any gender on the gender spectrum on any day. It changes for me, which is why genderqueer sort of encompasses the part where I don't have to be male or female or... Yeah. WHISPERS: It's confusing. And a refugee from Syria finds fertile soil in his new home. Khaled's just got an incredible wealth of knowledge in food production. I think, possibly, given the opportunity, he would feed everyone in Lower Hutt. I am Daniel Gamboa, and this is my neighbourhood. (UNEASY MUSIC) At my primary school in Colombia, local terrorists would line up the boys and take away the ones they wanted to fight with them. My mum owned a successful restaurant, and she had to pay them protection money so they wouldn't take me away. One day, they knocked at the door and asked her to store some weapons. When she refused, the rebels threatened to kill me. We left the same night. We left our family, our friends, our possessions. We left everything behind and fled to Ecuador, where we were given refugee status. After six hard and unhappy years in Ecuador, we turned to the United Nations for help. They said, 'New Zealand.' We didn't even know where New Zealand was, but they just said, 'Take it or leave it.' Of course, back then, we didn't know how coming here would completely transform our lives. TRANSLATOR: I miss Syria, but it is not safe. How can you love your country when it is not safe? (SPEAKS ARABIC) Syria, before the war, was a beautiful place. But when the war started, everything changed. (SPEAKS ARABIC) TRANSLATOR: Because they started putting the bombs on the school, and we were scared to send them to school. We stayed in Syria for a year after the war started, then left for Lebanon. In Lebanon, we could finally get a good night's sleep because we didn't have to worry about bombs going off. (ALL CHAT IN ARABIC) (KIDS SQUEAL HAPPILY) (PEACEFUL MUSIC) TRANSLATOR: We had never heard of New Zealand, but the United Nations said this would be a good place for us. They sent us here to Lower Hutt, and we have felt very welcome. (SPEAKS ARABIC) TRANSLATOR: New Zealand is a very beautiful country. My children love it here. (LAUGHTER) They love their school, and we all feel very safe. I worked as a gardener in Syria. So did my father and grandfather. It was our job, our livelihood. (SPEAKS ARABIC) My garden was very big, around six acres. We planted all sorts of fruit and vegetables, which we sold. When I came to New Zealand, my back yard was all grass. I turned all of the grass so I could plant a garden to feed my family. (SPEAKS ARABIC) I have planted as many vegetables as I can. We have about 150 eggplants. If we can't eat all of them, I will give them to some of the other Syrian refugees. I love my garden. TRANSLATOR: The Syrians here want to work. We are hard workers. I'm not used to taking a benefit from the government. It makes me feel like a beggar. I'm used to earning money myself. My dream is to have my own business again. Until then, I am trying to keep doing what I love, and the community has been very supportive of that. Good morning, Julia. Good morning, Khaled. How are you? I am good. We're at the Unity Garden at Epuni School in Lower Hutt. It's a crazy experiment, really, to gather the community together around the shared idea that if we cooperate and support one another, then we can feed our children here. So it's very much a village response to the caring of our children. Khaled, in Syria, do you grow basil? Yes. In greenhouses? In the greenhouse. In the greenhouse. Yes. New Zealand, we grow outside, but very thick leaves outside in the garden. Yeah. So, Khaled's been with us for about eight months now. There's a lot of work here that can't be done by the children, and it's an acre of food production, so it really needs some care and guidance outside of what the children could offer. Khaled's just got an incredible wealth of knowledge in food production. I think, possibly, given the opportunity, he would feed everyone in Lower Hutt. In this community where we have this incredible fertile soil and a lot of people that are needing the knowledge that Khaled has, that's an incredible gift for us. Julia. Yes? In here... Yes. An olive. One, two, three. Not many olives, Khaled. No. CHUCKLES: No. TRANSLATOR: Julia has helped to give me more purpose in my life. It's a far cry from the fruit orchard and 600 olive trees I had in Syria. But at least it's a start. And it's a good chance for me to experiment growing in Wellington's climate, which is harsher than back home. It wasn't just providing Khaled with some employment every week, we also wanted to support him in his desire to establish himself as a gardener and food producer here in Lower Hutt. (SPEAKS ARABIC) TRANSLATOR: I'm very happy here in this job. I'll keep working towards a better future for my family. I hope, one day, I will be able to get some financial assistance to start my own market garden. Then I can help other refugees provide for their families as well. