Heading for our second Christmas

The year is galloping to a close with school galas, school outings, holiday plans and general end-of-year mayhem. It will be our second Christmas in New Zealand - part of me can't believe how the time has raced past.

Reflecting on the past 20 months is a painless task: as new immigrants we have been blessed with the softest landing possible - a wonderful group of friends, a small and close community, successful jobs and very happy kids. We love this country. We cannot imagine calling any other place home.



Lunch with friends at a waterfall near Karekare near where we live.

K and I watched a series of brilliant documentaries on New Zealand, among them "Here to Stay"  - a look at several different cultural groups that have immigrated to New Zealand.

Understanding the history of NZ is important to us, as well as discovering many quaint and interesting little towns and beaches. So when we recently landed up in Puhoi, I was especailly interested in a tiny, white-washed wooden villa on the hillside called the Bohemia Museum. I'd just returned from a holiday in Prague (Centre of Bohemia) and after watching "Here to Stay", I realised that Dallies had lived there. Sure enough, we were told that a small group of immigrants from the Czech Republic had canoed up the river in the early 1900s after months of travel.

Breaking News: NZ third best place to live according to UN

This article was posted in the NZ Herald today:

New Zealand is the third best country to live in the world, climbing 17 places in the latest United Nations' index aimed at measuring development.

The Human Development Report 2010 (HDR) was released today by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UN Development Programme Administrator, and former New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark.

The report, The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development, highlights countries with the greatest progress as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI).

The index calculates the well-being in 169 countries, taking into account health, education and income, which are combined to generate an score between zero and one. The countries are grouped into four categories: very high, high, medium, and low.

New Zealand was named 20th in the 2009 and this year is just behind Norway and Australia, first and second respectively.

The country's score has been rising by 0.5 per cent a year between 1980 and 2010 from 0.786 to 0.907 today, placing it in "very high" category.

New Zealand's life expectancy is 80.6 years, average number of school years is 12.5, and gross national income per capita is $25,438 ($32,046).

Read the rest...

A Blessed Sunday morning

 

Today is our second Easter Sunday in New Zealand. We watched a shimmering gold sunrise on the sea through the Kauri trees, listened to bird calls in the dead-still forest, had a gentle, leisurely breakfast and contemplated our blessings.


I am glad we are over the one-year milestone, which was a bitter-sweet bump, and now we listen to the gentle hum of our days. The last two months were among the happiest I can remember in a long time. “Pinch me! Pinch me!” I want to yell. Things can’t possibly be this... lovely.

We feel we have integrated fully in our community and that has helped speed along the at-home feeling. Of course, living in a spectacular area helps, but establishing friendships and playing a role in community life has brought us a sense of belonging we didn’t expect to get so soon. We have found it by volunteering at the kids’ schools, planting school gardens and going to working bees and community meetings. To me it feels like “This is what my life is meant to look like”.

One year, one month in....

The second year is definitely harder than the first.

Our first year as immigrants – 2009 – was a blast. We were like tourists, out every weekend climbing dunes at Bethell’s Beach, exploring tunnels at Devonport or hot-footing it over searing black sand at Piha. We were welcomed by people we met, and it was so easy.

“We arrived here a few months ago,” we’d smile. “We’re loving it,” we’d beam. And we’d be invited in.

Now it’s different, but it’s hard to pinpoint why. The magic of all those first months is over. We know now what to expect. We feel more responsible for our move. It has finally sunk in, and we are looking about and admitting: this is our new home now. Do we like what we chose? (The answer is ‘yes’, by the way.)

But it’s complicated.

For one, I feel a new level of homesickness. It would be so much easier if everyone back in SA said, “This isn’t working. Let’s all leave.” Then we wouldn’t wonder what we’re doing here, thousands of kilometres from SA. What makes it more confusing is that all our friends and family have stayed in South Africa and life has continued as normal for them. We wonder: why was it not OK for us, when clearly, they’re still fine there? Did we over-react? Are we too sensitive? Should we, gulp, go back? The thought fills me with dread, but the questions don’t stop.

Our One Year Milestone

“I love this place. I love this city.” This is the silent mantra that played in my head this year each time we visited a new part of Auckland. Or each time we drove home from school pick-ups and saw the serene turquoise of the harbour mouth, the bush-covered ranges, the startling red of Pohutakawa flowers against the deep blue sky.

For the nature lover, NZ is pure paradise. For the biker, the camper, the hitch-hiker, the adventurer, the loner, the tramper, the mountain climber, the river rafter, the ocean kayaker, opportunities abound in a mostly unspoilt, always un-crowded setting.

We never did the boerewors, beer and braaivleis thing back in SA, so we don’t miss any part of SA culture. We fit better here with the European immigrants than we did back in SA. On every level, in every way, coming here has given us the life we always wanted: open, carefree, lots of interesting people in an interesting community, loads of friends for my kids who like nature, clambering up trees and scouring beaches for treasures. My little girl skypes her old friends back home and they stare blankly at her precious kauri gum collection, her worm farm, her crystal and shell collection from the last year. They don’t get it because their lives are restricted to back gardens and shopping malls. That crazy, dirty, outdoorsy kind of childhood is dying out in the SA city suburbs.

So what made the first year so much easier than expected? We could have settled for one of the few mouldy rentals we found, but we took the massive risk of buying a house instead – after only three weeks in a country we had never seen before. We could have chosen a built-up suburb with massively expensive shacks, but we opted for a small lifestyle block in a community that suits us (Noordhoek is the closest equivalent that comes to mind). We wrote down what we wanted a year before we arrived, and we fought for it.