Upside Down and Downside Up- Working Down Under

by Isabel Baker (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

I didn't expect to find New Zealand

35 hours of aeroplane food and cold hard departure lounge floors later; disheveled, exhausted and hungry I stepped out into the unknown. New Zealand, 18,390 km from home, this place for me I decided was a place of new opportunities, new experiences and a new job. A sleepless night was rudely interrupted by my alarm clock calling me to my first day at my new work. Armed with 4 hours of sleep and my working holiday visa I stumbled into my new job at a girls’ boarding school. I stood grounded and rubbed my eyes in awe, and sleep deprivation as I stared at the school before me. The Maori name of the place translates to mean ‘wide sky shelter’ I discovered after a quick google search, which I found reassuring as I headed inside from the blustery July winter. Starting work I was met by 143 new faces of the girls I would be working with in the boarding house. Each girl was bursting with palpable curiosity about my arrival and how I was finding New Zealand so far. I told them about where I was from 18,000 kilometres away and how everything here was new to me. Slowly as the jet lag wore off the streets became familiar as did the faces around me and I slipped into a lull of serenity that I felt even as I shooed late girls out of the boarding house to school last minute. A few months later here I am with an expiring visa making preparations to move on, to leave behind the 143 faces that are not so new anymore. Here on the other side of the world I found something so valuable, I didn’t know was waiting to be discovered. In this new and scary place; living upside down, down under, where the hot and cold taps are backwards, where winter is August and summer is December, where Christmas is hot and the cherry blossoms in the park bloom in the autumn that is spring. In this back to front place where everything is front to back, where down is up and we float upside down on an island in the wide wide Pacific Ocean I have found a home. I have found a community of people made stronger by welcoming strangers, I have found 143 sisters who are all mana wahines (they took pride in teaching me that this is the Maori way to say powerful women.) A community with such a focus on kindness and Aroha (love) that I am reluctant to leave behind. On my adventure I found a shelter from the wide sky and in it I found a home.