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time with Grandma because Mum was working all day. I remember she would make these delicious Colombian sweets for me all the time. I really missed her so much when we left. One of the biggest challenges refugees face when being resettled, is that they are separated from their families back home. It is really difficult to feel settled when you are lonely and in fear of the lives of your family back home. I'm so blessed that by the end of 2015, my grandma came to New Zealand to live with us. Now she cooks these delicious Colombian treats for me all the time, whenever I want to. Mmm. Buena? Mm. (SPEAKS SPANISH) Hi. My name is Carlos Luis Garcia. I was born in San Felipe, which is the capital of Yaracuy state in Venezuela. You know, very, very much like New Zealand, very green, beautiful, surrounded by farms, cows, yeah. Good life. One night, one of my friends took me out for dinner, so we went out for dinner, and then we went out to a pub, and I was playing pool, and I played with this guy from New Zealand, and that's how I met Toby. Yeah, he was working over there on an exchange programme as a teacher. We had a civil union back in 2005. It was funny cos I wanted to cook a dish, and I told Toby that I needed to go to buy a frypan. And on the radio, we heard that the civil union in New Zealand passed; the law passed, right? I was like, 'Right,' you know, 'This is good for New Zealand.' So we were at Briscoes and then I found my frypan, and I went down on my knees and asked him to marry me. I proposed to him with a frypan. Well, tonight, what we're gonna do, we have a couple of Venezuelan friends coming around with their Kiwi partners. We're gonna cook some traditional arepas, which is a cornmeal, sort of like pita bread, you know? Yeah, these are recipes that I was born with, pretty much. Like, every single Venezuelan will know how to cook this. Like, you know, like, Mexicans, they have their tortillas? Well, us Venezuelans, we have arepas. We can eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner or for a snack. You know, they're always on the Venezuelan table. So, what we do, we just make the little balls like that. Right? And then you flatten them out a little bit so you get, like... kind of like a pita-bread consistency. You can find arepas in different countries, but the way we make it in Venezuela is different. Like, in Colombia, they use the same cornmeal, but they don't stuff the arepa, they just put the filling on top, you know, like a tortilla. You know, in Venezuela, we just stuff it with different flavours. As Venezuelan and Latin American, we are very flamboyant. You know, we use a lot of spices and chillies, you know? Trying the Kiwi food, we found it a bit bland, but you adapt to it. So, what we have over here is a feta cheese ` cow feta cheese. Then black beans. This one right here is reina pepiada, which is a mixture of chicken, mayonnaise, lime, avocado and coriander. And this one right here is pulled beef. The best thing is when you bite it, you need to make sure that the juice from the meat goes all the way down your elbow. So that's when you find out that's a good arepa. MAN: Hola! Como estas? WOMAN: Hola! TOBY: Come on through. Carlos is in the kitchen. Gracias. Carlos, como estas? (SPEAKS SPANISH) Hola. (SPEAKS SPANISH) Happy birthday! Thank you. Gracias. Happy birthday! We have a little Venezuelan community in New Zealand, right, here in Wellington. So what we do is every now and then we get together and we share the house. We go to people's houses and we cook a big Venezuelan meal, so then you get to meet new Venezuelans that are either here working or studying. So, yeah, we have a good community of Venezuelans here. So cooking is very important for us. Even now, when I cook, it just takes me back to my childhood. It's like, 'Oh, cool. We're gonna cook, and then all my cousins are gonna come over here.' So, after we finish cooking, you know, helping the family. We're gonna go and play some soccer. We're gonna go play some baseball, you know? It's just a family getting together. That was very important. Oh! MAN: Very nice. I have nine brothers and sisters, and we talk to each other every day. We are in different parts of the world, but we still keep in touch. Family is very important to me, but I don't have them close to me now, so my friends have really become a family, and just to get together with them, that's a good reason to