It was just the values
that we were, you know, kind of..
I think with every Pacific Island family
We were always taught to you know look after each other
you know if they were hungry kind of thing you know
we would support each other.
It didn't matter you know if we had
one sandwich you would half it kind of thing so it was always about sharing
those values there.
Hi guys, so I'll just introduce myself.
My name is Pati. I'm part of the Life community that we
have here for soup kitchen.
The volunteers, we start arriving from 4pm.
So we decided to come as a family to soup kitchen
because we wanted to teach our children
the values of not just turning up to serve at soup kitchen but also
showing our kids how to be compassionate
and to be walking in humility and serving people
that are in great need.
It's something that can't be taught in schools but
it starts off with, you know, from home if we can do that at home
and then we can and then be able to do it out in the community you know that's
something that's more valuable to us,
not only to Pati and myself, but to our children and
hopefully that will take on a ripple effect for the next generation.
I started doing some research going into Stats New Zealand,
reading up as much as I could to
understand what unpaid work actually was
and when i started reading the definition of unpaid work
and the things that fell under the category of unpaid work like
looking after a loved one
or checking on your neighbour
or volunteering at church.
I thought those are things that we naturally do
as Pasifika people because we are a collective community
In a Pasifika setting you could have a family and one person might be allocated
to stay home to look after saying out at the elders
or childcare in a family setting the contribution
that that person makes is immense because it allows everyone else within
the home to be able to go and do work so
that's the grey area where from a New Zealand western perspective
they're unemployed but from a family perspective their
contribution without their contribution the rest of the family won't be able to
do what they're doing so they become almost like the glue that
keeps the family together
it is unpaid work but it's not a burden to me
because he's somebody who's been designed for
me and my wife and so we have to put him in a position to
to be successful
when Taylor comes home at 3:30 we do a exercise regime
"That's it Taylor keep on going
Just working on the cycle work and also various exercises that will
work out as limbs and get and do a lot of functional
strengthening work
and then around 4:35 we do a speech therapy
and that involves a lot of practicing his
vocal chords getting them to actually sound out the alphabet and also doing
some counting
[TAYLOR SNR] "You count on your own now"
[TAYLOR JNR] 1... 2... 3....
We also address some of the issues around his behaviour.
Normally on Monday we have family catch-up. It's almost like a team meeting
To the Pasifika community I think unpaid work
is something that's quite foreign.
The western definition or the western title
unpaid work because when you associate the word work
with anything there's an assumption that you need to get paid for it
unpaid work for me is more from a pacific
understanding about service it's about serving your community
serving your family and so there's there's an understanding that by serving
it's reciprocal your children or grandchildren might
be in a situation that's similar to the people that you're serving and your hope
is that other people might be able to serve them
when they're in need
when you consider that the the bulk of what pacific people do in new zealand
which is like low manual factory type work work is
clocking in and then clocking out it's something that you you do because
it's about survival whereas all of the things that fall
under the category of unpaid work like looking after a loved one spending
time with your elders or someone who's sick
that's not work that's something that it's ingrained in here in our Pasifika
communities unpaid work or the term unpaid work can sometimes be seen as
offensive and the reason why i say that is because
when you associate acts of service to work there's an
assumption that the person who's doing the work wants something in return
when in reality that's that's not necessarily the case
so i think that uh when we're measuring unpaid work
what we are getting is just surface level i think
that there are there are a lot of other people who do unpaid work quite
uh not counted because of the fact that they
may feel it the the term quite offensive
i think in our dna it is the humility and sometimes it
sort of doesn't benefit us because we don't
promote ourselves and sometimes it does work
against us in the job seeds when you're applying for work you're you
don't want to like say i did this i'm this person and
we're not so good at promoting who we are and what we've done
so you know if we've led a choir or led a bunch of volunteers to
do outreach work you know community work we don't
say that enough and that's probably the double each sword is when it comes to
advancing ourselves in terms of a position
yeah i wouldn't even consider calling it unpaid work
and it's been part of our culture for many many generations
you know being samoan we were taught when we were younger to serve our
our elders and if we had guests come over we would
automatically get up and put on our lava lavas and we had to serve
people with whatever we had in our cupboards
and so that's just naturally something that we do
and we continue to carry it on with our children
i think new zealand as a whole can learn a lot from our Pasifika communities
about service and about redifining unpaid work the importance of redefining unpaid
work so that it it's something that touches us here and our hearts
i am not an individual i am an integral part of the cosmos
I share divinity with my ancestors,
the land, the seas and the skies.
I am not an individual
because I share an inheritance with my family,
my village and my nation.
I belong to my family and my family
belongs to me.
I belong to my village
and my village belongs to me.
I belong to my nation and my nation belongs to me.
This is the essence of my sense of my belonging.