Citizenship

About a month ago now the Brunt family officially became citizens of New Zealand.

This was a very big deal for me and I just felt that I should make a record of it on here. We have always intended on staying in New Zealand permanently (a decision made about a month after we first arrived sitting on a bench in Butterfly Creek in Eastbourne looking over Wellington harbour) and eventually becoming citizens.

We were prompted into it by the Brexit vote in the UK earlier this year. As a family we had lived in Brussels for just under two years and we had always felt like Europeans, embracing the many benefits that being part of Europe brought with it. However after the shock result and all the vitriol and lies that the Government and a large percentage of the British press seemed to be spreading we began to feel more and more remote from our British heritage. I was ashamed to be British!

So the day after the Brexit vote we filled in all the papers, paid the fees and put in our application to become proper Kiwis. As we already had permanent residency this was not really a difficult task and the Department of Internal Affairs are very helpful. You can make an appointment to go there for an interview and they process and check all the paperwork in front of you.

About 6 months later we were invited to attend the citizenship ceremony. You have to declare your loyalty to the Queen and receive your certificates from the Mayor before you are officially declared citizens.

The ceremony itself was lovely and a very uplifting and positive experience. The city we live in is very multicultural and there were people from all around the world getting their citizenship at the same time as us. Some of the accents we spotted whilst they read the oath were American, Spanish, Malaysian, British, Samoan and Scandinavian. The section that almost moved me to tears (I am a bit of a soppy old thing at times) was when the Mayor declared that his city was proud of its multicultural heritage and that we should not forget our original culture or traditions but they should be blended and shared with the rest of the population. If only every country was as accepting as this.

I really wanted to know what everyones story was and how and why the ended up moving to New Zealand and settling in our little city. I was particularly interested to find out why the chap who appeared to be a Tibetan Monk has decided to move to New Zealand but his grasp of English was faltering so I was not brave enough to approach him.

The ceremony ends with everyone singing the national anthem and you are presented with a native tree to plant. Since we live in the middle of a native forest we were obviously grateful, but did wonder where we would find the space to plant it. In the end we invited some friends round for a celebration of our citizenship and a ceremonial planting in the back garden.

I did ask the kids to do a haka as we planted it, however they ended up doing the macarana instead!

A sense of not quite belonging

I have been getting a bit homesick this week and it has all been down to one particular song that they keep playing on the radio. The lead singer has a distinctive English accent. Its the accent that I was surrounded with for the first 20 years of my life and the song is very Brit pop-ish. It just reminds me of sitting on the pebble beach in my home town and eating fish and chips late at night. We used to sit and watch the storms roll over from France. It also reminds me of getting the train from Charing Cross Station and the smell of coffee and bored sweaty commuters on their way home from another boring day in the office. It has been making me nostalgic for afternoons in country pubs nursing a glass of diet coke for hours on end. Listening to the Eagles repeatedly on the Juke Box and watching the children run riot in the pub garden. So generally just missing English stuff this week.

Its not that I want to go home, I love it here! I have just been feeling like I don't quite fit in. I have been working with a lot of people who every now and then will swap between English and Maori. Obviously my knowledge of Maori is non existent and so this has left me out of the loop somewhat. Everyone is very nice and friendly but it is obvious in so many ways that I have only been in New Zealand for 18 months and so I don't understand the traditions and language of quite a large percentage of the population. It feels like its going to be a very steep learning curve.

My eldest daughter can actually sing in Maori and is being taught all about the history and traditions of the original settlers of these Islands. Her Kiwi accent also means that she will always be automatically accepted as a New Zealander. My (apparently quite posh) English accent is unlikely to ever go away so I will always be identified as a non Kiwi.

We visited Te Papa again yesterday and ended up in the section about immigrations to New Zealand. How people in the Nineteenth century were brave enough to get on a ship to the New World knowing that they would probably never see home or their family again is unbelievably brave. New Zealand is a country that has been populated in relatively recent history by a series of immigrations. Firstly the Maori about 1000 years ago and then far more recently with European settlers. So I guess I could count myself as being amongst the newest wave of immigration. So essentially I am not that different to everyone else in New Zealand. I just happen to have arrived only a relatively short time ago!