start cooking, you know? Love to cook my Latin American food; bring people together. Four years ago, I could not speak a single word of English. This year, I'm acting in A Midsummer Night's Dream at Hutt Repertory Theatre. This is really special because this theatre is just around the corner from my home. I fell in love with acting when I was a child. It gave me the confidence and the voice I needed. When I was in Ecuador, I wasn't allowed to join any drama group because I was a Colombian, and we were discriminated against. As soon as I was resettled here in New Zealand, I started performing all around Wellington. I'm really passionate about theatre and acting, and I want to use them as tools to empower others and bring communities together. So, I identify as genderqueer and queer, in general. I came out once as lesbian, and then I came out again as gay, and then I came out again as queer, and then I came out as genderqueer, so there's been an entire process of doing and undoing and learning and unlearning as to how gender is fluid, I suppose, and sexuality as well is fluid. It's an ongoing process. You can shift. You can change. You can essentially feel any gender on the gender spectrum on any day. It changes for me, which is why genderqueer sort of encompasses the part where I don't have to be male or female or... yeah. WHISPERS: It's confusing. I graduated from Massey University with my Bachelor of Fine Arts, First Class Honours in 2015. So, basically, what I've got here is 10 test prints for a 10-part series called Day Since And Again (So Soon). I was posed with a set of questions that I had to respond to. The one that I have here, I was simply asked, 'What do you fight for?' There are things like, 'What's next? Where feels like home? What intimidates you? 'What does feminism mean to you?' So, the premise of all of my work since 2015 is every shot contains my body quite literally as the centre focus. This is when I tried to answer, 'What's next?' I feel like this one is the most... obvious. I've always found this is sort of getting from one point to another, or, like, an attempt to make some kind of grand leap or gesture of striving, that kind of thing. So, yeah, this one makes sense to me most out of the large majority of the portraits. So, at the moment, in Lower Hutt, there is a work of mine called Effortless Reassurance, which is a four minute and 40 second audiovisual performance piece... that was commissioned by The Dowse middle of last year. Took me about two months of filming. 'Here are a few things I saw on my way here when you weren't there that made me think of you.' So, essentially I set part of it in my bedroom, which is looking at private space and safety, and where you go to be alone, and how do you operate in that space. And the other part was set out in Lower Hutt, sort of drawing comparison to those two spaces. 'When you get to your front door, I can lock mine. 'Effortless reassurance.' There is a narrative running over top, which literally cites effortless reassurance as the title of the piece, but also the point of the piece, in which I'm trying to essentially coach people through longing and loneliness, and talking about my own experience of that. 'In the absence of someone, 'everyone becomes not them.' Politics of identity is something that's really important for younger audiences coming through. And to see that reflected in a work here, I think is incredibly powerful. Jordana was selected for solo as a recent graduate from Massey University due to the strength of their practice as dealing with gender and sexuality. I think we're a space where we can discuss uncomfortable issues, and it's a place where people are invited to reflect, to take time, to encounter ideas that might be new to them and to think about those. So I think it brings people together and helps them to encounter different ways of living, different ways of thinking. Everyone's gonna bring their own set of knowledge and thinking to my work, and I can't say, 'This is what I want you to get out of it. This is what it means.' That was the first thing I learnt in` Oh, actually, it was maybe one of the last things I learnt in art school, and it was completely disorienting. But it was` You can't tell someone what something means, or you can't make them believe you; these kinds of things. But I like to think, disregardless of all of this talk around gender politics, it is just a universal interest or an interest in, sort of, like, love and acceptance and empathy and emotion. So it's trying to draw on similarities as opposed to differences. I'd like to hope that my work continues to have... not critical acclaim, I don't care about that, but some kind of significance wherever it, sort of, ends up. Oftentimes you question how sustainable it is, and if in, you know, 10 years' time I might be working in a restaurant. Cool. Like, and that would be absolutely fine. The idea that this is a legacy is really obscure to me, but I'd like to think it is, in some ways. That I will still be producing in many, many years time would be what I hope for, yeah. My own experience as a refugee has made me very aware of what other new arrivals go through. Young refugees often learn English more quickly than their parents. This means that they become the interface to the outside world. They feel the pressure to earn more money, and they take on huge responsibilities. Roles are reversed, and this means that usually young people end up suffering from depression and isolation. That's why I wanted to establish the New Zealand National Refugee Youth Council. We advocate, support and engage refugee youth across New Zealand. Last year, my work took me to address the UN in Geneva. It's so strange when I look back on how far I have come over the past few years. But I want to achieve so much more. I was born in China, of course, and so we used to be classmates at university in Dalian, a coastal city, yeah. From my thinking, my wife... was beautiful` Of course, is beautiful right now. (LAUGHS) 'Was beautiful.' (LAUGHS) Yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean. (LAUGHS) In that time, life was quite peaceful. I think it's different nowadays in China. It's a very fast-paced lifestyle. (CHUCKLES) Every child must work hard, study hard. They don't have more time to enjoy their childhood, I think. My husband and I decided to try a new lifestyle. We seek a country` a place to live, and, of course, New Zealand is the first choice. And we became New Zealand residents in 2002. We have two lovely children. Of course, we speak Chinese` only speak Chinese at home. At home. Yeah. Yeah. (SPEAKS MANDARIN) Uh, OK. (SPEAKS MANDARIN) And we also brought many Chinese books with us. (READS IN CHINESE) The Chinese ancient language is quite different from the modern language. So it is very beautiful. So we want her to keep in mind, even, maybe she doesn't totally understand at her age, but it doesn't matter. Just keep going. It's better for her to learn. Yeah. Our children are Kiwis, but we don't want them to lose our own cultural identity. Another thing for my daughter, because she's older, so we convinced her to learn the traditional Chinese instrument guzheng. She has played for five years now, yeah. (TRADITIONAL CHINESE MUSIC PLAYS) This instrument is called guzheng, and it's a traditional Chinese instrument that has a history of over 2000 years. Yeah, it's really old. And so this guzheng, it has 21 strings and there's bridges. And usually you play on the right side of the bridge, so it sounds really nice. It sounds like flowing water, so it's like a stream. And that's one of the reasons why I chose guzheng, because I thought it would sound really nice. (CONTINUES PLAYING TRADITIONAL TUNE) We think that music is a wonderfully important vehicle to carry the cultural elements and then to reflect the history, literature,... Mm-hm. ...and everything. Yeah. I play, like, old songs, like, traditional songs. Yu Ge Wan Chang, The Fisherman's Song at Dusk, is about the scenery of fishermen going fishing. (TRADITIONAL TUNE CONTINUES) And at dusk, they returned home, and on their way home, they say, 'Why don't we have a race to see who gets to the shore first?' And so that's why at the last bit it goes faster and faster. (TEMPO SPEEDS UP) When we were young, we didn't have access to learning music. That's why we don't want to miss the chance for my daughter. (PLAYS INTENSE MUSIC) She has the chance, so we just want her to learn` keep learning, yeah. Listening to the music, especially my daughter playing for me, is one of my favourite things in my life. You know, have a cup of tea, and then my daughter playing the music for me ` that is great. Here in New Zealand, the air is so good to breathe. I just relax. I don't have to worry whether someone is going to threaten me or discriminate against me, my grandma or mum. But although I feel safe here, I'm all too aware of the stereotypes that some people still hold. I want to challenge those negative associations with the word 'refugee'. People with a refugee background are not a burden. We can be a source of inspiration. I'm really passionate about talking to people about my journey and telling them that I have been through so many things, and look how far I have come. I believe you need to be the change you want to see. Captions by Julie Taylor. Edited by Tracey Dawson. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017